Drive by Houses - Avoca Street, South Yarra

I often drive up Avoca Street on my way to the Tan for a run.

This is my absolutely favourite street in all of Melbourne. I know there are more perfect streets, and more well known streets, and more paved with gold streets, and this one certainly has its share of 1970's brick 3 storey apartment blocks. But it is on a hill, and is a short walk to the Royal Botanic Gardens, and it has some amazing houses.

I do love a good sticky beak at the outside of houses. It is why I prefer being a car passenger than driving. I am sure I have almost had many near misses, distracted by some wonderful facade as I drive past. In some ways gazing upon the outside is more satisfying than seeing inside a house. I often don't like the inside of people's houses. Especially those houses owned by people with lots of money. Sorry but it's true.

My way, one can furnish the house oneself. Elegantly, sparsely and relatively true to the period, with lots of modern touches thrown in.

Anyway, I thought I would take some sneaky photos to see if you agree with my assessment.

All the food groups are represented in Avoca Street:

Early Victorian 

Georgian 

Victorian Terrace (at the end of this row (called Lee Terrace) is Waterloo which I wrote about here)

Spanish Mission

Melbourne modern Palladian

1930s Georgian revival

Palm Springs

 Italianate

Forbidding and Inaccessible 

Colonial

Do you see why I like it so much?  

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Strathroy and smiley happy people - Watch this video.

Strathroy is was built in 1882 and is a striking and intact example of the small mansions in gardens built all over Kew and Hawthorn in the Victorian Italianate style.  When it was first built, its net annual value was 50 pounds. 

The house was built for John McCutcheon, one of the top executives of the Commercial Bank. It is now known that he was one of the land boomers, engaged in speculative high risk activities, which were sometimes partly funded by the bank's assets.  He was insolvent when he died, although this was kept secret. 

It is now for sale (through this agency).

Here are some other external shots of the beautiful garden and pool.

As is often the case with these houses (picky me) I don't like their interiors much, even though they are clearly very expensively fitted out, so I haven't included interior shots. The interior also loses major points for me for the plasma TV in the bathroom, and the fact that every single coffee table is Very Ugly.

A relatively new approach to the sale of these large mansions is the You Tube video, prepared at vast expense by the real estate agents, for the international market of wealthy bankers no doubt falling all over themselves for this piece of heaven in Melbourne.

Before I show you this magical little video, some context. Here is a sample of the kind of clothes worn by ladies when Strathroy was built:

(from costumes.org)

And here is what we wear now, when we stride around our beautiful mansion:




Isn't it just something else? You realise of course that these people are pretend people - a pretend wife in pink or leopard print silken mini dress, pretend children combing their hair, pretend hard working husband coming home at night, pretend cocktail party, pretend platter of sushi (oh so that's what those people eat) and so on.

Anyway, kudos to the owners for preserving a lovely home.

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February 2010 beach house round up

We Australians are reknowned for our love of the beach. 

I may just possibly be the only exception in this wide brown land to that rule. 

I loathe the sand sticking to me, the stinging bright sun, the blistering burn which I obtain from just half an hour in the sun and the salty wind.  This loathing may derive from the fact that my father got skin cancer when I was 20 but even before that, I had learned the hard way that I couldn't get a tan. In those days, the only fake tan available was something in a tin called Sudden Tan.  It produced an almost fluorescent yellow/orange glow a bit like a mango and stained your hands, zombie-like for days on end.  It is hard to remember now, with so many warnings about the dangers of the sun, but when I grew up people were teased for having pale skin.

Anyway, to look at, and to walk on in the evening or very early morning, there is nothing better than a beach.   And to see my daughter playing in the surf with such uninhibited delight a few weekends back did make me reevaluate my grumpy approach. 

January and February is the time when all the beach houses go on sale.

Perhaps the market is not as bouyant as people may have hoped given that the GFC has not been as severe in Australia as other places.  These places may prove the naysayers wrong.

Especially because in Victoria, with a shorter coastline, there is not such a great abundance of coastal beach homes as there is further north.

Here is my round up of the best I have seen.

A boathouse at Shelley Beach, Portsea (this sold for $455,000 over the weekend, to two families who 'wanted somewhere to store their beach gear').

And this is what you see from inside:

A Cape Cod style house in Wattle Grove, Portsea.


A house in Stonecutters Way, Portsea:

and with a pool - call me old fashioned but there is something wrong about pools at beach houses.  Isn't that what the ocean is for?



A house at Lorne, on the west coast of Victoria:




and the view from that house:




A cliff top eyrie, in the same family for many years, at Shelley Beach, Portsea, known as Inverary:



This has something of the Cote D'Azur (nice not gold plated ) about it.   And it was sold for $8.71 million on the weekend.  




(All Images: from RT Edgar and Kay & Burton)

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Dream House - Bluestone Estate in the Western District

Our recent holiday necessitated a lovely drive west of Melbourne for many hours until we got to the South Australian border. This means you drive through rich green dairy and cattle country, low rise blue stone fences (built by convicts), little towns with names like Hexham and Moriac, and occasionally, down a long drive way, you can catch a glimpe of a house like this:

This house. Leslie Manor, near Colac, was built in 1845 by Scotsman John Hastie. It has been renovated and comes complete with 18 foot ceilings, herb garden, friendly hens and lots of eggs, separate 4 bedroom manager's cottage, harness room and 183 hectares of verdant arable land:

Divine little bluestone shed for the lawnmower:

Access to two lakes:

And this green view when you are washing up, or preparing hearty country meals or just staring and daydreaming (or in my case given my slight country-0-phobia, mixing the first martini of the day at 10 am):

All this, just 2 hours from Melbourne, and yours for (price undisclosed) but I would be guessing about $6 million. But that is just a stab in the dark. If you are in the market check out their website. The auction is this Sunday!

One thing you can be certain about - there are no bright white or dark black floorboards in this house. No chandeliers in the kitchen. No quirky mix of mid century furniture and ultra modern Italian fittings. No walk in wardrobes. No mosaic tiles. Just country goodness.

I haven't shown the interior shots because although it has been renovated, in my view it would need some more work, but probably just superficial (soft not hard!).

I have previously written about my fear of being trapped forever in the countryside. But I could make an exception for this house.


(Images: Leslie Manor Homestead)

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