Pieter and Tinne van Beeck always wanted to return to their country roots. They’ve achieved their dream in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.
Buying a farm had become a running joke. Pieter and Tinne van Beeck had spent almost 30 years living very urban lives in Australia, the first two years in Sydney and then in Melbourne from where Pieter travelled extensively as a mining engineer while Tinne raised their family. They later moved on to jointly run a mergers and acquisitions company. But both had farming backgrounds — Pieter in South Africa and Tinne in Holland — so they always talked about moving to the country.
So when Tinne’s sister and her husband were visiting from Holland in 2002, the van Beecks suggested a drive to the Yarra Valley “to look for the farm”. While they didn’t actually find it that day, they did see a real estate photograph of a property at Dixons Creek, midway between Yarra Glen and Healesville, that piqued their interest. “When we went to inspect it, we knew it was right the moment we came up the drive,” Pieter recalls. “We didn’t get to see inside any of the buildings, but the rolling green hills and surrounding vineyards and farms were enough to convince us that we’d found the peace and quiet we were craving. We put in an offer and it was accepted.”
Pieter and Tinne met as students — he was studying engineering and she was learning French — when they literally bumped into each other on the ski slopes of the Swiss Alps. Tinne’s family had a chalet there between Chateau d’Oex and Rougemont and they still holiday there as often as they can. They married in 1979 and Tinne and Pieter started married life in South Africa, where their first home was in a remote town on the Namibian border, where Pieter was working at an alluvial diamond mine. The couple moved to Australia in 1983 and enjoyed many trips and adventures exploring their new home country.
But the Yarra Valley always held special appeal, perhaps because the rolling green hills reminded them of the European and English countryside. The van Beecks called their Yarra retreat Glenlowren, an abbreviation of the three elements that encapsulated the property. ‘Glen’ for the valley, ‘lo’ for their family name Looringh van Beeck and also the founding Lorimer family, and ‘wren’ for the blue-headed resident birds. The 110-acre (44.5-hectare) block came with a motley assortment of farm buildings in various states of disrepair. They included the original settlers’ cottage, built in the 1860s by the family of Samuel and Mary Ann Lorimer when they established a dairy on the property.
There was a rambling farmstead that, a century later, had been built as accommodation and mess for a bible college the Briggs family ran on the property, and an ex-army Nissen hut, which also served as part of the college campus. There was also a main homestead, which became Pieter and Tinne’s first restoration project.
“Experiencing the peace and stars at night, it’s hard to believe we’re only an hour away from Melbourne.”
In 2008, they engaged the services of Eltham builder Hamish Knox and his apprentice Mark Spratt, who took the house back to its footings, laid a new floor and used rendered lath walls and lots of recycled materials for the rest of the build. The enclosing verandah uprights used to be part of the pier at Portarlington on the Bellarine Peninsula, while timber for the beams came from a stadium at Warragul in East Gippsland. The Van Beecks asked a local boiler maker, Justin Purser, to create the balustrading for the verandah, incorporating oak leaves and even birds and other whimsical touches. They also sought landscaping help from their neighbour, John Van de Linde, who is the mastermind of the Valley’s showpiece Alowyn Gardens.
As it turned out, these collaborations all turned into long-term relationships and the various tradespeople have contributed to the restoration of the various buildings the van Beecks have turned into a multi-faceted hospitality venue, which can now accommodate family groups, small conferences and retreats for up to 27 guests. “After the homestead, we restored the settler’s cottage in 2013,” Pieter explains. “Now it accommodates a couple, but amazingly the Lorimers raised 10 children there. Then in 2017, we moved onto the Nissen hut, which was pretty much derelict and had cows living in it.”
The ribs of the hut had been brought home from Borneo by Jock Briggs who was a missionary before he came back to the Yarra Valley to establish the bible college. It was run for almost a decade by Hal Oxley, the founder of Oxley College in Melbourne’s Chirnside Park. These days the building, with its splendid vaulted ceiling and serene lakeside location, bears little resemblance to its lecture-room former life as it provides luxurious accommodation for two couples. The final and most comprehensive undertaking was restoring the U-shaped farmstead into high-end, self catering accommodation for up to 21 guests in eight bedrooms. This turned out to be a COVID-era project and the van Beecks opened the doors to the first farmstead guests after lockdowns ended in 2022.
They have now filled their own homestead with treasures including family portraits and antiques from both South Africa and Holland. Pride of place in the entrance foyer goes to a dolls’ house built and furnished by Tinne’s mother, right down to tiny petit point rugs on the floors and miniature photographs of the van Beecks’ grandchildren on desks and sideboards. Of course, there was also considerable work on the gardens, which today frame the buildings in truly stunning style. While they acknowledge the assistance provided by John and other garden experts, Pieter and Tinne have done most of the hard yards themselves, attending to endless plantings and maintenance and adding an espaliered orchard, berry cage and kitchen garden, from which they now encourage their guests to harvest.
Pieter says Tinne “remembers every plant name and has an extraordinary eye for plant groupings” while Tinne adds that they couldn’t run the property as it currently is without the help of a succession of ‘workaways’, volunteer cultural exchange workers who stay free on the farm in return for spending 25 hours on the grounds each week. Pieter and Tinne accomplished the bulk of the landscape work on weekends, as until they sold their business to their son in 2019, it consumed most of their weekday attention. Gradually they transitioned from their home in Melbourne’s suburbs to Glenlowren and their commuting lives officially ended two years ago. “It’s hard to remember that when we came here 22 years ago, you hardly ever heard a bird,” Tinne says. “Now the garden is full of them and apart from the call of the frogs in the dams, birdsong is the most common sound.”
“Experiencing the peace, tranquility and stars at night, it’s hard to believe we’re only an hour from Melbourne,” Pieter adds. “Yes, we’ve put a lot of effort into restoring the property, but it doesn’t feel like work because it brings pleasure. We always yearned to come back to the country and finally it feels like we’ve achieved that dream.
