Brigitte Hafner

Working in Idyllic Surrounds

Brigitte Hafner, who owns Graceburn House & Tedesca Osteria in Red Hill on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, has several projects going at the one time. As well as establishing an orchard on her Red Hill property, there’s a new restaurant and B&B nearby. With her husband architect Patrick Ness, design director at Cox Architecture, and their daughter Vivienne, how they find time to prepare a great meal at home, let alone get through each day, is extraordinary. However, Hafner is as content being in the kitchen as she is in the garden, which she worked on with her father. “We’ve just planted thirty-six different types of fruit trees, plums, pears, cherries and apples,” says Hafner, who loves retrieving the eggs from the chook house (a miniature Edwardian-style structure) at the top of the embankment. “Just listen to the sound of those chooks,” she says.

The couple purchased the 12-hectare property, a one-and-a-half hour’s drive from Melbourne, five years ago. Originally built in the 1970s, the low-slung mud-brick house had no architectural pedigree. However, the house enjoyed unimpeded views over rolling hills and came with great ‘bones’, including 50-millimetre-thick Oregon floors and chunky messmate tree trunks used as structural columns. “It gets extremely cold down here, with wind and rain lashing the windows on extreme days, and it can be hot in summer,” says Ness, who slowly transformed the house, including a new kitchen, together with modifying some of the previously orange features (orange-stained floor boards and lots of pine joinery). Other changes have been the addition of a separate studio and work sheds.