The Pocket Land
After struggling to find a farmhouse that felt right for them, this couple built their own instead – carefully channelling the warmth and personality of a traditional homestead.
Words Casey Hutton / Photography Mark Zeidler / Home + interior design The Pocket Land
On an elevated clearing in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Alana and Alex’s property is flanked by grey-green bushland. Their toddler Mars tinkers in the garden and their two dogs snooze on the low-slung veranda, while a kookaburra swoops down to perch on a pergola crossbeam in the sun.
“We do miss parts of city life,” muses Alex, “but waking up surrounded by bushland has completely shifted our pace. It’s calmer, more intentional, and feels like the right way to raise our son.”
Before finding this block in 2020, Alana and Alex had been working remotely from Brisbane. They’d begun to question whether they needed to live in a city at all and started searching for a hinterland Queenslander that they could renovate.
Falling in love with an empty block of land was not part of the plan – but as soon as they saw this 19-acre plot just west of Maleny they switched course. “We weren’t ready to build, and we didn’t know anything about the process, but we knew it felt right,” says Alex.
The home, dubbed The Pocket Land, took more than three years to plan and build. They worked with a builder and draftsman and sourced nearly all the finishes themselves. “Together, we value creativity and good design in every aspect of our lives,” explains Alana. “We focused on how we wanted the home to feel and function and stayed firm on that throughout the process.”
This clarity of thought is evident at every turn. While careful use of colour and materials lends each room nuance and personality, the home as a whole feels effortlessly unified. This is thanks in large part to the timber windows and doors throughout, designed in close collaboration with a local joiner and fitted with antique-style brass hardware.
“Timber joinery was essential to creating the farmhouse aesthetic we were after,” says Alana. French doors in the lounge face to the north, flooding the interior with each day’s changing light. The laundry’s old-fashioned stable door opens to raised vegetable gardens, while in the guest bathroom a clawfoot bath rests romantically below sash windows.
The home mixes new and reclaimed timbers and incorporates antique pieces. In the laundry, for instance, a vintage concrete sink sits atop a recycled Oregon timber stand. “We wanted the house to feel lived-in. Mixing materials, tones and finishes helped us to achieve that age and warmth.”
In the living area, a white pitched ceiling is reminiscent of Scandinavian barn houses, while the khaki-green kitchen embraces the timeless comfort of old English farmhouses. The mood throughout the home is refined and unfussy. “I find there’s a calmness to having only what you need within a space,” Alana reflects. “We really leant into that.”
With its pared-back artfulness and punctuation points of contemporary design, The Pocket Land feels simultaneously old and new: folding modern sensibilities into the character and sturdiness of a classic farmhouse so that it ages beautifully into the future.
“Living here still feels surreal,” says Alana. “Even after two and a half years, we wake up and can’t quite believe this is our home.”
