The Longhouse sits on the elevated plains just outside Daylesford, and from a distance it reads exactly as advertised: one continuous 110-metre shed running along the ridgeline, clad in corrugated steel, with views out to Mount Franklin on one side and Hepburn Springs and Daylesford on the other. It’s the kind of scale that needed a drone to photograph properly, because no lens on earth was fitting the whole sales pitch into one frame. Day to day, it means the walk from the front door to the far bedroom is a genuine 30-minute round trip — this is not a ‘pop to the kitchen for a snack’ house, it’s a ‘log it in your step count’ house. Somewhere in there is a home. Somewhere in there is also a farm, a cooking school, and a greenhouse the length of a city block, all of which you will be personally responsible for.
Designed by Partners Hill under director Timothy Hill — awarded the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 2025 — the Longhouse won the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture and Australian House of the Year at the 2019 National Architecture Awards, then went on to Grand Designs Australia and Apple TV+’s Home, racking up more accolades than most buildings manage in a lifetime, let alone a listing. Owners Ronnen Goren and Trace Streeter spent close to a decade building it as a joint project — his hospitality background, her farming one, combined into one very long shed — and are now selling, which either means the concept has run its natural course, or a decade of milking, mulching and menu-planning before breakfast will do that to anyone. It’s on the market through McQueen Real Estate, guided around $6.35 to $6.98 million when it first hit the market: not just a house, an entire second career.
That second career includes more than 60 metres of internal garden, an irrigated vegetable system fed by a deep-litter compost setup, orchards, and a 16-metre poly tunnel, all watered daily as a matter of architectural necessity rather than hobby. The whole structure is roofed in translucent sheeting that turns it into a greenhouse in the most literal sense, which raises a question the agent copy carefully avoids: if your house is a greenhouse, is watering the garden a chore, or is it just Tuesday, forever, for the rest of your life? Off-grid infrastructure includes a 27kW solar array, 650,000 litres of annual rainwater harvesting, dual bores and gas reserves — less a home amenity list, more the founding infrastructure of a small, extremely well-funded nation state, of which you are both head of state and the only citizen doing the watering.
It’s also, genuinely, a working farm — cattle, goats and pigs roam the grounds outside the glasshouse envelope, and they will need feeding regardless of how your morning is going. Any resident pets, at least, have the shortest commute in the country, given they can supervise the whole operation from indoors instead of being walked. Accommodation runs the full length of the building: The Lodge, with two bedrooms, its own kitchen, a bathhouse and a sauna; guest lofts; a self-contained studio; and the Stableman’s Quarters, plus a separate agricultural store with potential for a future farm manager’s residence — which, reading between the lines, is the listing’s polite way of saying you might want to hire someone.
And then there’s the primary suite, which, after 110 metres of restrained cypress pine, glazed brick and architectural gravitas, abandons all of it for salmon-pink padded walls, a plaid bedspread, and three hanging copper disco balls. Every other room in this house has been reviewed by an architecture jury. This one hasn’t, and it shows, in the best possible way. Whoever buys the Longhouse isn’t just getting a house — they’re getting a working farm, a cooking school, an off-grid utility company, an architecture prize cabinet, and, apparently, a nightclub for one, tucked away where the judges couldn’t quite see it.
