We had originally planned to tell you about this wonderful property we discovered on the central coast of New South Wales, but after speaking to the owners (the pair behind furniture and homewares company Koskela) we thought we’d let one of them, Sasha Titchkosky, do the talking…
The Story so far…
A very good friend of ours has a house at Patonga. We had heard about this place through her for a while but we were a bit dubious – no rolling surf, a creek?
Once we visited her we were smitten and decided that day we wanted a place there. Two weeks later we were walking around Dickebusch with the agent. Six weeks after that we bought it.
Before that…
Dickebusch was built in 1929-1930 by the Flowers family as a holiday home. It was a pre-fabricated home that was barged to Patonga wharf in pieces then erected.
The name Dickebusch was in memory of the son of the Flowers family who died in World War I when he was serving as a medic and was buried in Dickebusch in Belgium.
We happened to find out about the original name when one day as we were working on the house, we noticed a car pulled up at the front of the house and an elderly passenger inside pointing and talking about the house.
We asked if there was anything we could do and it turned out that the people in the car were the granddaughter and great grandson of the family that built the house.
We were really fortunate that we made this contact as Jean Elliott provided us with a letter of her memeories about the house and some wonderful old photographs of the times she enjoyed there.
Back to life..
As we were doing the renovation, we discovered that many of the original weatherboard timbers had the name “Flowers” written on their reverse side in pencil on the them.
Stay a while…
Visitors love that the house feels like a holiday house. It was designed to be very different from people’s city homes in terms of the finishes that were chosen which gives it a really great relaxed, warm feel.
There is also something about Patonga, which is only 1 1/2 hours form Sydney, that makes you feel like you are a million miles from the city and the stresses of city life.
Surrounded by National Parks, full of wildlife, two streets one way and three streets the other so you can get about by bike -it is the perfect antidote to city living.
Okay, that’s the story. Do you need to know more? You can get most of the details here but you’ve probably already booked it, right?
Dickebusch
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