Prestige Property: Two Roads, Maleny, QLD
A modern hinterland masterpiece offered for the first time.
2 min
Two Roads is a peerless, multi award-winning masterpiece of grand scale set on 185 acres of the Queensland Sunshine Coast’s hinterland.
Located in the hills behind Maleny, it is the first time the HIA 2016 Queensland Home of the Year has been offered to the market.
Boasting an intense sense of privacy – with views over the Witta and Curramore Ranges – the 15000sqm, 6-bedroom, 4-bathroom, 7-car garage home is a mere seven-minute drive from the heart of Maleny.
Taking its design cues from the opulent retreats found on the South Island of New Zealand, the exterior of the home sees Alpine granite and Buffalo granite used as the prevailing materials.
Inside, the home uses a select palette of polished concrete and stained hardwood flooring alongside New Guinea Rosewood feature ceilings and dark-stained hardwood shiplap cladding.
The kitchen features European appliances and a polished concrete benchtop with a separate concealed butler’s pantry adjacent.
Large glass doors combine the indoors to the outdoors, with the wraparound veranda, alfresco dining area and large pool featured outside.
Throughout the home one can expect a plethora of living and entertaining spaces – including a large games room and commercial sized gym – office, library guest room and temperature-controlled 1000 bottle wine cellar.
Adding elevated appeal to the home is the use of gas fireplaces dotted throughout the home.
Solar panels are used throughout the property to heat the alongside and Envirocycle system and rainwater tanks capable of holding 300,000 litres to ensure the home tracks towards becoming environmentally neutral.
Further, the grounds are privy to a full-size floodlit tennis court with spectator seating, Olympic size dressage area and helicopter landing site.
These features are further coupled with two self-contained luxury eco-cabins and a renovated 3-bedroom manager’s cottage.
Elsewhere on the property is manicured gardens, pastures, native rainforest, kilometres of walking trails, multiple waterfalls and swimming holes.
As a working farm, it currently has 45 head of cattle, five horses and stockyard, sheds and machinery.
There are few properties in Australia like it.
The listing is with Mosaic Property Group’s Deon Calder (+61 400 551 635); POA.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
