You won’t find many homes in the inner city that have intentionally shrunk to make way for a larger garden, but that’s what happened behind a bright red door in Northcote, Melbourne.
Alistair Tuffnell and Christine Baro live with their cat Peppino in a two bedroom workers’ cottage. When Alistair bought the house twenty years ago, it was rundown, dark and all he could afford in the area. His partner Christine moved in three years later and they had big plans for living off the land.
‘We went to Tassie where we were going to buy a farm, but that didn’t work out,’ says Alistair. ‘So all of the things that we wanted to do down there, we thought, “stuff it, let’s do it here instead.” ’