Pialligo Estate: Three months on from the fire that destroyed the Farmhouse

General manager Charlie Costelloe was one of four people in the Farmhouse Restaurant when the fire broke out on the afternoon of October 12, between lunch and dinner service.

Firefighters managed to contain the fire to the property's main building, and business resumed on other parts of the property less than 48 hours later.

"There was no damage to anything else. We had a wedding two days after the fire, and it's not the nicest thing to present to a bride, but she was absolutely outstanding," Mr Costelloe said.

Three months on, there is still a big gap where the Farmhouse building once stood. Just before Christmas, the site was bulldozed and cleared, and a corrugated iron fence was erected around the Farmhouse site, which blends in with the Glasshouse function space next to it.

They plan to rebuild the Farmhouse, with a restaurant, but any further plans are still up in the air.

Pialligo Estate co-owner Rowan Brennan said, "We haven't had a chance to scratch ourselves and think about life after the fire.

"Now all we're doing is waiting for the final tick off from insurances about what we can re-do.

"John [Russell], my business partner, and Charlie and I, we haven't had a chance to sit down and say, 'OK now what's gonna happen here moving forward?' The only thing we can guarantee is it will be, we think, a better proposition than we had before."

All they managed to salvage from the ruins of the Farmhouse building were the two front copper doors, which will be incorporated into the new building. Mr Costelloe said, "they're quite distressed looking but that's part of the story".

For now, breakfast, lunch and dinner is served in the Garden Pavillions, and functions run in the Glasshouse. The property will also host a number of events in the coming months, including the Auto Italia Canberra showcase in April.

Mr Brennan said, "To be completely honest, I reckon we'd be over the moon if we could have something there [on the Farmhouse site] by the end of the year, but that's highly unlikely. To do something decent is usually up to a 12 or 18 month build.

"We obviously lost a considerable amount of money [since the fire]. And that's life, we're not whinging about it. But we certainly had bigger plans of what we were going to do throughout the property and obviously your profit is what goes into that so that's put us back six to 12 months.

"We wanted to just make this place bigger and better, but we haven't given up the dream, we never have, it's just about being realistic. So we're getting there."