As soon as former midwife and missionary Susan Hutton clapped eyes on an old 1871 flour mill in country NSW, she thought it would be magnificent to rebirth it as a character home.
But it was only after she bought it, then climbed up the builder’s scaffolding for a closer look that she realised what a magnificently mammoth job it was going to be. “It was a labour of love, and then it just became a labour,” she says.
“I’d seen a Laura Ashley book about interiors and that had a picture of a barn with a mezzanine floor and I thought that’s what this mill could look like. Then I went up and looked down on the roof and thought, ‘Oh dear me!’ It was such a hotchpotch of different pieces of metal and sawtooth around the guttering that didn’t meet the sides, and that had led to damage to the timbers underneath too.”
A new roof, reinforcement for the timber, new windows and frames, and a huge amount of extra work later, Hutton, now 69, can at last stand back and admire the multi-award-winning restoration work she did, together with heritage architect Hector Abrahams, in creating a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home at Stephenson’s Mill in Crookwell, in the NSW Southern Tablelands.
