Legendary landscaper Paul Bangay's personal estate is for sale, and it's a gardener's heaven
A peephole curiously cut into the hedge offers a glimpse of an elegantly dressed garden with Italian cypresses and paved path beckoning to a two-storey rustic villa.
It’s a bucolic vision more at home on a Tuscan hillside than among the rolling pastures and bush of Victoria’s Central Highlands at Denver, about 100km northwest of Melbourne.
This is Stonefields, the beloved country estate of celebrated garden designer Paul Bangay. It is back in the spotlight after its sale to a hotel consortium – that included fellow celebrity gardener Jamie Durie – fell through in 2023.
When Bangay bought the 15.8-hectare property in 2004, it was just cow paddocks. He set to designing the house and gardens running along a northeast-southwest axis, front and back. Off to the sides are “garden rooms”, full of vibrant trees and flowers, clipped hedging big and small, and places to sit and take a moment.
“I knew what I wanted straight away,” remembers Bangay. “The feeling of different spaces.”
And so, for the past two decades, Bangay has created an Eden of immense beauty and joy, which he shares with husband Barry, cocker spaniel Ruby and Harold, the resident peacock.
“I wanted the garden to be a journey,” he says. “I didn’t want to see everything in one glimpse.”
Hence, the peephole: “Everyone looks through the little window in the hedge. It entices you into the next space.”
In fact, Bangay cleverly builds the anticipation on arrival. There’s an arboretum of about 60 oaks coming through the top paddock, alongside serpentine hawthorn hedging and a meadow with crab apple groves (which were pink and blousy this time of year). On an alternative route is a gatehouse with an arched walkway.
If that isn’t enough to pique one’s excitement, there’s a six-metre obelisk, topped with a bronze wedge-tailed eagle standing sentinel over the property.
Again, Bangay holds us in suspense, inviting us into a small courtyard, almost vestibule-like behind a two-metre hedge. Spying what lies beyond (through the hole) you step round it onto the main path to the front door. “Everyone gasps,” says Bangay.
Box-hedged garden beds brimming with blue flowering perennials lead to two levels of immaculate parterre, filled with centimetre-precise cube and spherical hedging and, at the minute, “fluffing” with 4000 white tulips.
“My philosophy is to start informal with a park-like atmosphere of trees and lawn softly tracing the land’s natural contours and, as you get closer to the house, become more formal,” he says.
The journey continues with hedge-walled gardens either side. Left, there’s a calming white garden with hydrangeas, crab apples and a water-lily reflection pond, ringed by a four-metre pleached hornbeam hedge.
“A single-coloured garden is a little dated these days but, 20 years ago, all I wanted was my own white garden,” says Bangay, who exits here along a path lined with box-ball hedges to his studio in the gatehouse.
Right is a very un-English rose garden Bangay planted with perfumed maroon Munstead Wood and white frothy Wedding Day to appear like a Persian rug.
There’s an apple walk, too: a cross path lined with Crimson Crisp apple trees and “box clouds”, with wisteria-covered rotunda either end, ideal for morning or afternoon tea.
Interrupting the garden is the house: a 10-by-10-metre living-dining cube, with wings. One has the main bedroom and en suite, hidden behind a secret library door, the other a country-styled kitchen with Lacanche oven and flower-cum-mud room. Adjoining is an herb garden with bell tower and bay hedge.
Bangay calls the house he designed a “timeless classic”, unburdened by detailing, leaving it to his collection of antiquities, amassed over 40 years, to gussy up the interiors.
He also made it one room deep, so as not to lose sight of the garden. It’s here, for the first time, you spy the pool garden, with its sweeping views of the valley below. “Everyone gasps again,” says Bangay.
A 17-metre pool sits in the middle of a lawn, flanked by box hedges and enclosed by herbaceous flowerbeds and Portuguese laurel hedging. At the bottom is a ha-ha (sunken terrace) with twin flowerbeds, billowing with perennials, and rolling hills to the horizon.
Left, outside the pool garden, is a shady woodland garden, encircled with pin oaks, sugar maples and plants such as hostas, dogwoods and viburnum. The other side is Bangay’s vegetable garden, where he spends most of his weekends.
“It’s my big thing,” he says, explaining his next garden will be a walled vegetable garden. “A place of beauty and productivity.”
He’s experimented playing with new forms and planting schemes, too. For instance, below the circular woodland he has added the lower pool terrace as well as the less-formal lilac walk, which bleeds into the landscape.
Bangay also no longer slaves over the gardens, as he once did. They’re fully irrigated, and his gardener is happy to stay on to maintain it.
“When we come here, it feels so special and happy,” he says. “We just hope someone else feels that.”
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