The run of the place
Who would have thought Drovers Run was an easy 45-minute drive from Adelaide airport and only moments from the cellar doors of the Barossa Valley? Those glossy-haired stars of television's popular McLeod's Daughters, beloved across the globe (particularly in Germany, it seems), weren't in the middle of nowhere after all.
But the illusion of TV is nothing compared to the magic woven by the new owners of Kingsford (aka Drovers Run), Stefan and Leanne Ahrens, Barossa business identities who have lavished countless hours and even more dollars on restoring one of our most recognisable homesteads.
Dating from 1856 and hewn from Edinburgh stone brought to Australia as ship's ballast, this handsome Georgian-style house, with curious gothic portico, was built by pastoralist and entrepreneur Stephen King.
His 19th-century spread has been whittled down to 90ha, hidden in golden, rolling hills above the sleepy North Para River on the western edge of the Barossa.
And the property has passed through several hands since King's pioneering day, including, most famously, the Nine Network under Kerry Packer, who used the working farm to film 224 episodes of McLeod's Daughters.
The Ahrenses have long known and loved Kingsford. Their fourth-generation, family-owned engineering and construction business, now a large national concern with a mining services division, began life in a tiny farrier's shop in nearby Shea-Oak Log in 1906 and Stefan, now the company's managing director, remembers playing in the river at Kingsford as a boy.
As we approach the homestead, which opened this month as a luxury country-house hotel, along a narrow gravel track (a path trod almost every other day by German backpacking McLeod's Daughters fans intent on a glimpse of the house), the 21st century recedes and a palpable, lost-in-time magic takes hold.
It's almost as if this is still a film set. Suddenly we are in the back of beyond and before us is a house as elegant as it is lonely and unlikely, sat like a gentleman explorer surveying the dry hills with a linen hanky to his nose.
We are greeted at the large front door by Jas the sheepdog and our hosts Pat and Sally Kent, who recently moved to Kingsford from Arkaba Homestead in the Flinders Ranges.
They are still mopping up after the builders, who spent three years working an incredible transformation. I don't want to talk out of school, but those McLeod gals were no domestic goddesses.
The house was in a right state when the Ahrenses took over. It was strung with old lighting cables, an upstairs room was encased in egg cartons (for sound insulation), the high ceilings and cedar trimmings unloved and ignored for decades.
Pat rustles up a glass of bubbles before we climb the impressive cedar staircase to embark on a quick tour of the new and very glamorous Kingsford Homestead. There are six guestrooms in the main house and another in the old stonemason's cottage tucked behind the kitchen garden.
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Source: The Australian, 23 June 2012
