The Houses That Formed Me
Josep Pla, the Catalan writer, believed that a philosophy would one day arrive to demonstrate that human character is mostly forged by weather and climate. I would add dwellings to that observation — and the deep geographies in which they sit.
The first years of a life do most of the forming. Here are the houses that shaped mine.
·
It starts with a risk. My great-grandfather Benjamin made his way up the Hume one day to make his fortune. He had been raised on the outskirts of the Victorian goldfields in Ballarat. His father William, my great-great-grandfather, was a mining engineer who tried his hand at founding a small mine in Clunes. William signed up for the Boer War and came back to Victoria decorated but paralysed from the waist down. The Melbourne Land Boom had tipped the colony into depression; the economy remained broken for the better part of a decade. The mine was a commercial failure.
Benjamin left school at the age of thirteen to support the family. He found the book binding trade, then printing, and learned that the use of white space was just as important as the printed word. He took both trades to Sydney, settling in a boarding house in the working suburb of Bondi and establishing a small print business in the basement. The business grew into Sydney’s largest fine art printer of its day, finding commercial success with the department stores — David Jones and others — as they discovered the catalogue as a means of selling goods into Australia’s rising middle class.
The house Benjamin built in Vaucluse circa 1920 was an eclectic mix: Indian-Colonial influences common to Sydney’s earlier housing, the construction caught between the Edwardian era and the Spanish Mission period to come, elements of both present in its style. Its position was supreme. Opposite, the Arnott’s family had a superb house, built largely from materials shipped from Northern Italy. Growing up, my grandmother told me that the Arnott’s retained a family parrot on the front veranda that mirrored the symbol on the famous biscuit tin. Over a century of family ownership, little changed, save the surrounding vegetation. The lush sub-tropical greenery of Sydney had taken over entirely; a wild banana plant produced the most beautiful fruit.
Benjamin died unexpectedly and young in the dining room. The printing business lasted but was eventually competed out by printers in Hong Kong and beyond. My great-uncle Bill took over the house. He was born on the dining room table and passed away in the same spot. Bill ensured that all of Benjamin’s descendants were welcome to use the house whenever they came to Sydney, for as long as they needed. As family members scattered to other states, they always counted on coming back to ‘Vaulkers’ — the family’s tongue-in-cheek nickname for it — for their Sydney stay. The length of stay was entirely at the discretion of whoever visited.
The area changed markedly while the house and its occupants largely did not. The never-ending construction of large-scale homes with lifts and pools took place unabated on surrounding lots. The character of the homes built in ‘Vaulkers’’ era was being dismantled lot by lot. In the middle of last century, Vaucluse could still mean a captain of industry living next to the leading artist of their day. Now it is mostly capital that determines its resident.
Growing up I would travel to the house in Sydney and did so most years up until only recently. Bill would collect me in the old Subaru from the airport. There was always a great sense of calm at the house. I would wake up and head to ‘Nealo’ (Nielsen Park) for a swim at Shark Beach and then come back to the most important of the house’s rituals: breakfast. Bill and Janice, my great-aunt, would wheel the breakfast trolley out onto the front veranda. The toaster came too, trailing a long extension cord back through the dining room door. Hand-squeezed orange juice, hot-buttered toast, large plungers of coffee, and fresh bananas from the garden if the season was right.
The vista from that veranda each morning was spectacular: sailing boats working for wind, beautiful coves, the Opera House, the Bridge, the comings and goings of ships from the Heads. It was always in the back of the mind to think of Arthur Phillip, who came through this stretch of water a few centuries earlier, landing at Camp Cove before settling at Sydney Cove. Australia is a huge country. Yet this particular spot of first entry remains, however contested, something like Australia’s social heartland. The great rights and wrongs of the nation written into this geography.
My cousin told me about a talk she once attended at Butterfly House on the Yarra with the architect, and occupant, Peter McIntyre. She said he spent more time discussing the geography than the house itself. Houses may not endure, but geography always persists. The geography of the Sydney house will always be something special — unable to be taken away.
·
I grew up in Princes Hill, a tiny inner-city suburb in Melbourne that shares the same postcode as Carlton North. My father was an engineer on the rise who had a great interest in restoring old Victorian terraces. The house that I was born in and was to spend the next twelve years of my life in was directly across the road from Princes Park.
It was a two-storey, late-boom Victorian in Hawthorn brick. My bedroom was the front room upstairs, with a balcony. I could lift the window and watch the comings and goings at the park. Before the football ground opposite was developed, I could see half the oval — when Carlton played, I would watch the near end from the balcony and switch to the radio when play moved away to the opposing end.
Dad kept the house in a perpetual state of renovation. I might come home to find a wall had been taken down, its reconstruction months away. On Saturdays I would encounter him and his engineering friends sitting on milk crates in whatever room was under their interest, mired in dust, sipping tea, working through Arnott’s mint slice biscuits — over the years I have found the probability high that if someone likes mint slices, they have an engineering streak — in deep technical discussion grounded on first principles. The muffle of the commentary of some game of cricket on in the background.
The house was solid. If a bunker were ever needed in Melbourne, this was probably the place. Before the hydronic heating went in, a fire in the front living room kept Melbourne winter nights at bay. The inner city was beginning its resurgence back then, returning to its late nineteenth-century destiny before the motor car had temporarily broken the pattern of cities.
Kids were still found on streets and life was still rather simple: milk bars flourished under Greek and Lebanese proprietors, potatoes arrived at the front step in sacks thrown from an old ute, paperboys struggled under the sheer weight of Saturday’s paper, and the garbos were slightly miffed if a six-pack of beer was not left on top of the bin at Christmas. Cafe culture was restricted to weekends.
The Victorian terrace has proven a remarkably hardy and enduring housing style. The first people to build here tended to choose well: Victorian architecture represents some of the earliest large-scale housing in Australia, and those early choices of land have largely remained the most prized today. Victorian, Edwardian, and Federation styles are wonderfully adaptable, functioning as readily for commercial use as for residential, absorbing new purposes without surrendering their structure.
I did my lifetime’s worth of renovations early. Hot running water is always worth maintaining. I assisted where I could, but preferred the old horse stables at the rear of the property. My mother kept a skeleton from medical school locked away upstairs in the stables. I took great delight in showing visiting friends. That was until the show Round the Twist came out and put a stop to my going up there alone.
What I learned then is that houses exist within varying states of incompleteness. There is an old Turkish proverb: when the house is finished, death follows. Houses are organic things, constantly in motion. Embracing some incompleteness, always having something further to work on, is in my view the right way to approach a home.
·
The house on Kooyongkoot Road in Hawthorn. Kooyongkoot is a Wurundjeri name meaning Land of the Waterfowl. You approached it up a long gravel drive, slightly hidden behind a large oak tree. A small modernist family home that took up no more than one-fifth of the available site.
My grandmother and grandfather built it in 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics. The architect was Phyllis Murphy, a legend in Melbourne’s architectural circles, who passed away only recently at the age of one hundred. Nan had the seeing eye, just as her father had, and she and Phyllis together produced something simple, understated, and elegant. Nan disliked period homes — too dark, too cramped, too uninviting. Whereas the Princes Hill house was governed by form following function, Nan did not disregard function, but she insisted a place had to be beautiful too.
I spent a great deal of time at the house, and every Christmas of my childhood took place there. My uncles would in jest jostle for the carving of the ham, the plum pudding arrived in brandy flame interspersed with coin, and the doors to the garden stood open: children, especially me, running to and from the rear pool, the odd bindy or bee a minor nuisance to the small bare feet involved. My grandfather had played a few seasons for the Hawks, so the 1980s always seemed to have the Hawthorn theme song drifting out from the lounge room.
The property was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for a new home — and tennis court — that took up most of the site. The buyers were apologetic about the demolition, which would likely have been resisted today through probable heritage orders. Very few people would build a house like Kooyongkoot now. New eras place new demands on what any space is designed to do.
I spoke to Phyllis by telephone when she was in her late nineties. She remembered the house and my grandparents warmly. I had the sense she had grown ambivalent about modernist houses — not about the thinking behind them, but about what had happened to them. She was not keen on design by committee. Many buildings she had cared about were demolished, as were those of other modernist architects of her era. Phyllis was tough in the way that people who have lived through periods of less tend to be. She became one of the great collectors of Edwardian wallpaper and was instrumental in the painstaking restoration of Emu Bottom homestead in Sunbury — built in 1836, Victoria’s oldest.
Permanence is rare. My own history has drawn me toward the older proven styles — and then, in time, back toward the modernists. From the 1970s onward there has been, as Rem Koolhaas observed, rather more production of the fleeting than of the permanent — what he called Junkspace. There is still great opportunity to do beautiful things. Whether new architectures will arrive in good taste is for future generations to judge. The changing climate may force new structures and new geographies upon us in any case — which is its own argument for getting the thinking right before the building begins.
·
On a recent trip to Sydney I took the ferry from Watsons Bay to Circular Quay. Standing on the deck, just after passing Nielsen Park, the old Vaucluse house appeared — standing proud, brightly illuminated in the late-afternoon sun. It may not survive the next onslaught of construction in Vaucluse. But it has achieved a permanence that I think Benjamin would have been very proud of.
Paul E. Osborne