Life, as we know, doesn’t always go to a carefully considered plan. And so it came to be, in mid-2020, that The Block co-creator and executive producer Julian Cress and wife Sarah Armstrong surprised even themselves by making a tree change with their family. But this, of course, was an unprecedented time in history.
And COVID had a way of dramatically reassessing priorities. Sarah Armstrong (left) and Julian Cress at their Gisborne property. Credit: Natalie Jeffcott “We’d just come out of the first long lockdown, when we were all scared and worried about our future,” says Armstrong, a senior producer on The Block .
“Being a country girl, the lockdowns also made me yearn for grass and wider outdoors for my mental health and the health of our two small boys, who were spending way too much time inside.” Arriving at the property near Gisborne in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges, just 45 minutes from Melbourne, the parents of Max and Charlie immediately felt they had been transported to a faraway world – a world so mesmeric that it seemed they had stepped into a dream. “The entry to the property is in a towering pine forest.
I was pretty sold by the time we’d driven up the driveway,” Cress says. Cress and Armstrong renovated a single-level 1980s kit home on a sprawling block. Credit: Natalie Jeffcott Perched near the crest of a mountain, the site’s nondescript single-level 1980s home had been well-cared for over the decades.
To Armstrong and Cress, however, it was.
