In A World Of AI Slop, Ettalong’s The Special House Rewards Curiosity Over Algorithms

At a time when the internet's arteries are thick with AI slop and our own downtime is feeling eerily programmed, there’s something kind of foreign, yet appealing, about going somewhere that asks very little of you.

Not because there’s nothing to do, quite the opposite. It’s the absence of pressure around doing it properly. Ettalong is very good at that.

In fact, I’m currently writing this with a laptop lightly dusted in flour following a so-good-you-have-to-Facetime-your-mum attempt at firing puffy, sourdough slabs blanketed in zucchini ribbons and torn mozzarella in a driveway pizza oven, right in the heart of the Central Coast suburb.

My day was filled with circling kaleidoscopic tables of produce from a market hidden inside a local scout hall, filling up on Filo fare inside a neighbourhood bookshop-cafe, picking from an edible garden overflowing with herbs, ocean dips, long walks and no notifications. If ‘touching grass’ needed a poster child, I’d already done the press tour.

For those unfamiliar with the southern end of the peninsula, Ettalong exists through a slightly different lexicon to the rest of coastal New South Wales. It sits somewhere between a ferry town and a mildly surreal seaside village. There’s a six-screen Renaissance-themed theatre complex, going hard since the 70s, showing everything from new releases, 3D blockbusters and art house films.

The local Diggers still proudly claims to have been the heart of the community for more than 80 years. 

A charcoal chicken shop, with a gloriously aggressive shopfront screaming ‘Chicken Packs’, ‘Chips’ and ‘Gravy’ in yellow-and-red capitals, has amassed all of four Google reviews.

Yet for $33, the family-owned institution will hand over a Big Vegie Dinner complete with a whole roast chicken, six potatoes, six pieces of pumpkin, peas and gravy. Incredibly competitive in this economy, and even more impressively, seemingly achieved without a fresh lick of paint over the last decade. It is, in every sense, just a very good chicken shop. 

So, it’s against this eclectic backdrop that The Special House makes perfect sense.

Image credit: Ishita Moghe | Supplied

Positioned on a quiet corner in Ettalong Beach, the thoughtfully restored cottage feels like the Central Coast's answer to the kind of design-conscious stays that have made Barrenjoey a destination in its own right. But unlike your usual run-of-the-mill holiday rentals, there’s no television, no Wi-Fi, no laundry.

The intention is pretty clear: switch the hell off.

And while plenty of stays now trade in the language of slow living, The Special House has the advantage of actually being quite old.

Built in 1947, it was one of Ettalong Beach’s only double-brick homes at the time, with concrete bricks made by hand on site. Artist and creative director Caroline Presbury and her husband Sunny bought it for their young family in 2017, then spent the following years peeling back later additions and restoring the house with its original character in mind.

For anyone fluent in design publications, the easiest shorthand I can offer is that it feels like The Design Files and Japan’s Casa Brutus had a love child, then dipped it in the ocean to loosen her up a little. I don’t have to tell you there’s restraint here, but it's never the sterile, beige-for-beige’s-sake kind. Vintage pieces sourced from Australia, France, Japan and Morocco sit alongside lots of little elements designed or made by the couple themselves. 

Even the front door has a backstory. Sunny and his father remade it from reclaimed timber, complete with a small nautical porthole, using old photographs supplied by the niece of the home’s original builder, who had knocked on the door one day to share the property’s history.

Inside, the living room is largely surrendered to a huge linen-covered modular sofa and enough paperbacks sprawled across a wooden coffee table to lose an afternoon to.

Image credit: Ishita Moghe | Supplied

Now, the kitchen is considerably more serious than the ‘no washing machine’ set-up suggests. Hand-built cabinetry has been finished using the Japanese shou sugi ban charring technique and a deep farmhouse sink looks straight onto the herb garden. A 900-milliemetre Falcon oven handles the heavy-lifting, staring you down to cook up your own feast like a Kelpie guilt-staring to play ball. 

Out back, the edible garden supplies sage, chives, tarragon, wild rocket and sorrel, while a brick barbeque has been crafted together for coals, open fire or the aforementioned pizza oven. There’s an outdoor shower for post-swim rinses and a claw-foot bath sitting against the painted brick wall.

If you do have to leave the premise, the trick is not to overthink it.

Saturday morning is the easiest place to start. Ettalong Fresh Food Market sets up inside the Broken Bay Scout Hall on Picnic Parade from 7:30am, with trestle tables piled on with fruit and veg, mushrooms, eggs, bread, honey, flowers and whatever else local growers have brought in that week.

Pick up whatever looks good to your eye, maybe grab a coffee after, and start mentally converting your makeshift haul into whatever will eventually end up blistering in the pizza oven back at the house.

For that caffeine hit, Hank’s Speciality Coffee is a laneway spot with a PB&J aerocano, a creamy, fruity concoction for anyone open to sprucing up their daily. On weekends, a cheesecake made from the owner’s family recipe shows up on the counter. They apparently keep it to one cake a day so she can spend the rest of the week focussing on pickleball which is very much the local operating model anyone would want to support.

Ruby’s Cafe & Books on West Street is where I’d be perching up next. Don’t be fooled by an Instagram account that stopped posting sometime around the ScoMo era—this part bookshop and part living room is very much open for business and delightfully dog-friendly. Filipino specials also rear themselves here, if tapsilog or pork skewers are on the board, that’s where I’d be putting my money.

Image credit: Ishita Moghe | Supplied

Then swim. Walk. Do nothing for a bit.

By late afternoon, this is where the kerbside kiosk Skinner’s Seafood starts making a very convincing case for itself, slinging white eskies of tiger prawns, Sydney rock oysters, marinated mussels and octopus—all with very little ceremony. 

That’s more or less the operating system you’ll fall into at The Special House, and in a world intent on optimising every hour, there’s something deliciously inefficient about that.

Image credit: Ishita Moghe