45

 

De Beer House

71 Barkly Street, St Kilda

 

As a child in Richmond in the 1870s, Helen Mitchell would, at the end of her organ lesson ... ‘promptly ... gallop down to the Yarra River, strip off and swim nude with the local boys.’  In her fascinating doctorial thesis on him, now published as Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, Prof. Harriet Edquist suggests that one of the boys may have been Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865-1933).  Helen Mitchell became Dame Nellie Melba (1861-1931), the formidable prima donna; Desbrowe-Annear became one of the most innovative Australian architects of the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century.

Whilst absorbing most of the principles of Modernism, Desbrowe-Annear adapted the English Arts-and-Crafts movement to an Australian environment.  Edquist also claims that Desbrowe-Annear was the first Australian architect to accept suburbia as the normal Australian way of life and that the small Australian house could indeed be architecture. Later, after completing 71 Barkly Street, in the 1920s he developed this house type within the Classical language of architecture.  Desbrowe-Annear’s work cuts across the usual architectural stylistic categories of Boom, Federation, Bungalow etc., into none of which he readily slots.

Desbrowe-Annear completed his articles with William Salway from 1883-89, who was then moving stylistically from Boom Mannerism towards a more picturesque asymmetry.  Desbrowe-Annear’s architect contemporaries, born in the 1850s and 60s, included Willian Pitt (architect of St Kilda Town Hall (33)), Nahum Barnett, Henry Hardie Kemp, Walter Butler, Robert Haddon and Beverley Ussher. Working in Swanston Street and studying at the National Gallery School, further up the street, Desbrowe-Annear hung around in bohemian cafés with artists such as Frederick McCubbin, John Longstaff and Arthur Streeton

Over 1888-1902, he taught at the Working Men’s College (now RMIT University), where he pioneered the teaching of history in the architectural drafting course.  This course is now in its 118th year and the History of Architecture subject, which I now teach, in succession to Desbrowe-Annear, is only a year younger.  It is the oldest architectural course in the state, possibly in Australia.

Desbrowe-Annear was especially influenced in his works and in his teaching by the most significant nineteenth century writer on art and architecture, John Ruskin and by the structural rationalism of Viollet le-Duc, the French architect, restorer, and writer; who had earlier influenced older architects in Victoria, such as Alexander Davidson and William Wardell.

Desbrowe-Annear collected a remarkable professional library and was a founder of several other libraries.

Desbrowe-Annear’s first published work is a drawing (1890) in the Building and Engineering Journal, of St Kilda Primary School tower (34).  His first building, in Domain Road went up later that year.  He became involved with the fledging Royal Victorian Institute of Architects.

In 1893, Desbrowe-Annear’s first substantial building in Melbourne was built.  It was the Warren house, on the corner of Hughendon and Lansdowne Streets in East St Kilda.  Like the Priory (28) in 1890, it was Romanesque, influenced by H.H. Richardson in Chicago.  Sadly, it was demolished in 1972.  In 1895 his renovations to William Pitt’s Princess’ Theatre, Spring Street, were completed: Desbrowe-Annear was active in theatre in Melbourne.  Later he befriended artists such as Blamire Young and the Lindsays and other writers and poets in bohemian Melbourne.

In 1897, Desbrowe-Annear designed the Springthorpe Memorial in Boorondara Cemetery, Kew, one of the most ambitious funerary works in Australia: a neo-Greek temple set in a garden, with sculpture and decorative arts components.  It embodied principles of the English Arts-and-Crafts.

 In 1900, Desbrowe-Annear launched the T-Square Club, a ‘guild’ for architects, artists and craftspeople.  It lasted only three years, but led to formation of the Arts and Craft Society here (without Desbrowe-Annear).  For the 1901 Royal Visit, he designed a very popular celebratory arch over Princes Bridge, and an addition to the See Yup Temple in South Melbourne.

Later that year, Desbrowe-Annear moved to live at Eaglemont and gave a lecture on a topic not previously of interest to architects in Australia: on planning the decent five-to-six room villa, after all, the most common domestic type here.  This interest, as Edquist observes, follows in the steps of  Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Voysey, and Baillie Scott, but very few other architects in the world at this time. (This was twenty years before that of Le Corbusier, for instance).

Desbrowe-Annear was concerned to avoid the waste space of passages, to have the largest room as the dining room, create vistas, for rooms to be well ventilated, to have bedrooms near bathrooms, to install built-in or recessed cupboards and wardrobes, to secure privacy, to introduce sunlight to every room, to create a broad ‘piazza’, instead of a narrow verandah and install single-hung sash windows (his invention), all at a time well before Californian Bungalows of the 1920s. (Piazzas had been used by A.J. Mcdonald twenty years earlier, but in public buildings).

In Eaglemont, he designed three extraordinarily innovative houses in The Eyrie, in 1903, with (American) balloon-framed timber, clad with (Voyseyan) roughcast.  Their piazzas reveal views, framed by a shaped valence and balustrades, which were painted twelve to fifteen years earlier by the Heidelberg School artists: Roberts, Conder and Streeton.  The architect of the suburban house, had appropriated, by framing, the very views first selected and enshrined by the artists’ works on the suburban frontier.

Externally, battens grid the walls, tracing the configuration of the timber frame beneath, forming a module for Desbrowe-Annear’s narrow sash windows in horizontal series, similar to the rationalisation of Viollet le Duc.  This system is developed further at 71 Barkly Street, where windows are in continuous bands and this grid is continued into the valences.  The house is a single form, without added sub-forms (the piazzas are under the main roof envelope), and not just behind a street facade.  Elevations, however, appear open and permeable. (At Barkly Street, subsequently glazed).  Entries are tucked into a recessed corner porch, sheltered by a low-point of the folded, over sailing roof.

Another influence, was the Swiss Chalet vernacular admired by Ruskin, and a source for the American bungalows: a bulky, jettying upper floor, earthy natural materials and careful siting in the landscape, emphasised by the recessive ground floor.  This, and the band of windows across the front  are both characteristics anticipating International Style Modernism.  Interiors have no passages, so all rooms have access to views.

Presumably, the views at Barkly Street are to the south and west, where the piazzas are.  There is a short first floor passage probably due to the narrow site, but all rooms seem to have views.  At Eaglemont, Art Nouveau valences overhead define internal spaces, furniture is built-in, timber roof-beams are exposed internally and decorative stained glass is used sparingly.

In the UK and USA, early bungalows were vacation houses or a retreat which as Edquist explains, was certainly Desbrowe-Annear’s aim in moving his family to Eaglemont, and in a different way, may have been for his clients moving to the resort suburb St Kilda. Edquist says that Desbrowe-Annear believed the house to be a shelter built to nurture family life and quoting Robert Winter, ‘a symbolic retreat from the materialism of society ... into a quieter place.’  John Blair who grew up in Eaglemont with Desbrowe-Annear’s sons, has memories of ‘Dessy’ as ‘gross, irascible and cigar-smoking’, not all sweetness and light. Desbrowe-Annear entertained his bohemian friends frequently and ‘certainly lived beyond his means’.

Four or five other houses followed in the Heidelberg district, over 1903-10, then in 1910, artists’ houses: for John Longstaff at Eltham and Norman McGeorge at Fairy Hills, Ivanhoe.

In June the same year, between these two houses, the brick and timber Solomon De Beer house at 71 Barkly Street was tendered. Now it stands close to the street and on its narrow site, close to side boundaries.  It is unclear if this was so in 1910.  It has been altered.  Oddly it is symmetrical to the street and quite monumental, with subtle v-shaped elevations to its piazzas.  Nothing is yet known about De Beer and no architectural drawings survive.  This house is one of a group of four brick, double-storied houses Desbrowe-Annear designed then in affluent suburbs: South Yarra, Kew and Malvern, as well as St Kilda; a transitional phase in his practice and clientele.

In the Domain Road, South Yarra house (1913), is a two-storied bow window, a detail lifted by Howard R. Lawson (12) for his Manhattan Bungalow, 346 Dandenong Road, St Kilda East.  It would be interesting to note any further influences of Desbrowe-Annear on Lawson’s St Kilda works.

Through wealthy clients of his artist friends, from 1913 Desbrowe-Annear began to attract substantial domestic commissions in South Yarra and Toorak (as well as a series of more modest houses influenced by the clean lines of Californian Bungalows.  The Desbrowe-Annears themselves moved to South Yarra. His houses in this period included Inglesby, 97 Caroline Street, South Yarra (1915) and Broceliande, 224 Orrong Road, Toorak (1916, demolished) are amongst his finest.  Plain roughcast blocks, with narrow, deep-set windows, were carefully placed.  Edquist is convinced that these were influenced by the sheer Modernism of Adolf Loos’ Steiner House, Vienna (1916); not directly at this moment during the war on Germany and Austria, but indirectly through the work of Irving Gill. Californian Arts-and-Crafts architect’s houses were assemblages of pure cubist forms, such as his Dodge House (1916).  Unlike the English immigrants to Melbourne Robert Haddon and Walter Butler, Australian-born Desbrowe-Annear moved easily between both English and American influences. 

After World War I, Desbrowe-Annear’s interest in the new discipline of town planning developed, including campus design and war memorials and their meaningful placement.  He won the competitions for the design of the University of Western Australia in 1914 and with T.R. Ashworth for the Church Street Bridge (1920).  It opened in 1924.  Rather conservative Beaux Arts plans for the urban design of central Melbourne followed in 1922-27, yet even these contain interesting, even prophetic ideas.

There are at least eighteen of his urbane ‘town houses’ in Toorak and South Yarra (1919-33), which have been dismissed for their ‘retrogressive’ Regency manner.  Edquist has consistently argued that this is a superficial impression and has explained the subtle complexity of their designs.  They include:  Cloyne, 611 Toorak Road, Toorak (1926, (29)), the Baillieu house, 729 Orrong Road, Toorak (1926), Katanga, 372 Glenferrie Road, Malvern (1931) and invariably  their gardens. For Darryl and Joan Lindsay, he designed Mulberry Hill, Baxter in 1915, identified as Spanish Colonial Revival by Bryce Raworth.

There have been several other Desbrowe-Annear works in St Kilda, but little remains. At St Joseph’s Primary School, 28 Sandham Street, Elsternwick are most of the extensive schoolroom additions he completed to house the Chiselhurst Cromarty School for Girls in 1909-10.  A house at Quat Quatta Avenue, Ripponlea (1914) survives, an interesting comparison with Edward Billson’s Tintara (38), nine years later, just across the railway tracks. Desbrowe-Annear’s kiosk at Point Ormond, Elwood (1915), a house in Merton Avenue, Elsternwick (1917) and the Meyer House, 448 St Kilda Road (c1925) are all demolished.

Desbrowe-Annear never travelled; he was a great Australian nationalist: ‘... Ideas from other countries cannot help us; they must be our own, born of our own necessities, our own climate, our own ways of pursuing health and happiness.’

 

 

References

Blair, John (b. 1897). Taped memories.

Cazaley’s Contract Reposter.  21 &  28  June 1910.

Edquist, Harriet. ‘The Landscape of Desire: Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Eaglemont. B.  52-53. 1995/96. pp 83-94.

Edquist, Harriet.  Harold Desbrowe-Annear. 1865-1933. A life in Architecture.  Doctorial Thesis.  School of Architecture and Design. Faculty of the Constructed Environment. RMIT University. March 2000. 2 Vols. Passim. From which several of the following sources derive, noted: particularly, Vol.1, p 188 & Vol. 2, p 438.  I thank Prof. Edquist for the kind loan of this work.

Edquist, Harriet. Harold Desbrowe-Annear. A life in Architecture. Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2004. The work  was published after the completion if this chapter, too late to for new material to be incorporated here,

Hetherington, John. Melba. A Biography. Cheshire. Melbourne 1962. p20.  Quoting, Russell Braddon. Joan Sutherland. Collins. Sydney 1962.  p21.

Peck, Robert. von Hartell. Trethowan.  City of St Kilda.  Twentieth Century  Architectural Study.  May 1992. (Unpaginated).

Raworth, Bryce.  A Question of Style: Interwar Domestic Architecture in Melbourne.  M Arch Thesis. The University of Melbourne 1993.  pp 86&87.

Winter, Robert. ‘The first Generation’, in  Robert Winter. Ed. Towards a Simpler way of Life. The Arts and Crafts Architects of California.  University of California Press. Berkley 1997. p9.

 

PDF Version