Old country for all men

An ambitious feat of design brings Elizabethan England to rural NSW, writes Bruce Elder.

Kevin McCloud, the presenter of the popular British TV series Grand Designs, would be amused and impressed. Betty and Larry Kendall have taken a nondescript aluminium-clad house on a quiet street in Lavington, a northern suburb of Albury, and plonked a half-timbered, Elizabethan-style house on top of it to create a luxury two-storey bed and breakfast. On top are two large guest rooms and an Elizabethan gallery with a baronial table, library and burgundy carpets.

The experience is unforgettable because of its incongruity: a startling vision of faux-Elizabethan England in a suburban street of bungalows in country NSW.

The Kendalls transformed their pre-fab home, built around a steel sub-frame, into Elizabeth's Manor about a decade ago. The alterations are recorded in a book in the gallery that shows a huge crane putting the upper storey on the house and then carpenters installing faux half-timbering on the walls, building Elizabethan-style bay windows and fitting aluminium lead-lighting windows. They hung lots of framed prints of classic paintings, put a mock-Elizabethan chess table in the gallery near the bar, found some bits and pieces of armour, installed a bright red English postbox on the street, put up a sign featuring an image of Elizabeth I and found key rings embossed with Union Jacks for the doors to the suites.

Cynics would say this is appalling kitsch - and they would have a point. But this ignores the fact that a good bed and breakfast is not about the design idiosyncrasies but about the quality of the beds, the size of the rooms, the friendliness of the hosts and the standard of the meals. Measured in those terms, this is an impressive bed and breakfast. It has every possible inclusion and so can be genuinely regarded as a five-star establishment.

It is easy to dismiss eccentric enthusiasms - turning a mundane piece of suburbia into a faux-Elizabethan manor is about as eccentric as you can get. But let's examine the experience. The rooms are large and comfortable. I stay in the Elizabeth Room; the other is called Henry's Room. There is also Anne's Cottage out the back for families.

My room has a spacious ensuite with separate shower and bath. There are a huge walk-in wardrobe, heavy curtains, a comfortable pseudo-Tudor four-poster bed (the trick seems to be to get a really good queen-sized bed and build a four-poster around it) and, of course, the room is half-timbered. There are some interesting party tricks: wave your hand near the bed lights, for example, and they turn off and on. There are wireless internet access and a table that is large enough to spread out your work. The room opens directly onto the gallery, where there is an open fire, lounge suite and plenty of books. Not surprisingly, the library has a decidedly English orientation.

Guests enter through the car port at the side of the house and walk up to the front door across stone paving. To access your room you have to walk through the Kendalls' kitchen and navigate a narrow stairway. At the top of the stairs is a Tudor Gallery stretching the length of the building. Here, the Kendalls provide a full English breakfast at the huge red-gum table. Downstairs may be modern but upstairs is, quite consciously, far removed from modern-day Albury.

The Kendalls are excellent and generous hosts eager to suggest local places to visit. They are also passionate Anglophiles (Larry emigrated from Britain decades ago) who, on numerous trips back to the "old country", fell in love with Tudor and Elizabethan England and decided they wanted to recreate their little piece of England in north Albury.