The Burrows: a seaside holiday home in Swansea, Tasmania (2024)

Video: Lightnoise Films

It’s perfectly fitting that a wild hare would find a home at The Burrows — not just because that’s where hares live. There are deeper reasons to do with memories of school holidays spent at nana’s beachside home on Stradbroke Island and a desire to recreate that comfortable feeling in Tasmania’s Swansea.

A print of the famous Young Hare, painted in 1502 by Albrecht Dürer, was handed down through grandmother to grandson, and now has pride of place in a renovated shack overlooking Great Oyster Bay.

The small 1860s stone cottage, with extensions from 1950 and 1970, was originally intended as a bolthole for Bek Burrows and Paul DeRuyter, the owners of a wedding and events business in Launceston. While their East Launceston home is more formal, The Burrows is about old ways, former residents and treasured possessions. “The beds are sumptuous, but the doors are old, the laundry has a concrete floor, and there’s no dishwasher,” says Bek. “It’s not about living with the latest appliance or technology.” The television is in a wardrobe.

Children’s shoes — good luck charms rescued in the three-month renovation from wall cavities where they were originally placed by British settlers — are preserved in a display jar. Everything has a story.

It was meant to be an escape from the world of creating up to 30 weddings a year with 12- to 18-hour days, usually four nights a week away from home. “You get your 40-hour working week in three days,” says Paul, a former marine engineer whose renovation skills were honed working on ships at sea, “where you have to make do with what you’ve got”.

One stone wall was completely removed, revealing views of Freycinet and Schouten Island, and replaced with salvaged windows and French doors. The back door is now the front door, so that when you arrive the view is in front of you rather than behind. An internal room has become a glamorous foyer.

Tiny rooms were opened up to make one living room, presented in three romantic and functional vignettes, pulled together with Bek’s soft and textured colour palette, Paul’s long-haul appreciation of the table and chair settings in Qantas lounges, and the ever-luminous East Coast light.

Like many, Bek and Paul, with their children Oscar, 20, and Poppy, 17, are redefining their lives post the pandemic. “We can’t go back to how we were,” says Bek. “I don’t reckon we’ll have normal again.” COVID-19 has meant time locked down together in The Burrows with a flatlined business since mid-March.

It’s made them think, get up late, slow down, and decide to do fewer weddings so they can spend more time relaxing, reading a book all day on a voluminous, slouchy couch — with that view of sunrise over the Hazards, the moon on Great Oyster Bay, the curious addiction that is cloud watching, and the luxury of time. Bek has the energy of a dragonfly buzzing and, while Paul is the air beneath her wings, you get the feeling that only COVID-19 could stop her.

Sitting like a grounded cloud on a hill overlooking Freycinet Peninsula, The Burrows is filled with treasures; some were collected by the couple from auctions, markets and salvage yards and others were handed down. Like Young Hare, which came to Paul via his grandmother, Margritte, who emigrated to Australia from Germany in the 1950s.

OUTDOOR BATHHOUSE

In the outdoor bathhouse, accessed from the garden or deck, there is a claw-foot bath, found in a friend’s shed and restored by the couple, and curtains made by Bek from Bedouin Societe linen sheets. Beside the bath is a stool from Joyce Antiques and the towel and mat are from The Evandale Village Store. The chandelier is an heirloom, the Art Deco doors are from Andy’s Salvage and the wall is painted in Porter’s Paint Blue Steel.

The Burrows is a coming together of the couple’s separate lives and dreams, a place to indulge the Friday night feeling of their childhoods. “You arrive, you unpack, and you relax. You leave all the stress at the door,” says Bek. If her grandparents were here now they would see their great-grandchildren curled up in their fireside chairs, reading books from the op shop, doing jigsaws, and playing chess or Monopoly.

Everything is a style Bek calls “a bit undone” — just like the flower arrangements she makes for weddings. The fine arts graduate inside her knows the space in between blooms speaks as loudly as the flowers themselves. On the mantelpiece is a jar of cat’s eyes, the white foot of the sea snail, that the family has collected from beaches. A note to Bek, handwritten on Huon pine, reads “Thank you for joining us together.” There is the sound of waves crashing and Paul says that he always feels comfortable by the sea.

BOOK A STAY

For more information about The Burrows and to book a stay, visit theburrows.com.au