Housing fashions come and go on the streets of Sydney

In a city boasting such planning blunders as Blues Point Tower few can disagree with NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes’ desire to confine ugly buildings to the attic.

Pembroke Terrace, Buckingham St, Surry Hills, pictured in 1871. Historical / Suburbs New South Wales (NSW) / Housing / Real ...

In a city boasting such planning blunders as Blues Point Tower, historic streetscapes slashed by blank-faced three-storey unit blocks and sprawling cookie-cutter new builds, few can disagree with NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes’ desire to confine ugly buildings to the attic.

Less obvious is what Sydneysiders define as architectural beauty, especially faced with age-old budget constraints and population pressures.

A century ago the apartments and Victorian terraces under consideration by Stokes and government architect Peter Poulet as desirable housing were derided by planners as unhealthy and unhygienic. Even the Californian bungalows that proliferated after WWI fell from favour a decade later, dismissed as “desolatingly prevalent”.

Terraces were common in Sydney from the 1830s, although the city’s oldest surviving terrace at Susannah Place in The Rocks dates to 1844.

Bureaucratic controls over Sydney housing began in 1838, when rules required party walls of a regulation thickness to rise above the roofline, later defining the skyline of terraced inner-city suburbs, and banned timber buildings. Rules also allowed dormer windows in attic roof space, and permitted building to the property line on narrow streets.

Terraced housing was common in London from 1630, when Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, commissioned architect Inigo Jones to design Bedford Estate at Covent Garden. Jones was inspired by Paris’s Place des Vosges, a grand central square fronted by uniform four-storeyed terraces built for Henri IV from 1605, and modelled on Andrea Palladio’s 1542 Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza, Italy. Covent Garden was divided vertically into terrace houses for London merchants. The design increased population density and building profit, while providing modest individual houses.

After the devastating plague of 1665, eradicated in the Great Fire, a 1667 Act for rebuilding London required all buildings to be stone or brick. It stipulated four terrace house sizes, specified party-wall thicknesses, set building heights of up to six storeys depending on street width, and banned facade projections.

Sydney’s first terraces copied London’s plain Georgian terraces, although the style was embellished with balconies and wrought-iron lacework, probably adopted from New York. Developers built extensive streets of terrace housing between the 1860s and 1880s to accommodate a post-gold rush population boom.

An economic downturn in the 1890s reduced smaller terraces in Pyrmont, East Sydney, Surry Hills, Redfern, Ultimo, Chippendale and Miller’s Point to overcrowded slums. With a plague outbreak in 1900, Sydney City Council encouraged terrace demolition in densely populated neighbourhoods, where dilapidated houses were still in demand because they were close to jobs on harbour wharves and Darling Harbour goods yard.

A council officer’s description of Sydney slums as “centres of dirt, vice, crime and ugliness” was supported by Australia’s first female architect, town planner and publisher Florence Taylor, whose “one family one house one garden” creed encouraged separate family homes.

Sydney Anglican Archdeacon Canon Francis Boyce approved suburbs for “ordinary residential purposes”, but argued many people found it “convenient to live near their work. Indeed must do so, and why should they not be considered?’’

The 1912 covenant over Rosebery which stipulated only single-storey Californian bungalows can be built there.

By Federation sprawling Sydney suburbs accommodated more freestanding cottages and bungalows, favoured in Britain and America as coastal or rural retreats from the 1860s.

Bungalow style derived from bangalo, or Bengali (Bangladesh). Bungalow described Bengal’s detached, single-storey houses with wide verandas.

In 1903 real estate agent and developer Richard Stanton designed Haberfield, a “garden suburb” of more than 1000 homes completed in 1925.

In a wave of Federation fervour, Stanton named Haberfield streets after colonial heroes while lead lighting windows in Haberfield bungalows featured Australian flora and fauna.

Taylor reshaped suburban Sydney in 1907, when her magazine Builder published pictures of “quaint American homes” designed by Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena, California.

Later described as ideally suited to the Australian climate, Californian bungalows sealed Australian identification with American rather than British design.

NSW Housing Trust chairman John Fitzgerald encouraged bungalow development in 1912 when he dismissed flat living, as “human nature is in favour of the freehold”, while in 1915 Taylor derided flats as “the enemy of home life”.

In 1912 Stanton developed Rosebery Estate of “artistic and modern villas” with four, five or six rooms.

Stanton sealed Sydney’s love affair with Californian bungalows in 1916, when he joined the Californian Redwood Association to import a prefabricated redwood bungalow, erected on Gardeners Rd at Rosebery.

Originally published as Housing fashions come and go on the streets of Sydney