MERRY & BRIGHT
AN ART DIRECTOR AND A LANDSCAPER HAVE CREATED A LIGHT, SERENE HAVEN ON THE COAST IN FLINDERS, VICTORIA, THAT PERFECTLY SUITS THEIR LAID-BACK LIFESTYLE.
Mornington Peninsula couple Marcus and Bec Dentry’s charming beach shack in the quaint fishing village of Flinders is ready for Christmas.
LIVING IN THE LITTLE FISHING VILLAGE OF FLINDERS, on the Mornington Peninsula, is paradise for Bec Dentry. “It’s really pretty and quaint, with a beautiful pier and boats moored everywhere. We don’t have letterboxes, so you have to go up to the post office to get your mail – you’ll always see people on the way and say g’day,” she says.
It’s a far cry from Melbourne, where Bec and her husband Marcus, both 46, used to live with son Monty, 12, and Macca the dog. Bec had a busy city life as an advertising art director, but, she says, “You start thinking about the life you want for your kids. And it’s a pretty idyllic life down here.”
Both Bec and Marcus grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, so their move to Flinders six years ago was an easy decision to make. The house, however, wasn’t such an immediate success. “We bought it as a private sale from a lady in her 90s. The house hadn’t been touched for a long time – it was baby-poo brown on the outside. And on the inside, she had two incontinent dogs and carpets everywhere, even in the bathroom.”
Those carpets, unsurprisingly, were the first to go in a quick reno intended simply to make the place liveable. “It was just to make it feel like ours,” says Bec. Two years ago, they gave the place a full face lift, but opted to retain the existing footprint without adding an extension. “It’s tiny,” says Bec. “It’s just a two-bedroom beach shack. >
“We’ve spent a lot of time in the garden, creating living spaces outside.”
But it suits us because we’re a little family. And we’ve spent a lot of time in the garden, creating living spaces outside.”
Those extra spaces are vital come Christmas, when the entire family descends. “We have quite a big family and we try to jumble everyone in together – it’s a fun time,” says Bec. “It’s my favourite time of the year, because living in Flinders, people do come to visit over the summer. They drop in for long lunches and we go to the beach and go surfing together and eat dinner at the beach – all those things that make an Australian summer perfect.”
Bec loves Christmas so much that, each year, she crafts her own seasonal decorations. “It’s a bit of a joke in our house, because I always make decorations and my son finds it so embarrassing – ‘Why does everything have to be made out of bits of driftwood and seaweed? Why can’t you just be normal?’ My best girlfriend took him to The Reject Shop last year and bought terrible stuff just to destroy my Christmas – but I thought it was hilarious.”
Her relaxed attitude extends to those outdoor spaces. Marcus has his own landscaping business building residential gardens, which gave the family a head start in creating them. They drew from their other business, too, for the vegie patch and wood stacker. Through Unearthed Garden, Bec designs and sells metal garden objects, including the round wood stacker that went viral as soon as photos of it found their way online 12 years ago. “I put two of the first prototypes I did for our square stacker flat on the ground and use them as vegie gardens, because >
“You start thinking about the life you want for your kids. And it’s a pretty idyllic life down here.”
I wasn’t happy with the corner profiles,” Bec explains. “The separate compartments stop the mint going wild across the whole garden.”
Inside the house, which dates from the 1950s, Bec kept as many original elements as she could, including the arched door into the kitchen and the windows. “They’re really great shapes, so we made sure to emphasise them. We worked with the builder to keep them and changed all the hinging, so now they open out at different angles,” she says. And she added her own favourite elements, like the tiles in the kitchen – “They’re handmade, and they were baked three times before we got the colour right!”
The bathroom is a perfectly formed space, designed to suit their needs. “We’re big surfers,” Bec explains, “and the bathroom has an outside door. So you come right in from outside in your wetsuit, get into the shower, take your wettie off and, because there are heated floors, you just hang it on the hook and everything’s dry by the morning.”
Calling the style of the home “modern beach shack,” Bec reveals she took inspiration from the era of the home and its location, rather than her own preferences: “My natural style is not this white. Our previous house was very banged-up and industrial-looking, which is actually my gig. So this house is very different. But because it’s so light, it’s a really happy house.”