How The Age helped build Melbourne, one small home at a time

In 1946, The Age did something revolutionary. It teamed up with the Institute of Architects and hired a confident young man, Robin Boyd, to design houses and then talk about them in our pages. We paid him £16 a week to start.

Called the Small Homes Service, the idea was to produce drawings for dwellings that were affordable, able to be constructed by small builders or home owners but, crucially, well designed by architects to be liveable.

Robin Boyd in 1970. “The cost of housing must be attacked by other means than shrinking the house to a dog kennel.”Credit: Mark Strizic

In 1946, Melbourne was suffering a chronic shortage of housing as soldiers returned from the war and waves of migration started crashing on our shores.

Boyd, who became an extraordinary journalist as well as an architect, described the city’s “overcrowding, the backyard tents, Victorians living in fowl houses, the deserted building sites and the idling factories”.

His plans and those of his fellow young architects sold for two shillings, and the full architectural drawings for £5. Builders and ordinary Melburnians bought them, often from a shopfront next to the SEC in Flinders Street.

Today, The Age’s series on apartment design in Melbourne has been inspired by similar sentiments: a looming shortage of housing and the dire need for better design in the homes we’ll all be living in. Some of Boyd’s words could have been written today about Melbourne apartments.

The T2 124 plan for a house, drawn up by architect Neil Clerehan for The Age’s Small Homes Service.Credit: The Age

“The chance of a home is being threatened by the mass production of shelters produced by churning out sausages which we call housing. The cost of housing must be attacked by other means than shrinking the house to a dog kennel,” he wrote.

Boyd saw good design as a human right, but also as a unit of the urban fabric of the suburbs in which they were located. They generated a community, built a city, became a society. Thousands of houses were built under his vision. Some still exist and are still delighting their residents.

Jason Kilgour bought his in Blackburn in 2014. He’s opened it up a bit and made a few changes, but the bones are of the Small Homes Service’s T2 124, designed by Boyd’s offsider, Neil Clerehan.

“People say it’s got a good vibe to it, a good feeling to it,” Kilgour says. “It felt inviting and comfortable. People say it’s a great house.”

Jason and Melinda Kilgour with their children Will, 10, and Harvey, 6, at their Small Homes Service home in Blackburn.Credit: Paul Jeffers

A lot of this is to do with the light — something acutely missing from many modern apartments.

“In the morning, it gets the morning light from the backyard. The front of the house faces west, there are floor-to-ceiling windows in the living area, then lovely light through the house,” Kilgour says.

By modern standards, it’s a bit of a strange shape, but “we love the long hallway — the kids run down it, the dogs run down it”.

Estelle Pratt lives in the same house that she and her husband built from the Small Homes Service in Doncaster in 1959 — the T377, also designed by Clerehan. She’s been there for 64 years and counting.

‘The cost of housing must be attacked by other means than shrinking the house to a dog kennel.’

Robin Boyd

“I looked at the plan and said to my fiance at the time, ‘that’s the house we’re going to have’, and he said, ‘Oh, really?’,” Pratt says. Its crucial attributes were a separate toilet, bathroom and shower. “My husband didn’t understand but you could use the bathroom and the shower at the same time.”

Pratt, who did not want to be photographed for this article, loves her “little cottage in the woods” in which she raised four children. Now her daughter and granddaughter have moved back in with her.

“We’re very lucky, it’s been very sound ... And the garden has grown like a mad thing,” Pratt says. “I’m not going anywhere. I hope to go out feet first.”

Historian Tony Lee, who has written a forthcoming book on Boyd and the Small Homes Service, says the houses were a reflection of people’s aspirations and lifestyles. After the war, people were identifying themselves as being different, he said, wanting a less cluttered life and more access to the outdoors.

Another revolution is under way: the need in Melbourne to live affordably, but with more urban density in apartments, units and townhouses.

Boyd would have had a view about how we should, and should not, be building them.

“The approach to cheap housing should not be made by asking people to live in minimum-size rooms in a minimum-size house on a minimum block of land,” he wrote. “The results of such a policy can only mean minimum-size families, narrow outlooks and future slums.”

The T377 plan. Estelle Pratt has lived in a slightly modified version of this house for 64 years.Credit: The Age

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