From Germany to Gippsland: Willkommen at The Ridge House
Updated: Aug 31
Guests who have flown halfway around the world and given us a few days of their Australian trip are a particular kind of pleasure to host. They had every option available to them. They chose to travel a gravel road in West Gippsland.
Our connection with European travellers started by accident, in 2021, when The Ridge House appeared across nine pages of Living at Home,a German interiors and lifestyle magazine I had never heard of and but my more urbane book club friend somehow had. She was quick to educate me!
Ali Heath was commissioned to tell the story, with photographs by Marnie Hawson. If you own a shelf of interiors books, there is a fair chance one of them is Ali's. Curate, Create and Cocoon are all hers, all international bestsellers, and she has spent three decades writing about homes for Elle Decoration, House & Garden, Country Living and the Telegraph. Curate was photographed by Marnie as well, which is more or less how a farmhouse at the end of a gravel road in Victoria came to the attention of a German magazine in the first place.
Ali and I talked across the time zones, her with breakfast tea, me with a G&T, about the house, the land, and the two years our family spent turning a tired 1970s homestead into something worth photographing. She asked better questions about this place than anyone has before or since. There were also design tips, translated into German, which I then had to translate back to check what I had apparently said.
Then the magazine came out, and something happened that I had not planned for at all.
Messages started arriving. Hallo aus Deutschland. German readers subscribed to the newsletter and wrote to say they had bookmarked The Ridge House for a future trip to Australia, and I sat at the kitchen table reading them thinking that the impossible had happened. I had travelled. Well, a picture of me had, anyway.
And in October 2025 it happened again, in Dutch. vtwonen Landelijk, one of the largest interiors titles in the Netherlands, ran the house across their October issue, with Marnie Hawson behind the camera again. That one is a story about the inside of the house rather than the renovation, so I have written about it separately: Binnenkijken in Gippsland.
A different side of Australia
For international visitors, The Ridge House offers a part of Australia that is genuinely hard to find on a standard itinerary.
We are in Yarragon South, in West Gippsland, 90 minutes east of Melbourne straight down the Princes Highway. No mountain passes, no winding back roads, no need for a four-wheel drive. If you are landing in Melbourne after 20-odd hours in the air, this is a comfortable first stop rather than something you have to build a whole day around.
It is also the gateway to Gippsland, which matters if you are driving between Melbourne and Sydney. Most people take the inland route because it is quicker. The coastal run through Gippsland is the one worth an extra day or two: Wilsons Promontory is 90 minutes south of us, the Gippsland Lakes are east, and the road keeps going all the way to the New South Wales border through country most Australians have not seen either.
What you get here is birdsong at six, breakfast made from things grown within about 20 kilometres, private trails through the bush on our own 50 acres, and a night sky with nothing in it but stars.
The village of Yarragon is ten minutes away and is a good introduction to country Victoria, with a bakery that has won awards for its pies and a coffee roaster worth a stop. Twenty minutes further, Warragul has two hatted restaurants, Messmates Dining and Hogget Kitchen, both of which need booking well ahead. Mount Worth State Park is 40 minutes away and holds a 300-year-old mountain ash with a seven-metre girth, along with lyrebirds that will mimic a chainsaw at you if they feel like it.
Because The Ridge House is a whole house rather than a hotel room, there is room to settle in properly: cook something from the market, put the kettle on, light the fire, take a glass of Gippsland wine out to the veranda and watch the light go.
You do not have to fill every day. Most people work that out by the second afternoon.
Why the Australian winter is the best time to visit Gippsland
This is the part I most want European visitors to hear, because it runs against instinct.
Most people plan an Australian trip around their own summer, which lands them here in June, July or August. They arrive apologising for the season, half expecting to have got it wrong.
They have not. Winter is the best thing that happens on this ridge.
Fires burning from morning. Mist sitting low in the fern gullies. Rain on a tin roof, and the valley below Loggers Lookout vanishing into cloud and then reappearing an hour later like nothing happened. Both fires are laid and ready to light before you arrive, with the firewood stacked and waiting, because nobody should have to negotiate a strange fireplace on their first night.
It is not the Australia of the brochures. It is the one people come back for.
Our summer, December to February, is the other good answer: long evenings on the deck, sunset from the lookout at half past eight, cicadas, and the beaches at Inverloch an hour down the road. Autumn, March to May, is the quiet favourite of anyone who has been here for it. There is no wrong month, only the version of this place you happen to get.
A country home in Gippsland
The Ridge House has four bedrooms and sleeps up to eight, which suits couples travelling together, families, and small groups working their way around Victoria. Everyone gets their own room.
The house sits on 50 acres with two private walking trails and no neighbours in sight. Green Hills Farm, our own 150-acre working farm, is over the fence, so the landscape you are looking at from the veranda is also our Tuesday. The honey in the kitchen comes from hives you can see from the deck. So do the eggs, most weeks.
There is fast NBN wifi, which is worth stating plainly because rural Australia has a reputation on this front and ours is genuinely good. There is no television in the main living room. That was deliberate, and it is the thing guests write to me about afterwards more than anything else in the house.
We also like helping guests find the places we go to ourselves. Our Gippsland Guide has the restaurants, wineries, walks and day trips we actually use, and if none of it suits how you like to travel, ask me and I will tell you where to go instead.
And the German magazine?
We still have it.
You can download the original nine-page Living at Home feature below and see this place through the eyes of a European writer describing it from 16,000 kilometres away. Ali also provided an English translation, which is here for anyone whose German is as good as mine. Download the whole nine-page German-language spread below. The images are worth it!
Visiting Australia?
If an Australian trip is taking shape and Gippsland is anywhere near the route, the fire is laid, the kettle is on, and the valley does something extraordinary at about half past five.
Willkommen im Ridge House. We would love to have you here.
Continue Exploring Gippsland
If looking to say 'Gidday' and travel to country Gippsland in Victoria, Australia, these will help you fill the days:
Where to Eat Dinner in Yarragon and Warragul: A Local's Guide: the places I send guests to, including the two you need to book weeks ahead.
Gippsland Wine: Pantry to Cellar Door: the cellar doors within half an hour of the house, and what is waiting in the pantry when you arrive.
There's More to The Ridge House Than What's Inside the Fence: what happens over the fence at Green Hills Farm, and where the honey and the eggs come from.
