Crafting a sustainable getaway at Tyenna River

When the pair bought a 100-year-old weatherboard cottage on the Tyenna River, the second-to-last house at the end of a quiet country lane 10 minutes from Mount Field National Park, their intention was to honour its bones – a rudimentary, salvaged home built by 1900s forestry workers – while crafting what would become a group-friendly retreat.

Ben, a builder, was disillusioned with the output of his industry, and the pair reduced, reused, recycled and repurposed as much of the three-bedroom property as they possibly could.

“[It] was as much about the end goal of creating something special as about how we could create that in a way that wasn’t subscribing to that high-waste model common in construction,” says Tess, who, with Ben, also created Huntingdon Tier, a converted bus 10 minutes from Kempton, and Hobart’s 29 Ebden. “We wanted to be crafty and to reuse not just things that were available to us but also seek out materials that would otherwise be wasted.”

Broken pipework became a bathroom vanity; 100-year-old weatherboards were spruced back to life; salvaged windows, frames and doors came from old buildings across Tasmania; and “a mismatch of lovely old” art deco and mid-century modern furniture was positioned on restored timber floorboards. The raw-edge timber slab that became the kitchen counter was lovingly reserved by Ben for 20 years, awaiting the perfect location for its final installation.

“Certainly in all our projects to date, that’s been a way for us to reconcile our ethical values,” says Tess.

The home makes the most of the region’s very wet period with three rainwater tanks (and more on the way) that service the house. A move to solar will happen as soon as they can get the trades to the semi-remote property. There are no single-use plastics here, pantry supplies are sourced in bulk, and the supplied milk arrives weekly in glass bottles from Elgaar organic dairy in Moltema.

The property and its sumptuous outdoor bathtub are surrounded by eponymous ferns and prehistoric-like foliage, with the icy-cool waters of the Tyenna River flowing between rock pools at its perimeter. There’s a peace evoked by this co-existence, a conscious parallel with the inventiveness of those who originally built the home from collected materials.