My Year with Bluestone: Teeny Tiny House

The smallest possible house, sitting on bluestone foundations, and with paved bluestone back yard. You are going to transform this teeny tiny house in Carlton and make it liveable and modern, but you can't do it without essential, foundational bluestone.

http://news.domain.com.au/domain/real-estate-news/making-a-tiny-carlton-house-habitable-20150501-13hy1p.html?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=social

My Year with Bluestone: Regency Melbourne plus brilliant idea.

One of the most striking pieces of domestic bluestone architecture is this long terrace of ten three-storey bluestone terraces in Nicholson St, opposite the Carlton Gardens and the Exhibition Building.



The building was commissioned by timber merchant and builder John Bryant in 1853, two years after the discovery of gold in Victoria. He lived here, and rented others of the houses to wealthy gold-rich tenants.

Here is an engraving by the architect John Gill (who also designed the Goldsborough building), published in the Illustrated Melbourne Post in 1862.

http://www3.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-88/fig-latrobe-88-055a.html



And a paragraph from the "on my doorstep" web page: 

Royal Terrace is of architectural significance as the largest early terrace building surviving in Melbourne, and is unrivalled amongst the early terraces for its elegance. The simple composition and austere decoration makes it a notable example, albeit a sober one, of the comparatively rare Regency style in Victoria. It has no comparison in terms of scale or quality of stonework to any other extant, early terrace building in the other major urban areas of Australia. It is remarkably intact, most notably the unified facade. The combination of stone and stucco is also particularly unusual. 

It's true that "Victorian" would be the dominant early style in Melbourne, because that's when the city was so prosperous in the 1880s and 1890s. I note the words "sober" and "austere" here, which are part of the regular pattern of bluestone descriptors. 

Brilliant note to self: build a wordcloud of adjectives used to describe bluestone buildings... Must investigate how best to do this.

 Walking or cycling or driving past, I've often felt the striped verandah was an unfortunate colour choice, but look at this picture from the late 1850s, from yet another useful blog: Radical Terrace. The stripey verandah was original: but look how wide Nicholson St appears here...




The Radical Terrace site also lists successive prices these houses have sold for, and shows interiors of one that's for sale. They look so similar from the outside, as if frozen in time. Maybe they're wildly inventively decorative inside: maybe they're incredibly run down. They always seem to me rather inscrutable.

 I'll add the remainder of my photos (from last week, on the way to my tax agent in Gertrude St).

Editorial note: I must admit I'm starting to find Blogger's textual interface rather unfriendly: spending too long faffing about trying to smooth font styles and sizes. I do try and make it easy to read but I also find this software rather resistant to editorial control. My apologies. Suppose it's too late to change...

My Year with Bluestone: Little House for a Big Day

It's been a huge day today: scrambling to rewrite a perfectly good lecture from last year on the Nun's Priest's Tale to discuss the Wife of Bath, instead, for a colleague's subject on Adaptation. Great fun, but took ages messing about with video clips and pictures. Stayed up too late last night to finish it; got home at seven to eat (luckily Joel had made a vegetable curry over the weekend) and then fall asleep, waking up to watch the all-female panel on QandA. Really not too bad at all.  And now, at 11, two reasonably urgent issues that must be attended to on email.

So here's just a dear little bluestone house I pass on my way to work, up in Drummond St. Note the neatness of its bluestone patterns, its lichen-encrusted slate roof, and the stained glass in its window. I'm not sure, but it looks from the room above at the back, and the way it matches the house on the left, as if the cottage is now part of a much larger street frontage.

Something charming about the size of this cottage, right up on the pavement: but no garden, no verandah, and facing the afternoon sun? Not designed for Australia!!

My Year with Bluestone: Carlton cottage

Now that I am often walking to and from work, I'm getting to know lots of the streets in Carlton and North Carlton again. This is a house in Palmerston Place, just off Swanston St, and opposite Newman College. It's unusual for its street frontage. Even in this little pocket of quite small cottages, it has not even a narrow verandah. But most remarkable is the layer of red brick on top of the bluestone.


If you go to Google Maps, you can see the house in its context, with its bluestone lane to the right.

It's hard to know when the brick layer was added, without looking into paper records at the library (and thanks to John Ganim for bringing my attention to the State Library's archive) but clearly the bricks are an attempt to raise the very low roofline.

From the right, you can see the original roofline and how it has been raised.



In the past, the whole house was painted: I found this photo on a generic real estate site. It looks as if it was taken in the eighties, when peach and apricot were the colours of domestic architecture, inside and out, and when any heritage interest in bluestone was subordinate to the aesthetic unity of having the house all the one colour and capitalising on the higher roof level.


The house was possibly white washed or painted quite early on, given that the patterning of the bluestone is pretty irregular. There are lots of tiny little stones filling up the spaces between the larger bricks. Perhaps the cottage was made of left over stones, which would have been much cheaper.

I like my photo of the corner: I took it because I like the geometry of bluestone meeting bluestone, but I see that it shows the larger blocks have been used to stabilise the corners, and also to determine the horizontal lines: the lines of little blocks have been used to maintain those horizontal lines.


Childhood memory: I was about eight, I guess, or perhaps a little younger. My parents were driving us around Carlton, probably driving past Queen's College where my father had been a student, and we drove past the similar small houses in Swanston St, opposite the university, and we all marvelled at how tiny they were, and where "the poor people" lived. At this time we were living in all the suburban grandeur of a manse in Strathmore, with a front garden with grass, a brick fence and a nature strip, the essentials of domestic life to my childish eyes:

Now, of course, house prices have soared, and the little bluestone cottage would command a very hefty price, probably much more than the old manse.