TIME AFTER TIME

HOMES

For Jane Crowley, owner of Dirty Janes antiques, family heirlooms take centre stage in her home in Bowral, NSW.

ANTIQUES RUN IN JANE CROWLEY’S BLOOD. “Between Dad and me, we’ve got nearly 90 years of experience selling antiques,” she says. Growing up in Canberra, she recalls, “Every weekend we’d go to country auctions and clearance sales. We used to joke that a trip from Canberra to Batemans Bay, which is a two-hour drive, would take us eight hours because we stopped at every op shop and second-hand shop on the way.”

So setting up shop with her father, Athol Salter, was a natural career choice – and Dirty Janes has become an institution in the NSW Southern Highlands. Jane and Athol opened a new branch in Canberra in March 2020, which has been doing such a roaring trade, despite the turbulent times, that they’re considering opening another market in a new location, yet to be decided.

With an entire antiques market to furnish her home from, you’d be forgiven for thinking Jane changes her décor as often as she has hot dinners. Although the temptation does arise – “Sometimes I do see things at the shop that just speak to me. And I go, ‘Oh gosh, I know I don‘t have room for it, but I really love it!’ So I find a spot for it” – she mostly keeps her acquisitions under control. “On my side of the family, there’s always been antiques and upcycling and recycling. So we’ve got some beautiful family pieces that aren’t necessarily flash, but they’ve got so many memories – I can remember Grandma having a cup of tea and resting her cup and saucer on that little table. It’s nice to have things that have stories.” Apart from >

keeping those precious family heirlooms close, though, Jane is sanguine about the necessity of letting pieces go. “You can’t keep everything, at the end of the day. It’s just stuff, so we have the few things we really treasure, and let others go so other people can appreciate them.”

The backdrop for her cherished pieces is the 1920s-era house in Bowral, NSW, that she shares with Bob, their children Jack, 17, and Evie, 14 (oldest son Sam, 19, lives next door with Athol), and a menagerie of pets: 12-year-old Jazzy, and Ripley and Gruber, both just a year old, all rescue pups. Then there’s the duck, Roger, and six or seven chooks. The house is used to plenty of animals – it used to belong to the local vet. And it required plenty of work: “It had that 1970s modernisation of ‘Let’s plaster everything and put down carpet everywhere,’” recalls Jane. Before they moved in nine years ago, she says, “The couple we bought it from were diligently cleaning out the kitchen drawers, and my husband said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t worry. Janie’s going to make a mess.’ Hours after we got the keys, I picked up the kids from school, drove here and started ripping the carpet up and jimmying off the plasterboard. The poor old thing – we took her apart.”

The 18-month-long renovation involved tearing out the orange 1970s kitchen, replacing all the wiring, insulating the walls and replacing the original lining boards on top, replacing damaged exterior weatherboards, and landscaping the garden. “The kids helped a lot, and now they have these great memories of working on the house. We put them on jackhammers and everything!”

True to form, Jane scoured estate sales and auctions for her interior finishes. “We put the house together very much on a budget, and it wasn’t a big budget. So things like >

the internal doors I bought on ebay – I’ve got a thing for > the old Z plank doors that used to be on outdoor dunnies. The poor builder kept saying, ‘This isn’t going to be the same size as the other ones, is it?’ Dad and I went to a clearance sale at a beautiful hotel at Moss Vale, and I bought four of their big old sash windows and put them in the house. So there’s been a lot of recycling of things. It’s great because for the kids, it’s just a way of life. You don’t go to a shop and buy something new, you go to an op shop or you go to a garage sale – and you never know what you’ll find. That’s the thrill of the hunt.”

But now they’ve got the house the way they like it, Bob and Jane aren’t hunting any more. “We must have moved eight times in my early years – Mum and Dad would buy a house, restore it, and the day it was finished, it would go on the market,” says Jane. “So when Bob and I bought this place, I said to him, ‘I’m not moving for a very long time. I want to watch the flowers grow and really enjoy this place’.” And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

The backdrop to Jane Crowley’s antique collection is a 1920s house she and husband Bob bought nine years ago. The 18-month renovation involved tearing out the 1970s kitchen, rewiring, replacing exterior weatherboards and landscaping.

The chest of drawers is a pine secretaire desk, topped by a bust Jane bought at auction. FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM The side table in the library belonged to Jane’s grandmother; Jane and Jazzy; the pressed tin splashback in the kitchen.

“We call this room the library – the English pine cupboard hides the TV,” says Jane. She bought the floral Knole sofa in Gloucestershire, and had it upholstered in a crewelwork fabric found at the Salvation Army.

The garden had established trees already, but Jane landscaped everything else, making fences out of old palings and posts bought from farm sales, and even building her own walls. FACING PAGE Collecting and antiques have always been a part of Jane’s life.

Jane chose Farrow & Ball paint to mute the brightness of the house. “And I went all blue, because I’m a blue person,” she says. FACING PAGE Jane’s collection of vintage paintings decorates the laundry room.

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT Ripley, one of the family’s beloved rescue dogs; Jane put the house together on a limited budget from second-hand and recycled furniture; “I just put in things I love,” says Jane (with Jazzy) of her ad hoc gardening; she loves the thrill of finding unusual items in op shops or at auction. “You’re incorporating these quirky things that aren’t available at a shopping mall,” she says. FACING PAGE An armchair in the bedroom. Jane loves furniture with history and a back story. “People love vintage, because it gives your home so much personality,” says Jane.