Almost 40,000 Serpentine sunrises have warmed the red bricks of this beautiful homestead. Yet she’s still as gorgeous as the day she was finished in 1907.You’re looking at Albert Park – part of the legacy left by the mining magnate Lansell family.Although best known for their family home, FortRuna Villa, the architectural contribution the Lansells made to the region stretches further.Albert Park is far from the ostentatious Frankenstein that is Fortuna. While George spent his later years adding architectural bling to his Bendigo mansion, this house has barely been touched.Albert Park was purchased for George’s second son, Horace Vernon, who commissioned this sprawling country home.Horace died young and the house went to the care of one of his sisters, Edith Fortuna Victoria and her husband Robert Norbury.The couple and their adopted son Peter lived in England and left the maintenance of Albert Park to the farm manager, two maids and a gardener. It seems this place was a sort of holiday home for the Norburys, who did visit from time to time.Lansell descendant and historian Beverley Carter briefly mentions the visits as part of a series of articles published in the Bendigo Advertiser. She writes Peter was the last Lansell child to spend time at Fortuna Villa.“The Norburys paid an extended visit to Bendigo in the late 1920s,” Beverely writes.“By then, grandmother Lansell was almost bedridden, and life at the mansion was, for a solitary boy, rather dull. “He spent hours playing the Angelus pianola in the billiard room, and listening to Aunt Nancy’s stories of Bendigo’s early days. “But on the whole, he wrote, years later, his mother’s property at Serpentine was much more fun.” In its heyday, the property boasted two houses, one for the farm manager down by the Loddon River.The main house had its own sophisticated sewerage system and custom-engineered water supply, thanks to two massive tanks fashioned from boilers out of Lansell’s mines.Home-brewed gas was used to light the home’s cavernous rooms and exotic plant species were brought in for the formal garden.While time has reduced the weeping elm to suckers, the twin jacarandas and cape chestnuts are as proud as the house.The arbour still looks magnificent in the spring and the kurrajong-lined driveway signals something special.From the road, the high heads of ancient palms tell you prestige was important to the Lansells.It was, and still is, the district’s most striking house. But to Ian Whinefield, it’s also home.While the Lansells walked these halls for 24 years, the Whinefields have been here for 80. Ian’s grandfather, Albert, bought the property in 1931.He says Edith agreed to split up Albert Park and sell a section of the land and this house to his grandfather on the condition the farm manager’s house be moved across the road and excluded from the sale.It was moved with an old steam engine and trolley.“They got bogged getting it over there that many times that once they got in onto high ground they’d had enough, they reckoned it was good enough to put it there,” Ian says.Ian has spent his whole life on this land. He was one of three Whinefield boys to love this place and he’s the last one left to hold the mantle.His little brother, Alistair, drowned in the river beyond the house when he was just 11 years old. He was playing with a neighbour and both boys slipped in. Ian saved the boy from next door but was left to grieve his little brother.Graeme passed away suddenly on the property this Easter. He was Ian’s twin and for 73 years the two men were inseparable.“We’d think alike. He could go into a shop in Bendigo and I’d go into a different shop and we’d come out with the same things. Identical,” Ian says.They also shared a passion for the land.“We were mad keen to be farmers. We couldn’t get home from school quick enough to be farmers,” he says.It was all they ever wanted.“Graeme always said he’d like to die here on the place with his boots on,” Ian says.“I’m the last of the tribe as neither of us married.“There won’t be another Whinefield here at Albert Park.”Ian feels the weight of living here on his own. It’s a big home for one man.“It’s nothing special as far as design goes, it’s a fairly big home and it’s been well built – they were good tradesmen,” he says.“It’s a bit more Australian [than Fortuna], it’s just a good country home.”The main rooms feature notable heritage touches like ornate timber mantles, pressed metal ceilings and fretwork separating the living and dining zones.The rooms are furnished with Whinefield family heirlooms – original works by Australian artists depicting the Yarra Valley, the Adelaide Hills and the Murray River, beautiful antiques and even treasures left here by the Lansell family.A hall stand in the wide formal entry, adorned with agricultural show ribbons and men’s hats, shows this house is so much more than a showpiece.Nowadays Ian spends most of his indoor life in the kitchen.It’s a pared-back, bare-bones space where the golden afternoon light filters through a yellowing lace curtain.A shining white combustion oven warms the space under a timber mantle.It’s about the only item of the home to be introduced – albeit 50 years ago, when it replaced a cast iron stove.Apart from that, this place exemplifies time stood still. There’s not a crack in the mortar, not a creak in the floor. Albert Park is without doubt a priceless link to the region’s mining and agricultural past. But although Ian is fastidious in maintaining its historical integrity, he’d hate for his home to become a mere relic.“I don’t want this place to end up in the hands of the historical society and be opened once a year,” he says.“It’s in good order, it’s solid, and there are no cracks in the walls.” As he says, it has been a much-loved family home for generations, and that’s the way it should stay.- View more photographs of Ian’s home and garden in the gallery titled Albert Park – A Lansell legacy.