The same hand

We built this on a hill, and everything we have made since has been held to what the hill taught us.

We planted vines and began to listen

In 2006 Even Keel began as an exploration of Australia's cool-climate regions. Eighteen months later we bought land at Red Hill and Polperro followed, the estate-grown expression of the sites we have come to understand over time.

We did not plan a destination. We planted vines and began to listen. The cellar door came. Then the dining room. Then the farm, the villas, Hut, Many Little and the boutique. None of it was a strategy. All of it came from the same instinct, and we made every piece of it happen ourselves.

What the land demands

A vine takes years to say anything useful. You cannot hurry it, you cannot correct it afterwards, and if you plant the wrong thing on the wrong slope you find out in five years rather than five weeks. The whole skill is choosing well at the start and then having the patience to leave it alone.

Nearly two decades in, we are still learning what one hill wants. Not a region. One hill, row by row, and the answer changes every season.

That is not a romantic idea. It is a discipline and it is unforgiving.

How a house gets in

This is where it shows. Not in how much I buy, but in who I am prepared to carry.

In the winery the role is to guide rather than shape. To let each site say what it has to say and not talk over it, adding as little as possible and taking nothing away that should have stayed. That is what respect looks like when it is a job rather than a word.

I buy the same way. I am not imposing a look on a season. I am listening to people who understand their material far better than I ever will, and choosing the ones worth standing behind.

What I am looking for is craftsmanship in real hands. Restraint. Quality that does not need explaining. And respect, for the material and for whoever ends up wearing it.

Which is why the list reads the way it does.

Santa Maria Novella has been distilling in Florence since 1221 and has changed almost nothing about how. Twenty generations of one family have held the same land in the Charente since 1270 and make Frapin from it. Trudon has been pouring wax since 1643 and still has the glass blown by mouth.

Acler is draped by hand in Adelaide before anything is cut. Zoe Kratzmann learned on her mother's machine and still works with a design team of two, making only what is needed and no more. Charlotte Blakeney spent two years drawing a single necklace. Christian Kimber draws in Melbourne and has it made by family workshops in Italy and Portugal that have done this work for generations. Ormaie is a mother and a son, working entirely in natural materials, with caps carved from wood rather than moulded.

None of them are the easy commercial choice. Every one of them would rather do it properly than do it faster.

That is the whole buying policy. Everything else follows from it, including why menswear here is one house rather than nine, why womenswear arrives in ones and twos, and why nothing is bought with a discount already in mind. A vineyard cannot mark a bad year down into a good one, and neither can a rail.

Care, not excess

Luxury, to us, is not excess. It is care. Not scale, detail.

In the winery that is the temperature of a barrel room and the cover crops left to grow wild between the rows. Here it is a box tied by hand at the counter before it goes, whatever is inside it and whatever it cost.

Two minutes away

The boutique sits about two minutes from the vines, which means you can make a day of it without having planned one.

Polperro is the vineyard, the cellar door and the dining room, which has held a Chef's Hat in The Age Good Food Guide four years running. The menu comes off Polperro Farm just past the vines, where the farmer and the chef plan a year ahead around things not yet in the ground.

The cellar door is built into the hillside and kept cool by the earth above it. Walls of wine, low light, a stone table in the middle. Everyone around it and nobody behind it. Ten people at a time. What happens there is closer to a conversation than a tasting.

Four villas sit among the rows on Talland Hill, forty metres from the dining room, for anyone who would rather not drive home. The Farmhouse is further along on the Donaldsons Road vineyard, a 1950s house we reworked with Hecker Guthrie, with Western Port water across the vines and a path through the rows that walks you quietly back.

Hut we built ten years ago, well before wellness became a word nobody could avoid. Each January it comes down to the vineyard for Yoga in the Vines, held on the lawn among the rows.

Many Little is the bar and dining room in Red Hill village. We opened it in 2018 and handed it over in 2026 to Gayan Pieris, who had run the kitchen from the first day and made it his own. He is still Creative Director at Polperro.

Named for two girls

Amelie and Frankie are our daughters. The boutique is named for them, which is either sentimental or the most accurate thing about it, depending on how you look at a family business.

Everything here is chosen one piece at a time. That is not a position we took for the website. It is how the wine is made, four hundred metres up the road, and it was never going to be any other way in here.

Still learning. Still refining. Still guided by the season. And always coming back to the same hill, which demands patience, rewards restraint and never gives the same answer twice.

You can see every house we carry, and why each one is here, on the Brands page.

Questions, answered

Is Amelie & Frank's part of Polperro?

Yes. Same family, same hill at Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula. Amelie & Frank's is the boutique in a group founded and built by Emma Phillips and Sam Coverdale, and it is named for their two daughters.

How does Amelie & Frank's choose which brands to carry?

By the same standard the vineyard is farmed to. Craftsmanship in real hands, restraint, quality that does not need explaining, and respect for the material and for whoever ends up wearing it. The role is to guide rather than shape, so the buying is a matter of listening to makers who understand their material better than we do, rather than imposing a look on a season.

How far is the boutique from the Polperro vineyard?

About two minutes. Most people do lunch in the dining room and the boutique in the same afternoon.

What else is part of the Polperro world?

The Polperro and Even Keel wine labels, the cellar door, the dining room, Polperro Farm, four vineyard villas and the Farmhouse, Hut wellness studio and Many Little in Red Hill village.

Can you buy Polperro wine at Amelie & Frank's?

Wine is sold through the winery rather than the boutique, but we can include it in a corporate gift. Write to us and we will arrange it.

Where is Amelie & Frank's?

Shop 9, 159 Shoreham Road, Red Hill South, on the Mornington Peninsula. Open seven days from ten until five.