A Hong Kong creative couple’s 1920s holiday home in Australia

“Excuse my hair,” says Ross Urwin, punctual to the dot for our appointment. “I’ve just been for a swim.”

Urwin may still be observing Hong Kong time on this winter’s afternoon in the small Australian town of Mullumbimby, in Byron Shire, New South Wales, but otherwise the city is zones away in terms of pace and lifestyle. While his Australian partner, Darrel Best, is busy having a massage, the British-born, Hong Kong-based businessman has returned from the beach to show Post Magazine around the property they bought last year, on a whim.

We go through the open-plan main house, and traipse across the lawn to an “artist’s studio”, so that by the time we finish the Skype tour, an hour later, I’ve spent three times longer viewing the property than the pair had before committing to owning it: last July they squeezed in a cursory inspection of the 2,900 sq ft house on the day they returned to Hong Kong.

“We walked through the gate and it felt like we were coming home,” says Urwin, adding that Best’s Aboriginal ancestral roots are in the shire. When the gavel fell on the property a month later, theirs was the winning bid.

Their emotional purchase may have gone against every rule in the book, but it’s not hard to see the appeal of the renovated four-bedroom-plus-sunroom late-Federation bungalow, complete with timber-framed leadlight windows, decorative ceilings, a painted-weatherboard exterior and an established garden that, Urwin says, swung it for them.

“It looks like an English garden,” he says, recalling a childhood home, in Britain, that gave him green fingers. “Most mornings, if we don’t go to yoga, we spend two hours gardening. It’s so therapeutic; it’s a complete opposite to our lives in Hong Kong.”