Photographer Kara Rosenlund’s North Stradbroke home feels ‘like my childhood’

When Brisbane-based photographer Kara Rosenlund began her hunt for a weekender, her driving desire was to find a house that was at home with nature.

Positioned on the northeastern reaches of the island at Point Lookout, the home offers a beguiling blend of bush and beach.

When Brisbane-based photographer Kara Rosenlund began her hunt for a weekender, her driving desire was to find a house that was at home with nature.

Having travelled the country in 2013 capturing images of quintessentially Australian homes for her first book Shelter, she spent the next three years trawling the Queensland and northern NSW coastline searching for her own special weekend escape.

In the end, Rosenlund found her nirvana on her doorstep, bursting into tears the first time she entered the 1970s A-frame house on North Stradbroke Island, just 40 minutes from her northern Brisbane base.

Photographer Kara Rosenlund by the hearth that she built with her father.

“I had a really strong emotional reaction to the house,” she recalls. “It just felt so familiar, like my childhood.

“It was a really beautiful feeling. And that’s part of the charm with shacks – they just remind you of the simpler times.”

Positioned on the northeastern reaches of the island at Point Lookout, the home offers a beguiling blend of bush and beach, with sweeping views over natural scrubland to Flinders Beach and the ocean.

An umbrella shades table and chairs.

While Rosenlund and her husband Tim O’Brien, who runs an impact strategy firm, have made some gentle changes to the house “to let even more of the outside in”, they’ve been careful to maintain the integrity of its original Palm Springs-inspired mid-century design.

With a love of interiors and a photographer’s eye for light and detail, Rosenlund, who also has an eponymous lifestyle brand, has created a home filled with natural colours and textures and a warm, carefree spirit. Visitors approach the black timber house along a pathway of original ’70s crazy paving, while on the front deck a raffia-fringed umbrella sits jauntily next to original Adirondack chairs.

Light flows into the home’s entranceway, which the couple has opened up with a new pivoting front door and wood-framed glass walls leading to a large living room.

Here, Rosenlund and her father have built a simple white fireplace that stretches along the main wall – the perfect setting for artwork and curios collected by the popular photographer.

Beside the hearth, one of Rosenlund’s striking images of the coast at nearby Adder Rock takes pride of place, reflecting her desire to bring more of the island into the house.

Sea breezes fill the room’s white linen curtains with life, while light pours in through large windows and glass panels that form part of the home’s soaring A-frame roofline.

Sand-coloured soft linen couches sit on seagrass matting on the blackbutt floorboards and the room’s tables are home to artistic clusters of shells and vases as well as woven baskets and bilums from Papua New Guinea.

While Rosenlund has been careful to maintain the home’s original knotted pine shiplap walls, plainer fibro walls have been covered in beautiful grass cloths from Phillip Jeffries to create a natural, textured look. In the spirit of the ’70s, the home has a few quirky design touches including a wooden platform suspended above the entranceway, installed by the original owner for her indoor plants.

Rosenlund has been careful to maintain the home’s original knotted pine shiplap walls.

“When we learnt that, I said to Tim ‘we have to bring those plants back’,” Rosenlund says, pointing proudly to pots of passionfruit vine now thriving on the platform.

The photographer laughs as she recalls that none of the home’s three bedrooms had ceilings when they bought the house.

“You could actually toss a ball from one room to the other, so it was a bit crazy,” she says.

Wood-panelled ceilings were duly installed and the walls of each bedroom now feature muted shades of grass cloth, giving them a calming air.

In the master bedroom, vintage gypsy cane tables sit either side of the bed which is covered in tonal linens, the colour palette drawn from the deep greens and browns of the bushland outside.

Inspired by her Friday-to-Sunday life on the island she fondly calls by its traditional name, Minjerribah, Rosenlund last year wrote a second book, Weekends, which captures the simple beauty of the home.

‘That’s part of the charm with shacks – they just remind you of the simpler times.’

With their first child due in the new year, the couple are now preparing the home’s second bedroom, but Rosenlund says she also loves to spend her weekends pottering, rearranging her prints and artwork and shifting furniture, much of which she’s picked up second hand online.

“There’s something beautiful that comes when you introduce old furniture – the house just didn’t seem to suit anything new,” she says.

One of Rosenlund’s favourite artworks is a large etching of a goanna by NSW artist Luke Sciberras, a fitting reminder of the relationship between the home and its bush surrounds.

“When we first moved into the house, a big fat goanna swaggered up the stairs and just walked past us and the house as though it owned it,” she says.

“It was just so wonderful – so I bought this piece for my husband that Christmas.”