Stanton Bed & Breakfast

Architecturally, Stanton has several stand-out points, the most obvious being the staircase, the fireplaces and chimneys, and the beautiful pit-sawn floorboards.

There are only three sandstone cantilevered staircases in Australia, and this is one of them. (I believe there is one other in Tasmania and the other in Sydney.)

When the Rumleys arrived in 1988, a length of plumbers’ pipe was used as a railing, and so Ian Rumley sourced the present simple wooden banister from an old house, Belmont, in Hobart which was being restored.

I was therefore really chuffed when Mrs Helen Andrews (nee Shone) visited and mentioned that, when she lived at Stanton as a girl, the original banister was very similar to the present one. Some things were obviously meant to be.

The five chimneys of Stanton accommodate seven fireplaces, and five of the surrounds are unusually made of sandstone.

In Georgian times, these would often have been painted to highlight the stonemason’s skill with carving, and we have left the fireplace in the living room in its original form, warts and all to illustrate that fact.

Interestingly, it wasn’t until a former resident of Stanton gave us a scanned copy of a watercolour from pre-1940 times that we realised that there had been a sixth chimney, in the now extended single-storey wing in which Mark and I live.

This housed the washhouse, and the chimney serviced a large boiler. At the same time, a newspaper photograph taken from the rear of the house in 1935 showed an open but covered walkway across the rear of the house, leading to that washhouse.

It is gratifying to know that these areas, and indeed the extension, lie over the site of a similar structure.