Under the Country Skies.
20 Feb 2025
Photography: Courtesy FigTree & Ray White Toowoomba
Written by: Sam Kirby
There is a particular kind of luxury that belongs only to the country. The quiet kind. The kind that settles into the folds of the land at sunrise and lingers long after dark. The kind you feel more than you see. At FigTree, on a soft rise just outside Pittsworth, that luxury lives in every moment.
Morning begins slowly here. Light spills across the plateau, unhurried, catching the tops of the grass and the long, stretching shadows of the two grand fig trees that watch over the property. Mist gathers in the gullies, drifting and lifting in its own time. Even before you step outside, the view has a way of finding you, asking you to pause, to look, to breathe.
It is the same view Ruth first fell in love with eight years ago, when she and her partner Ken drove onto a wild and overgrown 54 hectare block of land that had been left to its own tangled devices. It was rough and unruly. But there was a feeling to it. A pull. A sense that if you listened closely enough, the land was already telling you what it could become.
They had come with two dreams. Ruth wanted a view that opened wide into sky. Ken wanted an airstrip. Not an indulgence, but an old longing he carried with him as a lifelong aviator. He had spent decades in helicopters and small planes, and had built six aircraft with his own hands. To him, the idea of flying home was less fantasy, more a quiet, persistent wish. At FigTree, on that elevated flat, they found the place where both dreams could exist side by side.
What followed were years of steady transformation. Long days renovating their three-bedroom homestead until it became a warm, light-filled country home, the kind where a wood heater glows through winter and an open deck holds the breeze in summer. Months clearing paddocks, cutting walking tracks, restoring what had been forgotten. And during the months of COVID, when both found themselves sud-
denly without work, they poured everything into the land. Not out of desperation, but devotion. There is a tenderness to that kind of labour. A sense of partnership with the land rather than ownership of it.
“We never set out to run a business,” Ruth says. “We just wanted to bring the property back to life. But as we worked, we started to see how special it was… how much joy it could bring to people, not just to us.”
It happened quietly. Naturally. One small step at a time.
They signed up with Airbnb and Hipcamp, almost experimentally at first, just to see who might come. And then they watched as people began arriving with caravans and tents, drawn in by the stillness and those endless skies. Families tucked themselves into small pockets of the property, each site feeling private in its own way. Fire pits glowed at dusk. Children wandered the walking tracks Ken carved through the ridge. The land was opening itself to people again.
Then came the silos, salvaged and reimagined into spaces that feel both rustic and quietly refined. One became the Silo Bar, a gathering place at sunset where the whole valley blushes gold, its curved walls holding warmth long after the fire sinks low. The other became the now-iconic Stargazing Silo, a two-storey circular hideaway where the roof hatch opens to the Milky Way. It took 947 days to build, a project stitched together by patience and craft. Honeymooners arrive. Proposals happen. The silence of the night becomes its own kind of luxury.
And always, the land keeps offering up its own moments of beauty. The 280 degree views. The long, unbroken sunsets. The dust rising at harvest time. The soft glow of fires dotted across the plateau on winter nights. FigTree is a place where the small hours matter. Where time has a different texture.
For Ken, the airstrip remains one of the property’s quiet wonders. A long, manicured ribbon of grass that feels both practical and poetic. Pilots fly in across the Downs, touch down beside the wide 20x15 metre hangar, and roll their planes to rest beneath its corrugated iron walls - a hangar that also holds a studio apartment with views stretching far beyond the wings. Breakfast here comes with a view of your own aircraft. Days unfold between bushwalks, trips into Pittsworth, long lunches in Toowoomba, and the kind of stillness that city life sometimes forgets to offer.
Over the years, FigTree has become the backdrop to countless beginnings. Weddings beneath the fig trees. A Qantas Academy graduation. Gatherings in the hangar where the rustic iron walls hum with conversation. Families return season after season. Sometimes it is the simplest moments that stay with Ruth the most. One Easter, with dozens of campers spread across the land, she and Ken sat by the fire and listened to laughter drifting through the dark. Conversations carried on the breeze. Fires crackling. People unwinding back into themselves.
And for Ruth and Ken, it was in those small, glowing moments that they understood what FigTree had become.
“To us, it was the joy that people were experiencing,” Ruth says. “The land was being loved the way it should be.”
“We never set out to build anything big,” she adds. “We just wanted to nurture this place. But somewhere along the way, the land began gathering people… holding their stories… giving them something we never could have planned. Watching that happen has been one of the greatest privileges of our lives.”
And now, after years of stewardship, Ruth and Ken feel ready for their next chapter. Not because they have tired of the place, but because they have given it their everything.
“Everything is here now - the home, the retreat, the experiences, the rhythm of life that makes this place so special. We have built our dream,” Ruth says. “Now it is time for someone else to walk out onto the deck, see that view, and feel the same pull we did eight years ago.”
And FigTree is ready and waiting.
For anyone dreaming of a tree change, FigTree is currently on the market through Ray White Toowoomba - Contact Lindsay Southwell | 0402 059 985 or Myles Cosgrove | 0419 271 247
@figtreecountryretreat | figtreecountryretreat.com.au
70 Petersen Road, Irongate, QLD 4356
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