The house, with its soaring cathedral ceilings, sits on the road opposite the beach. On a good day, the location is peak Byron Bay. In the lingering golden hour in the evening, there are fires, kites, waves crashing, dogs running, the mountains in the distance, the sun slowly sliding down behind the dunes… It is where The Block Australia co-host Shelley Craft takes her two dogs to run in the shallows every day.
The two gentle ridgebacks, Aldo and Rocco, greet us with mild curiosity as we come through the gate. Aldo “used to gallop like a racehorse in the water”, says Shelley. But now that he is older, “he knows his limits – he stops where he wants to stop and waits for us to come back”.
Shelley and Christian Sergiacomi were married on this beach in 2009, at Beaumonts Beach House just across the road. This has always been their special place. “This was our spot,” says Shelley. “We always knew we would end up here.” After their wedding, they were driving back to Melbourne. “Christian and I looked at each other, and said, ‘What are we doing? Why are we going back?’”
They already commuted between cities for work. “We wanted to start a family. We knew this would be a wonderful place to do that. We appreciated the fact that there would be some work sacrifices, that the work might not come or that we’d have
