114yo Emu Park house for sale

This huge family home on Phillip Street, Emu Park, has had an interesting past and could be your future.

Supplied

IT has a romantic present, had a colourful past and could be your future.

Emu Park couple Melanie and Murray Jones purchased this 114-year-old home on Valentine’s Day, 2007, after Melanie walked though it and “fell in love with it”.

Melanie said they weren’t planning on buying a home at the time, but her husband thought it would make a good wedding anniversary present.

“We bought it with our hearts,” she said.

“It’s lovely and it has the most tranquil feeling when you walk in.”

With antique furniture, original doors, huge entertaining areas with water features, the tranquillity and history resonates throughout the two-storey home.

Some items that were left in the house when the Jones family moved in include a church pew; some old photographs, including one of a family who could have been the original owners; and some rosary beads found under the floorboards by previous owners.

These pieces, and most of the furniture, will now be passed on again as the family move on, and the house is now up for sale by expressions of interest until March 22.

With seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, Melanie said the home was “just a little bit on the large side”, and they were looking to build something smaller.

The previous owners, Andrew and Kaye Gardiner, spent three years renovating and restoring the old home, which they said was “beautiful but rundown” when they purchased it some time after 1983.

The couple transformed and ran the home as a bed and breakfast for many years. On May 15, 1888 Edward Seymour Lucas, of the Rockhampton drapery business Stewart and Lucas (now called Stewarts Department Store), purchased the block of land for sixty pounds at an auction.

However, the estate was seized by the Queensland National Bank in March 1894 and was later purchased by a Roseina Rebecca Palmer in 1895 with a mortgage repayment of six hundred pounds to the Bank of Australasia.

The colonial Queenslander was built in 1896 and was named Ribbonwood.

In the early 1900s it served as a boarding house for holidaying staff from the Mt Morgan mine and in the 1930s, the home was purchased by the Rockhampton Hospital Board and was used as a private hospital.

During the 1940s, the home was owned by the Sisters of Mercy, with hundreds of Central Queensland children visiting and staying as part of the Bush Children’s scheme, until the 1960s and ’70s when the Benedictine nuns used it as a rest and recreation centre until a monastery could be built in Yeppoon.