Maree Menzel and Marcos Davidson :: Places: Inside Australian House
When a builder friend saw what they'd bought, he said, 'Why don't you just rip it down and rebuild, down the back of the block, and put a garage at the front?' Pragmatic people do that kind of thing. But for Maree Menzel and Marcos Davidson, who'd been looking in vain for a piece of land in the old part of historic Port Melbourne, close to the city, it was love at first sight. The burnt-out two-storey former shop, circa 1890, was so derelict it had a demolition order on it. Marcos recalls that, 'the day we turned up, it just had a piece of tin nailed over the front doorway. The whole backyard was full of chicken coops, sheds, a jungle of wire and tin.' The only other people at the auction were builders. Although 'it was very scary', according to Maree, they wanted to save whatever they could of the old structure so 'we had to get an engineer in to have it tested. We saved the skeleton of the front but the lean-to buildings had to go.' The roof, which had been renewed in the 1980s, and the upstairs floor were about the only other elements that didn't have to be rebuilt.
The house is next door to a Scout hall and one day. as they were tearing their new acquisition apart ('Marcos loved demolishing,' quips Maree), they noticed that the Scouts were moving out. 'We asked if we could rent some space for storage. When I discovered that it actually had bathrooms and a kitchen, we moved in. It had been used as a stopping-off point for immigrants from England in the fifties. They'd come by ship to Port Melbourne and be put up in the Scout hall until they found their own accommodation.'
In planning the house, Maree 'wanted it to be a mix of my two favourite things: I lived on Crete for a while and I loved those flat-roofed, solid white Greek island houses; and, as a child, I went to a one-room country state school and I loved that, too. They are two entirely different things that I wanted to combine. Marcos was quite happy for me to go with that.' Because the house is long and narrow and inclined to be overshadowed by the edifice next door, finding ways to trap the light was a challenge. Before any plan was formalised, Marcos observed Maree 'walking around the backyard for days with a stick, which she held up at different times of the day to see where the shadows fell'. Windows and other apertures were placed accordingly, which means they are not necessarily where you'd expect to find them in a conventional house.
During the two years it took them to turn a dump into a dream home, they were able to live virtually on site in the Scout hall, toiling on their house whenever they had spare time from their regular work. Marcos is a goldsmith and gem broker. Maree is a designer, painter and courtroom artist for the ABC, who has worked in fashion and designed sets for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Between the two of them, they have created a house whose shape and character is unrecognisable from its origins, except for 'a very faint greengrocer sign on one side and on the other a Bushells Tea sign'. They rebuilt ninety per cent of the front and the entire back of the house themselves with help from Maree's brother-in-law, a builder from the country, and the generous efforts of a band of loyal friends. When it was time to move in, they didn't have to call the professional removalists. With the ingenuity that characterises this inventive pair, 'we just opened up the side windows of the Scout hall,' says Marcos, 'and put planks down, so boxes went straight into our upstairs area, which has a side door. The most fantastic move ever.'
According to a close friend, 'the house grows organically' and that seems to be because, while Maree and Marcos work to a plan, they are not bound by it, but are flexible when they recognise a good thing. As the house became habitable, they decided to leave two ends of it open, waiting for an indefinable something to fill the voids. Serendipity came when renovations to a friend's library yielded some tall, folding doors with glass panels. With a little bit chopped off the top, they fitted so perfectly they look as though they were always meant to be there. Bartering came in handy: Marcos traded a ring and a pair of sunglasses for a truckload of floor tiles that now pave all of the ground floor, with the exception of the front room, where the floorboards were Maree's reward for doing painted finishes in a nightclub.
Now that most of the work is finished, the two find it blissful to be able to sit back, relax and enjoy their own handiwork. While Maree has her studio at the back of the house, Marcos's workshop in Flinders Lane in the city is quite a social hub, so unless family or close friends call in, this place is their sanctuary. Are they completely happy with it, as it is now? Maree is only half joking when she says, 'I believe it's not good luck to finish a house.' Then, as an afterthought, 'The only finished house I've ever seen is one with a For Sale sign on it.'