Mick Richardson has transformed the disused shopfront built onto his house into a private bar full of Aussie pub memorabilia – and a unique point of entry. Jacob Harris explains.
There’s not a whole lot to Bayles, besides the general store and the old auto repair mechanic, it’s pretty much just a fork in the road between Koo Wee Rup and Warrigal in Victoria’s South East – but that’s how Mick Richardson and his family like it.
I’m nearly an hour late by the time I make it out there but Mick just smiles, shakes my hand and says ‘don’t worry about it’ before welcoming me into his home. He’s the kind of bloke you immediately feel comfortable with and conversation flows naturally as we walk through his house. It feels so relaxed that by the time we get to his bedroom I follow him into the walk-in-wardrobe feeling as though this is a perfectly normal thing to do.
Maybe Mick’s personable nature comes from the fact he worked in pubs for about 20 years, or maybe it’s just country hospitality. In any case, if you can stand in a walk-in-wardrobe with a bloke you’ve known for all of 10 minutes and not feel like things are getting weird – well that’s saying something.
We’re only in the wardrobe for a second though, before he opens the door he’s built into the back of it. We walk out into his man cave, and I feel like I might have just stepped back in time.
A corrugated iron awning leans out over a rustic bar that stretches the length of one wall with a cow skull hanging in the middle of it. The entire room is a composite of weathered wood, corrugated iron and curios from bygone eras. If you saw Ned Kelly leaning on the bar having a beer here he wouldn’t be out of place, it’s got that authentic, old-timey Australiana feel to it – you could imagine the worn old floorboards supporting a bush dance or two.
Antique flour bins line the back wall and sit just behind an old brick butter safe that is still accessible from a trap door in the floor. There are beer barrels scattered around the place (one’s being used as a table, another has been carved up and made into a chair) and a lagerphone leans against a grandfather clock in the corner. Everywhere I look, there’s something I want to ask about – like the pair of battered brown leather boxing gloves that hangs above the row of potato-sack-backed wooden chairs next to the pool table.
The room started life as the original hardware and haberdashery store in Bayles back in the early 1900s, but with Mick’s refurb it feels like it could be even older than that.
When Mick first moved here with his wife Brandi and their kids, they’d have to walk out the front of the shop and around the side of the building to get into the house – hence the bat cave style entrance through the wardrobe. But the new doorway was just the beginning. Mick tells me the place was in pretty bad shape when they arrived, and being used as some kind of office.
“When we came here the floor was carpet, the walls were that dirty old horse hair plaster stuff and there were computer points all over the place.”
So he got together with a mate who’s a fencer, and together they decided to rip everything out and reclad the walls with corrugated iron and used fence palings. It became a weekend project for three or four months, and then Mick gradually added to it with memorabilia he’d pick up here and there, until it became what it is today.
Everything here seems to have a story, and Mick’s happy to tell me a few. Lining the walls is a beer collection of epic proportions, and it only came to be here because of a chance encounter.
“A bloke who must’ve been about 80 or so came through the bottle shop I was working at, looking for the local footy club. Turned out he was headed there to try and sell a beer collection he’d been holding onto.
“He reckoned he had 100 or so bottles from all over the world, but he didn’t want them anymore and was just trying to get rid of them. I asked him how much he wanted for them and he said if he could get 50 bucks he’d be wrapped. I gave him $50 on the spot. But when I went to pick them up, bloody hell, there were a few more than a hundred I reckon.”
The bottles in question (all 600-700 of them) now line the walls of Mick’s place and stretch about half way around the room along with a vast collection of miniature liquor bottles from Brandi’s dad.
Mick worked in the Cardi pub down in Beaconsfield for around 18 years and ran a liquor store before that, and in that time amassed a pretty good collection of pub memorabilia. But that collection’s not the one decorating his man cave today: Mick gave the lot away. So when he moved here, he had to start over again.
“I gave it away because I didn’t think I’d ever have a room big enough to keep it in. So when we got this place I had to start buying it all back again – it’s a pain in the arse!”
The family moved here from the outer suburbs of Melbourne because Mick and Brandi were tired of seeing every corner block getting carved up into housing lots and carparks. They hadn’t even heard of the place before they moved here: just saw the house in the paper, liked it, and things went from there.
“I rang the agent up and asked ‘where’s that little house you’ve got in the paper?’ When he told me it was in Bayles, I said ‘where the hell’s Bayles?’ But we ended up having a look at it and then buying it at auction. We’ve been here for 13 years,” Mick says.
The room has come together incredibly well, so well in fact that on more than one occasion it has been mistaken as a functioning shop or bar with people wandering in off the street and making themselves at home.
“Last weekend I was sitting in here with a mate of mine and had left the door undone and two families just walked straight in. They said ‘how’s it going?’ I said ‘good thanks’ and they walked around the pool table and then went up and stood at the bar.
“I said, ‘can I help you?’ and they said, ‘We’re just having a look at your shop, can we have a game of pool?’ I told them it’s not a shop, it’s my house! You should have seen the look on their faces, it was priceless. I told them not to worry about it, and we had a laugh.”
Mick uses the room for all kinds of occasions. He has hosted a ‘Men’s Night In’ to raise money for breast cancer and also accommodated a bunch of his mates who were in town for the local motorbike show.
“They parked their Harleys out the front at first and we took some photos. But then one of them suggested we bring a couple of bikes inside to take photos. So we had two Harleys parked in the room when one of my mates asked if he could do a burn out on my floor. I said ‘yeah, go for it!’ Brandi came in and just about throttled him.”
But it’s not all wild parties at Mick’s place. Even the kids enjoy a game of pool on the Tooheys Blue table – provided they’re 10 and over! And there’s a table tennis table they can put on the top.
Mick tells me he didn’t think the room would turn out as well as it has. I reckon it couldn’t have turned out much better.
