READY TO MAKE A REWARDING LIFE STYLE CHANGE AMONG THE VINES
ON THE PRESTIGE’S KELMAN VINEYARD ESTATE

LUMBERJACK
Lot 28 Kelman Vineyard is
FOR SALE


Home or weekender, the ideal home you’ve always dreamed about. 
That special opportunity

LUMBERJACK is a stylish award winning residence; master built in the log cabin style, completely from Australian hardwoods.The external walls resemble the pioneering slab hut.  Internally, the richness of hardwood colours and its cathedral ceilings, supported by whole tree trunks is magnificent. Polished ceilings and timber floorboards of ironbark, silky oak, turpentine; every door is a handmade gun barrel door, hand sanded balustrades –
This home is a work of art.

LUMBERJACK won the 2001 Master Builders Excellence Awards for “Best Use of New Timber”.

• Less than 2 hours from Sydney via F3, 40 minutes to Newcastle and 60 minutes to Newcastle Airport.
• 3 queen bedrooms, 2 with ensuites, 3rd bathroom with spa bath, seperate shower, seperate toilet
• Living + dining + deck, Romeo + Juliet balcony
• Loft with so much room for the family area
• Natural Gas with Gas Log Fireplace and BBQ
• Reverse cycle air conditioning throughout
• Kitchen - fully equipped, stainless steel appliances
• Full size laundry
• Undercover parking for 3 cars
• Land 1702 m2
• Beautiful lake and parkland views and a huge backyard
• Safe area for children with 15 Km speed limit
  
  
• 2 grass tennis courts, 1 all season tennis court 
• Bocce court 
• Cellar door + wine tasting
• Golf driving range
• Gazebo, 2 outdoor BBQ areas. 
• Lake fishing
  
  

  Contact – Gay Cooper at the HUNTER VALLEY COOPERAGE – Bed  & Breakfast Lot 41 Kelman Vineyard, 2 Oakey Creek Road, Pokolbin NSW 2320 Phone: 02 4990 1232 Mobile: 0427 752 010 – 0421 683 435

  
  

• The location is absolutely one of the best in Kelman.
• The view is over parkland, vines and lakes.
• A north facing, passive solar design, meaning warmth in winter and less heat in summer. (See attached newspaper article).
• The backyard is huge and there is access for a vehicle, so you can put in a pool!
• If a weekender without work is what you are after, maintenance is carefree. We have the best gardener in the Valley, who keeps Lumberjack looking perfect all year round. Also able to do any handyman extras you may need.
• We also have the best cleaner, who will clean Lumberjack after a weekend of relaxing and wine tasting.
• There is a great community spirit here in Kelman.
• Each owner receives 12 cases of wine per annum. Semillon, Chardonnay, Shiraz, sparkling varieties and now Moscato.
• You can be as active as you like in the community or as relaxed as can be, just watching the workers tend the vines.
• A Social committee organises wonderful dinners and events.
• A Craft day, benefiting charities and Aids babies, on the last Friday of each month.
• Pruning of roses and vines, picking olives, oranges, lemons, planting trees, all followed by BYO BBQ’s.
• In summer we have a BYO BBQ on the last Friday or Saturday of the month in the wine shed.
• You can go along to all the meetings, such as Executive, Social, House and Landscaping, Farm, and Wine committee meetings.
• We have just had a marketing project that delivered some 400 new members to our fold, which should produce some wonderful sales over the next couple of years. This should affect our bottom line and provide a reduction in our levies.

Logging a Claim
This saw miller is also a winning environmentalist.  - By Colin Menzies - Sydney Morning Herald Saturday September 1, 2001

It's not often a company with a history in sawmilling is lauded for its environmental responsibility.
But Australian Hardwood Homes is different. The company's primary motive is "to encourage people to build and live in houses that don't cost the earth nor destroy it". And managing director Lionel Buckett follows those principles assiduously.
He has already been the MBA's Master Builder of the Year in 1999 and has a string of other awards in construction and innovative use of timber.
This year the company has added to the list with three MBA awards best use of new timber, the Environmental Management Award and Waste Management Housing award.
The accolades for the first two awards are for a pole house at Kelman Vineyard in the Hunter Valley which follows the pioneering timber slab huts once common to the district. Both the design and building were undertaken by Buckett.
His clients wanted to have the external appearance of a traditional slab hut, with all the conveniences of modern life inside.
So a pole frame with vertical timber walls was agreed on, but with the added comfort of today's building products to keep out the rain and wind.
Buckett began with de-sapped Australian hardwood poles for the frame. Ironbark half logs were used for the external facade and more Australian hardwood was used for the polished floors inside.
The cathedral ceilings were fitted with polished hardwood lining boards with exposed structural timber beams. A staircase to the home's loft was made of polished ironbark, while narrow leaf ironbark was used for the external timber decking, handrails and stairs.
Central to the concept was the passive solar design, which incorporates the orientation of the house, its eave length, wall insulation and the amount of glass for the northern face. Following these principles means more warmth in winter and less heat in summer.

Being entirely built from Australian hardwood meant a loss of mass. And that meant a lot of heavy lifting during construction. "There's a hell of a lot of work in that particular house", says Buckett.

The de-sapped poles for the frame provide a natural barrier against termites. "Once they were the standard power pole before chemical treatment came in", says Buckett. "We don't work with any poisons or chemicals. We won't have anything to do with them".
Despite the North Coast sourced poles being "durability class one" hardwood, Buckett still used Term mesh white ant stockings with each pole for added durability. He says the house will stand for "probably more than three centuries".
Buckett has nothing but contempt for modern "consumer housing" and the wastefulness of replacing a home every 20 or 30 years.
"We like to think that in our buildings we're actually doing something good for the world and the environment," he says. "It doesn't really cost any extra; it's just putting a bit of thought into what you do."
It's this thinking that led the MBA judges to remark: "This entry demonstrates a strong commitment to the environment both in policy and practice... the attention to detail in all elements of the environment: energy efficiency, water and waste management, fire-proofing, minimising construction and ongoing maintenance disturbance, harmony with the surroundings. An excellent contribution to the continuing challenge that is environmental management."
And all from a third generation saw miller turned designer-builder.
But it was his family's connection with a sawmill that enabled Buckett to hand-pick all the timber for the Hunter Valley pole house. Some of the hardwood came from the former family sawmill, while other selections were sourced using connections in Taree.
Buckett says the more timber we can preserve in buildings the greater the long term storage of carbon, and the less the ozone layer suffers. He points out that 60 per cent of wood's weight is carbon, so the longer we store it in this natural form the more we help the environment.
And if that sounds strange coming from a builder, it's not. Australian Hardwood Homes is one company that abides by its motto of "houses that don't cost the earth".