The coastal area southeast of Melbourne is providing a permanent escape as the pandemic endures.
5 min
It’s been anything but business as usual for the Mornington Peninsula, one of Australia’s blue-chip coastal regions, an hour southeast of Melbourne.
Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, rising unemployment, strict social distancing and economic fears, the prestige coastal community has offered homeowners a refuge and demand has seen it rise to become one of the country’s best performing areas.
Once the domain of wealthy second-home owners who decamped to their holiday properties over summer, it’s become a permanent hotspot with buyers across all price brackets trying to get a foothold in the area for the best part of six months.
Offering an appealing mix of diverse housing and an aspirational coastal lifestyle, the Mornington Peninsula is a comfortable commute to Melbourne’s Central Business District and has immediate access to restaurants, cafes, wineries and recreational activities.
Peninsula Sotheby’s International Realty managing director Robert Curtain described 2020 as being “a very different real estate market.”
“Every month since March 2020 has been a record month for us in terms of total sales value and volume,” he said.
There was no let-up in interest over Christmas and New Year’s holidays after a busier than expected trading period in the winter reduced stock levels ahead of summer.
Among several notable transactions in December, was the $5.5 million (US$4.26 million) sale of a two-bedroom house on 461 square meters of beachfront land on Mentor Road on Blanarring Beach and a home on Bowen Road in Sorrento that sold for more than A$4.5 million within 24 hours of hitting the market.
An architect-designed house on MacGregor Avenue in Portsea, which has a price guide of A$6.8 million to A$7.3 million, is typical of what discerning buyers are looking for in a luxury Peninsula property Mr. Curtain said.
Designed by Guildford Bell with five bedrooms and five bathrooms, it occupies a private 3,000-square-meter block in easy walking distance of the beach.
“High buyer demand and a lack of stock creates competition and ultimately strong sales results. This year we have seen very quick and sharp increases in property prices never seen before,” Mr Curtain said of the activity.
“The majority of buyers are either upgrading existing homes or making a longer-term commitment to buying on the peninsula. Without question the restrictions on travel has changed lifestyle options for many buyers,” he said.
Australia implemented international and national border control measures and physical distancing rules to reduce the spread of Covid-19 from March 2020.
Movement restrictions and social distancing requirements resulted in a ban on all in-person property inspections and auctions across the country.
Although Australia flattened the curve and lockdown restrictions eased in late May, a cluster of cases led to a second wave of infections in Victoria. A “state of disaster” was declared and Victoria faced severe restrictions including a nightly curfew, mandatory face coverings in public and the closure of schools and businesses between August and October. The Victorian Department for Health and Human Services reports more than four million Victorians have been tested for the virus since March with the state recording several days of zero new cases in early January.
Kay & Burton Portsea managing director Liz Jensen, who has sold property on the Mornington Peninsula for 35 years, said she was shocked at the demand that followed the lift in restrictions in October.
She said while the area was usually always busy in spring, she estimated inquiry levels increased three-fold once Victorians were allowed to move freely around their state again.
Big-Ticket Sales
The momentum of spring on the Mornington Peninsula has carried through to summer according to agents. More than 32,000 people have taken a shine to a listing for a home on Wild Coast Road in Portsea, making it one of Australia’s most viewed properties in January, according to online sales portal, realestate.com.au.
Several groups have conducted private inspections since it was listed the week prior to Christmas and an offer is imminent, said Ms Jensen, who is the listing agent for the property.
With a price guide of $8.8 million to $9.75 million, the eight-bedroom luxury home is embedded among the sand dunes and is not your “usual beach house,” Ms Jensen said.
Its indulgent resort-like feel has been designed to cater for large family gatherings or to be shared with groups of friends.
“There’s not much in these areas, it’s a thin market, so there’s always a level of buyers for properties of this calibre,” she said.
“Buyers are accelerating their plans, they’re not old enough to retire, but they’re choosing homes down here to live in permanently. We have people buying everything in every price bracket from $1.5 million to $10 million and everything in between.”
Buyers, she said, are looking with intention and showing a new appreciation for the established area.
“Over the last Covid year and going into this one, I find people to be very clear in their mind that they want to live a certain lifestyle that is more relaxing and less stressful,” she said.
“They want to enjoy themselves more and be able to share that with their family and friends. That works well down here,” she added.
A Strong Outlook for 2021
The trend hasn’t been lost on REA chief economist Nerida Conisbee, who picked the Mornington Peninsula as one of her top 2021 regional performers, based on its stellar results in 2020.
“Mainly because the region has seen the biggest jump in views per listing in Australia this year,” she said.
“The most popular suburb with house hunters is Blairgowrie where views per listing have more than doubled in 2020. It suggests buyer demand is accelerating while prices in Portsea jumped 20% last year to hit almost $2.4 million.”
However, Ms Conisbee expects Australia’s best-performing regional areas to be those that are closest to a capital city as movement returns and restrictions ease.
Regional Australia
The Australian Government’s $257 billion in direct economic stimulus to cushion the blow of the pandemic and the country’s record-low interest rate have helped support the property market but it’s the explosion of people shifting from capital cities that has had a dramatic impact on regional markets.
The spike in city-dwellers fleeing urban environments for a coast or country lifestyle meant regional house prices grew faster than metropolitan values for the first time in nearly 15 years.
Regional property values jumped 6.9% in the 12 months to December 2020 more than three times the 2% figures of the combined capital cities, CoreLogic revealed last week.
CoreLogic’s Asia Pacific Head of Research Tim Lawless said it was the first time during a rising market where regional markets had outpaced capital cities. Traditionally, regional areas outperformed capital cities during downturns.
“As remote working opportunities became more prevalent and demand for lifestyle properties and lower density housing options became more popular, regional areas of Australia saw housing market conditions surge,” Mr Lawless said.
It’s a movement not lost on the Mornington Peninsula, which appears to have its short-term future all but assured with January set to be another record month, according to Mr Curtain at Sotheby’s.
“The forecast for 2021, especially the first half, is likely to stay very strong as a lack of stock with more people using their homes than ever continues and cheap money provides further confidence for buyers,” he said. “But it’s a crazy world, so I’ll leave predicting the latter half of the year to those with a crystal ball.”
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The sports-car maker delivered 279,449 cars last year, down from 310,718 in 2024.
A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
