Historic Bickford home in the Hills
Yasmine and Mark Johnson have embraced life in the Adelaide Hills since moving into an historic 1916 home, originally built as the summer residence for the Bickford family.
Yasmine and Mark Johnson were not in the market for a new home when Yasmine began browsing real estate websites in 2022.
At the time, the couple lived in a modern home in Beaumont, which they had renovated only a couple of years earlier.
Their Beaumont home had sweeping city views, sat on a large 700-square-metre block and was perfect for their family of four with daughters Amaya, now 11, and Siena, eight.
But it was after returning from a holiday in the United Kingdom, where Mark grew up, that Yasmine found herself searching for houses like those they’d seen around Mark’s rural village of Buckinghamshire.
“We had travelled around a bit while we were away and seen all these beautiful big, brick homes,” Yasmine says.
“Then we came back, and I saw that this place was for sale.”
“This place” is an historic five-bedroom home in Stirling that sits on a sprawling 6500-square-metre block.
Try as she might, Yasmine couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the house for her family.
“I kind of ignored it because we’d only had our place in Beaumont for two and a half years and we’d just done a massive renovation and I thought we need to stay and enjoy it,” Yasmine says.
“But I couldn’t stop thinking about this house. I had shown it to Mark, but I thought we couldn’t afford it, and I wasn’t even going to call the agent. But I couldn’t stop talking about it and Mark said, ‘Just ring them’.
“It ended up being in our price range and the rest is history.”
The couple purchased the vast property in early 2023, and Yasmine says she was won over by the beauty of the red brick home with its distinctive curves and arches, as well as the many original interior features and spacious layout.
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The home has five bedrooms (currently used as four bedrooms and a study), plus a formal living room, three living/lounge areas, a billiard room, five bathrooms, and a cellar. All bedrooms feature original fireplaces and two of them, including the master suite, have balconies overlooking the grounds.
Yasmine’s favourite room, though, is the sunroom, which looks out onto the garden.
“I have my morning coffee in there on the weekends, and the sun comes streaming in,” she says. “It’s so beautiful. This is really where I feel the vibes of the house.”
Significant character features of the home, which was built in 1916, include original terrazzo flooring in the billiard room, which also boasts a billiard table circa 1946, oak wood panelling to many of the walls and an original lift, which still works.
“It’s a little clunky but it gets serviced every year and it’s more than fine,” Yasmine says. “It’s such a cool feature, the girls love it.
“We also love the billiard table and we’ve all had a go.”
When it comes to interior styling, Yasmine admits she’s “still kind of battling” given the family’s previous home was modern and minimalistic.
“The era of this house lends itself more to a modern English manor, Hamptons style, so I am gradually creating that over time,” she says.
Yasmine and Mark are both keenly interested in the history of their home but say there is limited documentation available. What they have pieced together is that the house was originally owned by the Bickford family, of the Bickford’s drinks dynasty.
“The house was built for Harry and Priscilla Bickford around 1915 or 1916 as their summer house, while their main home was in North Adelaide,” Yasmine says.
“They only had it for five years before Harry passed away, and then when Priscilla passed away some years later, the house was passed down to a member of the family who sold it about 30 years ago.”
Over the years, the house with its beautiful gardens has been used as a wedding venue and fortuitously, a Bickford relative attended a ceremony here and ended up buying the home in the early 2000s, according to Yasmine.
“Then he had it for 15 years and because he and his wife were married here, they were so attached to the place,” she says. “They ended up doing renovations between 2015 and 2019, including the kitchen and bathrooms. Then the house was sold to the people who we bought it from.”
Given the renovations had been done recently, Mark and Yasmine say they haven’t needed to touch the inside of the house at all, although they may do so in the future.
“The house doesn’t need renovating structurally, it has been so beautifully built,” Yasmine says. “For us it’s about maintaining what is here.
“However, I am thinking of a kitchen extension next year as the original kitchen sizes of older houses are small and are not the best for entertaining. We are big entertainers; we have already had some amazing parties in the house, my 40th in 2023 and Mark’s 40th last year.”
With entertaining in mind, Yasmine and Mark have also invested heavily in upgrading the grounds of the property, particularly the garden immediately surrounding the house.
“This was literally all woodlands and overgrown,” Yasmine says as she shows SALIFE around the property.
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“Everything was growing wild. At our last house we did a big landscaping project and there is so much space here that we thought we might do a tennis court and swimming pool.
“However, we decided to forgo the pool and tennis court, mainly because it’s a difficult sloped block, the retaining needed was astronomical and we would have lost the ability to have beautiful garden space which we think suits the house better.
“We thought we would utilise terraces for entertaining instead of a tennis court. As for the pool, that was a hard decision, we are still thinking about turning the decommissioned well at the top of the block into a plunge pool – stay tuned.”
The backyard has been landscaped into three terraces and multiple garden areas – allowing for different spaces to roam, sit and enjoy the garden.
“The girls love to run around here and play with our dog, Wolfie. At our other house, they used to come home from school and be on their screens but now they run in the door and wave goodbye and they’re out playing, with friends, with the dog, with the neighbour. It’s such a nice community.”
Yasmine admits she’s not much of a green thumb and has a track record of killing plants but says with the support of a gardener and an irrigation system, she’s learning.
The landscaping work was done by NG Harris Landscaping, a local Adelaide Hills builder/landscaper who Yasmine says has been amazing.
“They helped rebuild old pathways in the garden that had been overgrown and had basically disappeared,” she says.
“The landscaper called me one day because they’d found a massive pond. He asked if I wanted to keep it, I didn’t, so we filled it in and created a seated area. We also took the original gates from the front, and we are using them as a feature in the garden because we want to keep a piece of the history.
“There was also some seating in the garden that was broken so we had it welded and painted black. We’ve tried to keep the heritage where we can.”
The couple say they would love to discover more of the home’s history from current members of the Bickford family if there was opportunity.
“When we moved in, I found a big plank of wood with calligraphy written on it saying, ‘May 10, 1916’. We’ve kept that but we’d love to know more about who created that and just the history of the property,” Yasmine says.
Having a home of tranquillity surrounded by nature is a must for Yasmine and Mark who work long hours running their recruitment business, EGM Partners. It’s a growing business with a large staff, so being able to switch off as they drive up the freeway and pull into their peaceful patch of Hills real estate is vital.
“You really feel like you are somewhere else and not just 10 minutes up the freeway,” Yasmine says.
For now, though, Mark and Yasmine are gearing up for a busy festive season, hosting multiple Christmas celebrations at home.
“We love Christmas in the house and in Stirling,” Yasmine says. “We have a big annual Christmas party with all our friends, usually 120 people, with 50-plus kids, every year.
“We set up the garden with white tables, umbrellas, and lighting, we set up an outside bar with bar staff and serve Champagne spritzers. We always have a jumping castle, and Father Christmas visits the kids.
“It has become the Johnson tradition and one of my favourite events of the year to plan. I start planning this in July as caterers and Santa get booked up quickly.
“Christmas eve and Christmas day are when we celebrate a more intimate Christmas with our family, traditional German Christmas on Christmas eve with my side of the family and English Christmas on Christmas day with Mark’s side.”
Being able to create such special memories for their girls, their extended family and their friends at their beautiful Hills property is what brings Mark and Yasmine so much joy. Looking back, Yasmine is grateful she scoured those real estate websites and accidentally uncovered her family’s forever home.
“We don’t plan to leave,” she says. “We are the new custodians of this house, and we plan to live in it and love it and keep it in the family.”
