Our Story — Home Farm Healesville

The Lodges

The six of us, and the farm in between.

We're Elizabeth and Matthew Lodge, and along with our four young-adult children we live and work the forty-three acres that make up Home Farm. The kids grew up here — barefoot summers, muddy winters, the kind of long unsupervised afternoons that are getting harder to come by.

The farm is honestly run. We tend the food forest, look after the bees and chickens, keep the cottages ready, and meet most guests at the gate ourselves. If something needs fixing while you're here, one of us will turn up with a smile and a toolbox.

What we offer isn't polished. It's lived in. And we think that's the point.

— Elizabeth & Matthew

The Bexley Heritage

The bones of this place were laid by Rex and Helen.

Before us, there were the Bexleys. Rex and Helen developed Home Farm over decades — planting the rhododendrons, building the gardens you walk through now, putting the bones of the place in. The big trees were their idea. So was the long, slow driveway.

We didn't start this. We're carrying it forward. Every time we mulch a bed or prune back a hedge we're working inside choices Rex and Helen made years before we arrived, and we feel that lineage every day.

If a corner of the garden makes you stop and breathe out — that's likely Helen's hand. We're just the current caretakers.

Thrive — our philosophy

Lean alongside the land, not against it.

Thrive is the word we keep coming back to. It's permaculture in spirit if not always in textbook: build healthy soil, plant for generations, let the ecosystem do most of the heavy lifting, and step in only where you have to.

The food forest produces year-round without much fuss from us. The Kenyon top-bar hives keep the bees comfortable on their own terms. The chickens range, the lambs graze, and the wildlife — wallabies, kookaburras, the occasional wedge-tail overhead — comes and goes as it pleases.

We share a back fence with Toolangi State Forest, so the wild edge is never far away. Walk five minutes and you're in ferny gullies and tall mountain ash. Walk back and you're home in time for the kettle.

In the small things

You feel a place in the details.

The weathervane turning slowly above the garden shed. The smell of wood smoke when the first cool night comes in. The way the morning light hits the verandah at seven and warms the boards by eight.

None of it was designed for guests, exactly. It's just the way the farm is. We hope you'll notice the same small things we do, and take a little of that quiet home with you.