Tallarook’s former Howe’s Junction Hotel in line to be sold

An old pub-turned-brothel, “creepy” doll house, and now residence and trash and treasure store is a gem on the market in regional Victoria about an hour’s north of Melbourne.

Tallarook’s former Howe’s Junction Hotel at 6 Main Rd, now a home and vintage haunt on 1600sq m with up to eight bedrooms, is for private sale with price hopes of $1.1 million.

Lanie, the vendor, who runs shop ‘Howie’s Junktion’ from the dapper two-storey building, told the Herald Sun the site has a colourful and diverse history since being a hotel.

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“I’m pretty sure it was still a pub until the late ‘30s, after that I think it sort of became a brothel, and rooms for rent in the ‘50s and ‘60s; it was a milk bar,” she says.

“It’s been a boarding house for soldiers at Pucka(punyal), it was a doll house — there was a lady that used to make creepy dolls — and I think there’s been two or three private residences since then.”

Hang your hat and come on in.

Exposed brick and timber in the kitchen.

Lanie, who did not share her surname, says she had just lived there with her husband and children initially — but then the idea for a quirky junk store blossomed.

“We used to get people knocking on the door asking ‘what are you, what are you?’ — I said: ‘we’re a house’; they just expected something because it was such a grand building,” she says.

Agent Janelle Puppa says interested parties have been a mix of people who would operate “some kind of business” from the site and others who would purely use it as a home.

“What we’re looking at more often than not (in Tallarook) is owner-occupiers,” she says.

Between the VLine and the pub: perfect.

Character everywhere in the bathroom.