Arleston Cottage, Flinders review: On the edge of glory

At land's end, Dugald Jellie finds an agreeable gateway to a peninsula's pleasures.

Do we really want to be away from wireless roaming? Are we truly prepared to forgo decent coffee? It's the great paradox of the weekend away, and partly why we find ourselves in Flinders - on a far tip of the Mornington Peninsula and about as far south as one can go without actually leaving Melbourne's footprint.

Our get-out plan is for a lost weekend among grape-rows and restaurant tables on this long heel of the city, staying at Red Hill or Main Ridge. But others share the idea also, so we look for rooms instead at Mount Martha, Dromana and Shoreham, before booking two nights online at this new one-bedroom cottage at the back of an antiques shop near land's end at Flinders.

We arrive in the dark on a Friday to find our semi-detached lodging trim and neat, and dressed with hoop-backed mahogany chairs, Chinese porcelain, gilt-framed mirrors, a Persian rug and a tufted-button chesterfield. As an add-on to Arleston Antiques, which does a fine line in English Victorian-era and French signature pieces, it's no surprise rooms are decorated with a considered sensibility.

All weekend I'm intrigued by a late-1800s Vanity Fair framed print of American Civil War uniforms, but then again I'm intrigued also by Snooki on Jersey Shore, a hypnotically trashy American reality show on a pay TV channel — subscription television being a guilty pleasure of the paid room . Rooms are shipshape, including the galley kitchen, which we do not disturb. This is, after all, a holiday.

But there are hiccups. The queen mattress is too forgiving for my liking; there's no bath; no board in the Scrabble box, and no view as such. Blinds open to a timber courtyard deck when I had been hoping for waking views across clumped agapanthus to the blue of Bass Strait.

And then we ate Saturday breakfast out at Pier Provedore, one block away, where a young woman at the communal table wears a T-shirt that reads: "I left my heart in the Hamptons". If it's true Flinders is the new Portsea, then here it comes with better coffee and a more unbuttoned gathering of the beautifully unwashed. A Rolls-Royce parks outside. Table talk is of overseas jaunts and law firms and rounds of golf. The cottage's website labels our accommodation "luxury B&B", but we find the second "B" to be of the English muffin and sachet butter DIY variety. We eat out both mornings.

The deal maker Realty shop windows confirm our whereabouts at the top end of the Mornington Peninsula property ladder - making our room rates an affordable entry point to an end-of-the-road enclave of clipped cypress hedges and picturesque holiday shacks.

Stepping out Local consensus has La Petanque at Main Ridge as the peninsula's top winery restaurant, but we'd booked Saturday lunch at Max's at Red Hill Estate. It rains all afternoon, which matters not when confronted with a glass of the estate's chardonnay and a grilled quail entree with roast figs, blue cheese and prosciutto.