1950s Australian Houses

As part of my current quest to annotate my memories, the three houses below come first because they’re of the same style and vintage as the first house I was aware of. Any of the three could have been built between the late 1940 and mid-1950s. The ones on the left had brick cavity walls with cream or red face brick while the one on the right promised walls of some miracle new product called Durabestos. The header image advertises Hardie’s “Fibrolite” asbestos cement sheets. Houses with asbestos clad walls were known, somewhat disparagingly, as “timber frame”. These sat on timber posts (a.k.a. pegs) but the space beneath the house would be screened by a hedge or a timber lattice to give the illusion of solidity or permanence.

The next step up was brick veneer that had a layer of brick for the outer wall. Double-brick was cavity wall construction and everyone’s preferred. The sense was that it was more solidly constructed and it probably was. Concrete slab foundations weren’t yet commonplace so supporting all external and internal walls was an 18-inch by 2-foot deep half-buried wall of sandstone blocks that was notoriously weak against differential settlement, particularly on sites made level by cut-and-fill. Purlins were spanned a one or two foot air gap and supported wood floors always concealed beneath carpet, linoleum or ceramic tiles. Internal walls were single brick 爱你的everything internal was plastered and painted. The roof was framed in timber and covered with ceramic roof tiles in some colour from terracotta ochre to terracotta red. The pitch was relatively high to stop rain being driven under the tiles. Windows and doors were timber-framed. Gutters and drainpipes were metal.

The plan above is similar in size and layout to that first house I remember. It would have been called “double-fronted” because of the two large windows facing the street across a lawn with some decorative shrubs and, as in the two examples on the left, by a low brick front fence more likely than not to have a built-in letterbox. There would have been an entry porch as verandahs in front of the master bedroom were a hangover from the 1930s and 1940 and beginning to be seen as old. The front door was for visitors, and the rear door connecting to the rear garden for everyone else. Front doors and front gardens were mainly for show and rarely used.

• A hallway links all habitable rooms except the dining room which is still a room separate from both the kitchen and the living room.
• The corridor also connects to the kitchen and the bathroom of which there is only one. It’s not apparent in the plan above, but the hall was the ante-room to the living room and possibly the dining room, and the corridor connected to everything else.
• The laundry is accessed from a porch at the rear. This is because there may have been a wood-fired “copper” for boiling clothes, a concrete laundry trough, and maybe an upright washing machine with an “agitator” and a “wringer”.
• Suburbs didn’t have deep sewerage so the toilet was outdoors and connected to a septic tank.
• Insulation was nonexistent. Heating was provided by burning wood in the fireplace that was the visual focus of the living room, although a kerosene (a.k.a. paraffin) heater might be brought out if the living room wasn’t going to be used for long periods. Electric fans were the only cooling.
• Walls of each room were most likely painted different colours, although ceilings would have been uniformly “off-white” or cream. I’ve told this anecdote before¹ but, when I was perhaps seven, I asked my mother the name of the colour our kitchen cabinets were painted and she answered, “Flamingo”. I don’t remember it leading to other questions so I must have been satisfied with that as an answer. White was not yet thought of as a colour and there’s not the conscious coordination of colours we associate with the 1960s. If we imagine that the colours below represented the entire spectrum of interior expression, there’s an equal balance of pale colours such as AQUA, PALE CREAM and DUCK-EGG BLUE that I imagine being popular choices for walls. There were also dark colours that could be used on skirting boards and door frames as in the 1930s, and medium tones for fitted furniture. It’s difficult to imagine FLAMINGO being a popular choice for kitchen cupboards now but perhaps choosing colours such as that represented a break with wartime austerity.

This next layout from much later still retains those same relationships in a slightly more relaxed “modern” arrangement that was also suitable for narrower blocks. The laundry and the wc are still externally accessed.

This next house would have been at the higher end of the market because it’s not triple- but quadruple-fronted plus a bit. Wide blocks were more valued than narrow ones, and corner ones most prized of all. With its major windows in two directions and three of them being corner windows at that, this house was designed for a wide-fronted corner block. The garage would have been a separate structure at the rear of the backyard and accessed from the rear corner of the block.

• The porch is now called a patio and there are full height “patio doors” opening onto it, not that they would have ever been used as such but more for reasons of privacy than security. Now, as then, Australians don’t have a concept of domestic life contributing to the life of the street. The front of the house was “the garden” and the back of the house was “the yard”.
• There are four bedrooms but still only one bathroom. There is however an internal wc with a separate sink and this would have been thought of as very progressive. However, the laundry is still externally accessed and there is a separate “outdoor” wc.
• The dining room has become part of the “lounge” and probably had a more “formal” dining setting occupying that space. I can see it being used only for Christmas diner. The “meals” area adjacent to the kitchen would be used for breakfasts and a table in the “sun room” for daytime meals and tea. Strange.
• I can’t see the dining setting being in the Sun Room and freeing up the living room for two groupings of furniture – one for the drinking of tea or coffee with visitors, and the other with a three-piece “lounge room setting” for anticipating the purchase of a colour television. It was to be a 20-year wait.

At the end of the 1940s, Harry Seidler was working for Marcel Breuer in New York but his mother asked Harry to come to Australia and design her a house. Rose Seidler must have been rather formidable because Harry’s father, though present, never gets a mention. The house is known as the Rose Seidler house and, in 1950 it was “the most talked about house in Sydney”. The idea of putting a large white box as the main floor above a smaller stone or stone-clad box was revolutionary in 1950 Australia. Openness of plan and generosity of window appealed to Australians’ image of themselves.

Houses that architects designed for themselves are a separate category. Following the UK system of architect regulation, architects weren’t allowed to advertise their services, and so the houses they designed for themselves were important means of self-promotion. If those houses were sufficiently innovative or novel or intriguing, they may well have been featured in magazines such as HOME BEAUTIFUL. Truth is, architects had little means other than word-of-mouth to make themselves known. Architectural magazines existed but as specialist journals passed around offices and universities for the slow dissemination of ideas. This was not a bad thing, but it created an environment in which architects had to use their own houses to promote themselves and it’s difficult to say now how much of this innovation was genuine and how much was performative. The 1955 River House designed by architect Peter McIntyre for himself always gets a mention in any book of Australia’s early modern architecture.

Here are two more examples of houses architects designed for themselves. These were portfolios and not necessarily manifestos. The house on the right includes an office to which one can easily imagine potential clients being invited.

Seidler’s Rose House led to the big box on a small box being a 1950s trope, especially if there were ocean views to be had. In the examples below, the lower level is recessed and downplayed while the upper level is overplayed. A stone fireplace and chimney with curly smoke were still thought to make a home more homey. In later decades, the fireplace was to disappear and the stone chimney was to atrophy into a feature panel of decorative stonework below the eaves and between the front entrance and the living room window.

Internally, Rose House introduced to Australia the idea of the combined dining room and living room which was also known as the lounge room or, simply, “the lounge”. The image below could almost be of the house above in that the two spaces were still separated by a level difference of two or three steps and a planter and/or a low wall. There’s a lot of pattern and texture happening in this image. It’s a shame we can’t see the colours. It’s exactly as Robin Boyd described, in that feature curtains are separated by a feature wall with a feature painting. The living area has a corner feature with a lighting feature and feature suspension. The ducted air conditioning and modernistic furniture suggests this is a house an architect designed for himself.

Other than my memories, my main reference for this post was the Peter Cuffley book Australian Houses of the Forties & Fifties. The other book, An Unfinished Experiment in Living documents many of the more architecturally innovative houses architects were designing for themselves and, as it turned out, for other architects. Recognition by one’s peers was more important than improving the housing that was actually being built. All this was seventy or so years ago. Experimental housing of the 1950s was often located on large sites overlooking rivers where land may have been inexpensive because construction would not be, or in bushland on the then edges of cities where land was less expensive. As with The Case Study Houses, the sites were unrealistic and the premise fundamentally flawed.

1. COLOURBLIND ↩︎

• • •