At 76, Graham Liney is the quintessential jack-of-trades. He has bred potatoes, run restaurants, travelled the world, worked in television, and built his own house in Australia.
He came to Australia in 1969 as an art student from England, and three years later he stumbled across Willow Vale Mill, a 1830s flour mill in New South Wales. It was love at first sight. “When I saw the mill, I turned upon the back road and there it was, and instantly I wanted it.”
Willow Vale Mill was in a sorry state when he bought it. Once an imposing Georgian industrial building, it was little more than a “pile of stones” when he first arrived. “Really, it was a field with a falling-down building on a river,” he said. But he was not deterred. He quickly got into repairing and restoring the house using salvaged building materials sourced from all over Sydney.
Disaster struck several times – once, when a “mini tornado” blew most of the house down, and then when a fire broke out and “burned the rest to the ground”. He continued to tinker away at the house and gardens for decades, adding a column here or a tree there as inspiration struck. “It’s like a painting that took 50 years to paint,” he said.
In later years, he ran the mill as a popular restaurant and guesthouse. “I was probably in my heyday doing a wedding every third or fourth week,” he recalled.
The mill is an elegant stone building with six bedrooms and five bathrooms arranged over four storeys.
Exposed wooden beams and rustic doors feature prominently in the interior.
Outside, a creek runs through eight hectares of lush gardens and orchards.
An eclectic array of buildings are dotted throughout the grounds: a glasshouse, barn, summerhouse, and even what looks like a railway station.
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