A furniture restorer breathes new life into a 1950s Tenterfield home

At her new home in Tenterfield in northern New South Wales, Sandy has created the timeless farmhouse aesthetic she loves. Think linen and raw timber, symmetry and repetition, and a canny conversation between formality and informality.

Sandy and her husband Tim moved to Tenterfield from Bonogin, in Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland, in March 2022, living for the first year in a studio onsite while they worked on their house.

The solid 1950s double-brick home is surrounded by an immaculate lawn and a gaggle of old sheds on a 1.2 hectare block, five kilometres north of the town (popu­lation 4000) on the Northern Tablelands, a plateau of the Great Dividing Range famed for its prime beef, lamb and merino wool.

“Don’t give me modern,” Sandy says with a laugh when we meet on a sunny Saturday afternoon. She is as calm and relaxed as her surroundings. Her home’s apparently effortless style belies the lashings of chalk paint, beeswax and elbow grease she’s lavished on it. “My look is a bit farmhousy,” she says.

For most of the past two decades, Sandy interpreted that as going nuts with her signature white chalk paint, but today she’s just as likely to strip furniture pieces and let them be. “Now I’ll often just wax them,” she says. “People say ‘Oh, you have to seal them’, but I don’t follow the rules. I get it if it’s around a bath or a vanity: I seal it then, but otherwise I just sand things off if they get marked. I think people are too precious with their antiques: just use them.”

Sandy is well known for bringing fresh life to tired objects. For many years she owned Paint Me White, a second-hand and upcycled furniture store in Bonogin, where she sold Jolie Paint chalk paints and ran bring-a-piece workshops for customers.

After selling the shop in 2020, she has dipped a toe back into retail at Tenterfield with a pop-up store on Rouse Street, and continues to sell Jolie Paint online. 

When Graziher visits, the couple has only just moved into the home itself, and are now listing the studio — in which they squatted for the first year — on Airbnb.

Tim, a professional greenkeeper and former carpenter, is doing his thing on the ride-on mower to keep what must be Tenterfield’s most carpet-like lawn under control. “Tim can do anything,” says Sandy sitting at the couple’s freshly stripped pine dining table.

The hard renovation work was already done when the couple bought the home, with previous owners having fitted a new kitchen and converted a multi-car garage into a sunken living area off the main open-plan living, dining and kitchen space.

Sandy and Tim’s first tasks were painting the interior in Dulux Lexicon Quarter, a cool white, and getting the floors sanded, inc­luding original hoop pine boards and a section of floating floor. “It’s so hardy and strong, as it turns out,” Sandy says of the timber veneer. “Normally you’d get five bags of dust but the sander got one.” Sandy experimented with various washes before deciding to leave the floor bare and raw.

Their next job was replacing 60 panes of privacy glass in the living area with clear glass, allowing views over undulating pasture and grazing cattle to the north.