The Raconteur Farm Journal - We Broke Ground
For the past three years we’ve been imagining a place where the landscape is the storyteller. A place where fragrance starts in the soil. Where architecture quietly gives way to landscape. Where the passing of a season matters more than the passing of an hour.
After years of dreaming, drawing, planning and waiting, we finally broke ground.
It’s a curious moment. The paddocks are still mostly empty. The buildings don’t yet exist. There is more sky than structure. More possibility than certainty. Perhaps that’s what makes beginnings so beautiful. Little by little, a place we’ve carried in our imaginations will become something we can finally walk through.
If all goes to plan, by late summer 2027 these paddocks will be home to a four-bedroom luxury farm lodge, designed for exclusive farm-stay experiences among the gardens and surrounding landscape.
Alongside it, we’ll open a new chapter for The Raconteur: a flagship store, perfumery cellar-door, head office, and a working studio where many of the botanicals we grow will be distilled and transformed into the small-batch fragrances and products we create.
None of this would be possible without the extraordinary people helping bring it to life. Our heartfelt thanks to the team at Liminal Studio — Elvio Brisnese, Peta Heffernan and Guy Edwards — whose thoughtful design has shaped this vision from its earliest sketches, and to Mark Verdouw and the team at Maveric Builders, who are now carefully bringing it from paper to paddock.
But that isn’t really what we’re creating. We’re creating a place that reminds us to notice. The way morning light slips across a hillside. The first signs of spring. A conversation that lasts longer because nobody reaches for a phone.
The world has become remarkably good at asking for our attention. We hope this place might gently return it.
To the landscape.
To one another.
To ourselves.
We’re looking forward to sharing the seasons ahead with you.
Xx
Craig Andrade