I want to live at Vaucluse House - Low-tech Home, grand mansion, and useful kitchen Gardens

Something people don't know about me is that I grew up in a wood-stove powered, rosary-praying Edwardian-era farmhouse.

Not the whole time, just when my mother was giving birth, which happened every year, or when it was time for a holiday from Chadstone. 

Off I would go to Nellie's, at Fern hill. 

Beautiful, useful blacksmithing, the old stove at Valcluse house.

This morning here in Sydney I was a bit sad. I had just dropped of my lovely companion at the international airport. So instead of heading 'home' to the vast Balmain mansion,  I detoured to the other side, to National Trust's Valculse mansion, for comfort and uplifting. 

You enter into the 150 year old kitchen, with the wonderful resin-like smell of layers and layers, decades and decades of woodsmoke.

All from the very beautiful, useful old stove. 

Perfect Aromatherapy. I was uplifted.

Here is the drawing room, almost as beautiful as the stove.
It was designed to lure suitors to check out the daughters. Their beloved mother was 'illegimate', so they couldn't enter Sydney society the usual way.

Maybe that's what I'm lacking - fancy chairs.
Get that right, and a betrothal, a family is just around the corner....
Maybe its something else though. 

Here is the inner courtyard garden, something I have always wanted, being a cloistered kind of a lady. It recalls the otherworldly convents I visited throughout my childhood, calling on Sister Cephas and the other nuns close to our family. My own mother was brought up not in a home, but a beautiful convent.

At Valcluse, this courtyard's purpose was to separate the kitchen, with its threatening fires, from the main house.

How chaste and lovely is this delicately-lit nook, of floating pot plants.

More Greenery, hanging on in there, on the shady side of the house, in the babies room. Nine babies, I think they had, most of them growing up to thrive and flounder at about the same rate as all of us, it seems.

Oiled eggs, preserves from the garden, displayed in the kitchen

At the 1910's Tea House next door, I had a breakfast so perfect, it almost made me cry.

Photo by Pia Jane Bijkerk

The jam was made from Rhubarb from the kitchen gardens, with apple and vanilla added. The tea was perfect, there was sourdough toast and avocado lemon. They let me sit by the heater, where I read a book by my hero Shaun Tan. The roof was very like that of my grandfather's house in Trentham. I think his father built it himself, in the style of the day.

Making a house like this is about the only thing I really want to do with my life. And a family to bring it to life.