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Financial hardship during the depression, as well as the need for more land to accommodate a growing population, has seen many of Melbourne’s most stately mansions demolished to make way for houses, flats, office buildings and hotels.
But – thanks to private schools, wealthy individuals and groups like Heritage Victoria and the National Trust – some are still left standing. Domain takes a look at a handful of noteworthy – and newsworthy mansions from Marvellous Melbourne’s heyday.
1. Banyule Homestead, 60 Buckingham Drive Heidelberg
If you live near the Rosanna train station in Melbourne’s north eastern suburbs, it’s likely you live on land which once formed part of the Banyule Homestead, which sits on a cliff top overlooking the Yarra River and Banyule Flats Reserve in Heidelberg.
Built between 1839 and 1846 for English explorer and prominent local affairs advocate Joseph Hawdon, ‘Banyule’ – as it was known back then – is believed to be the oldest mansion still left standing in Victoria. The home was designed by colonial architect John Gill, and is built in Tudor Gothic Revival style – popular in Sydney, but unusual for the time in Melbourne.
Banyule is characterised by several gabled parapets and corner pinnacles, a bay window and porch and several chimneys. Walls between rooms are some 75 cm thick.
Hawdon was involved with the Heidelberg Road Trust, the establishment of the Heidelberg Primary School, the Old England Hotel and St John’s Anglican Church, all nearby.
The Hawdon family, who moved from the Port Phillip area, owned Banyule until 1863, and it stayed in private hands until the State Government purchased it, in 1974, and used it as an affiliate art gallery of the National Gallery of Victoria. However by that stage the Banyule estate had been mauled – shrinking from 266 hectares, to just one, after a controversial subdivision in about 1958.
About 20 years ago the house was again sold to a private interest, and it is now unavailable for inspection.
2. North Park (Corner Buckley Street and Leslie Road) & Earlsbrae Hall (29 Leslie Road), Essendon
The young ladies that attend private colleges St Columba’s and Lowther Hall in Essendon may not realise it, but the classrooms they occupy were built from money the wealthy McCracken family raised brewing and selling alcohol.
The 42-room North Park mansion, now known as the Australian headquarters of the St Columban Mission and part of private school St Columba’s College, was built on the highest point in Essendon by renowned brewer and sportsman Alexander McCracken in 1888.
The red brick North Park was built to symbolise McCracken’s prosperity and achievements and includes ornamental bargeboards, decorative finials and chimneys and intricate glass glazing.
It’s believed North Park was the first mansion in Australia to use imported Marseilles terracotta roof tiles and feature a unique bee imprint, a signature of the French Company that made them.
Part of a spacious ballroom McCracken built to host parties for Melbourne’s bourgeoisies, is now a chapel, while other parts of the mansion, including a coach house and stables, are now used as offices and classrooms.
At the time Alexander McCracken was building North Park in the late 1880s, his cousin Coiler McCracken – also a wealthy brewer - was building the 27-room Earlsbrae Hall, only a hundred metres away in Leslie Road.
Coiler McCracken occupied the double storey grey classical revival building until 1911, when it was sold to flamboyant businessman William Cole, of Cole’s Book Arcade who built a monkey avery for his pet gibbons, and a 75-foot garden of flowers all the colours of the rainbow.
When Cole died in 1918, Earlsbrae was sold to the Anglican Church and remodelled into the Lowther Hall Anglican Grammar School for girls.
Other mansions which now form part of private schools include Illawarra House in Illawarra Crescent Toorak which is leased to St Catherine’s Girls School; Mandeville Hall in nearby Clendon Road Toorak, now part of the Loreto Mandeville Hall school, and Malvern House, now part of Caulfield Grammar in Willoby Avenue Glen Iris.
3. Kamesburgh (now the Anzac Hostel), 74 – 102 North Road Brighton
Built in 1874 for businessman William Kerr Thompson, Kamesburgh is the result of huge prosperity in the decades following the gold rushes. Occupying a massive block of land and with expansive street frontage to North Road, Cochrane Street and Downes Avenue, Kamesburgh is regarded by historians as the most important work by prominent Victorian architect of the day Lloyd Tayler.
Between 1892 and 1918, the home was owned by BHP director, Minister and member of the Victorian Legislative Council Duncan McBryde who lived there until his death. Kamesburgh was then purchased by the Repatriation Department in 1919 with a gift of £25,000 from the wealthy Baillieu family, for the care of severely incapacitated soldiers after the war. The mansion and gardens are still used as part of the Anzac Hostel today.
Another mansion to have been reincarnated as a hospital is the Stonington mansion at 336 Glenferrie Road Malvern. Between 1938 and 1940 (and after 31 years as Victoria’s Government House), Stonington treated patients suffering polio. It was then used as a Red Cross convalescent hospital until 1953 before being transferred to the Education Department in about 1957.
Stonington was given to Deakin University in 1995 which used it as its Toorak campus until 2006 before controversially selling it to Hamton, a developer, for around $30 million on Christmas Eve that year. Hamton have since subdivided the estate, and in turn sold the mansion last year to art dealer Rod Menzies for $18 million, setting a new record for a home price in Melbourne.
4. Frognall, 54 Mont Albert Road Canterbury
Rags to riches timber merchant Clarence Hicks spent only a couple years in the Frognall mansion he built in 1888 – before the depression of the early 1890s, which resulted in a sharp trading dip for Hicks, forced National Bank of Australasia to foreclose the mortgage and repossess the property.
Frognall is thought to have onsold several times before winding up in the hands of wool manufacturer Burdett Lancock in 1901. The Lancock family lived in the property for 40 years, before offering it to the Crown for wartime purposes in 1941 – where it was soon used as the RAAF’s Wireless Telecommunications Station.
The mansion was used for telecommunications services until 1976, and as a centre for RAAF engineer cadets until 1993.
The government then subdivided 1.4 hectares of the Frognall estate into 16 residential allotments, built around a new street, Frognall Place, off Torrington Street on the property’s southern border. Blocks of 780 square metres sold for about $350,000 – about 10 per cent of their value today, according to local agents.
The Frognall mansion was also sold in 1993, to investment manager Raydn Nolan, for $1.755 million. At the time, it was reported, he could not believe any property in Canterbury could sell for land value of just $12 a square foot. And he was right. Today, land values in the AAA-belt of Canterbury ask about $250 per square foot.
On Christmas Eve 1998, the Nolan’s sold Frognall for $4.3 million to the Kotevski family, who in July 2001 subdivided the land again (fetching $3 million) and resold the mansion, on almost one hectare of land, for $6.3 million.
The 31-room Italianate mansion still contains original outbuildings including stables, and its original, and now very lush garden layout.
5. Cranlana, 62 Clendon Road Toorak
The Cranlana mansion, which sits on one of the biggest residential blocks in Toorak, was built in 1903 – but substantially extended and remodelled around 1929, after it was bought by businessman and philanthropist Sidney Myer and his wife Dame Merlyn Myer.
In 1932, additional land on the northern boundary of the estate was purchased by Mr Myer, which enabled the construction of a sunken formal garden. The massive property is hidden behind grand wrought iron gates.
The garden, considered to be one of the finest in Victoria, includes vast lawns and open spaces, deciduous and evergreen specimen trees, colourful shrubs, clipped conifers and hedges, rows of Italian Cypress, water features, statues, ornaments and a Pin Oak tree lined driveway.
Russian-born Myer, who founded the Myer department store chain lived in the mansion until his death in 1934, leaving his wife Dame Merlyn Myer sole proprietor until her death 48 years later in 1982. Cranlana continues to be owned, maintained – and occasionally opened to the public - by the still philanthropic Myer family.
6. Raheen, 94 Studley Park Road, Kew
Historians couldn’t believe their ears in 1999 when State Premier at the time Jeff Kennett declined an offer by billionaire businessman and philanthropist Richard Pratt to donate the imposing Raheen mansion in Kew to the State Government.
Despite its place as one of Victoria’s finest (and most expensive) homes, Raheen, on the corner of Studley Park Road and Raheen Drive has always been held in private hands. Mr Kennett cited a maintenance bill, speculated to be $1 million a year, as the reason to decline the offer.
Built in 1870 for Carlton Brewery boss Edward Latham, and extended in 1884, Raheen’s 4-level tower has become an important landmark dominating the crest of the Studley Park area of Kew.
Somewhere at the turn of the century, Latham sold Raheen to prominent barrister and solicitor Sir Henry Wrixon, who in 1917 sold it to the Catholic Church, when it became the official residence of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, as well as four other Catholic archbishops of Melbourne.
The Church held onto Raheen until 1981, when it sold to Mr Pratt and wife Jeanne for a price estimated to be $2 million. The Pratt’s are reported to have spent more than $10 million painstakingly reconstructing Raheen and its garden back to how it was at the turn of the century.
The Pratt family use the mansion for philanthropic parties and functions, but live in a house they built, nestled discretely behind the Raheen mansion.
State Government’s it seems often did more damage than good, in their role preserving Melbourne’s mansions for the better part of the 20th century.
Mansions including Norwood in Brighton, Charnwood in St Kilda, and Iloura in Kingsway were approved for demolition by council, to make way for new homes, apartments and office buildings. Even the massive 3-story 80-room Cliveden mansion at the corner of Wellington Parade and Clarendon Streets in East Melbourne was demolished, to make way for the Hilton Hotel in 1968.
Historians agree the demolition of large mansions along St Kilda Road in the 1970s and early 1980s, to make way for office buildings and apartment towers, has permanently stripped away what would be the most impressive boulevard of 19th century mansions in the country.
Some St Kilda Road mansions remain intact, though dwarfed by neighbouring buildings. These include Airlie at 452 St Kilda Road (though a high rise apartment is being developed immediately behind it, which will destroy the atmosphere somewhat) and Majella at 475 St Kilda Road.
Thanks to architectural historian Dr Kerry Jordan, Heritage Victoria and the National Trust of Victoria for their input preparing this story.
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