A Large Arts and Crafts Villa - Essendon
This symmetrical Reformist (Arts and Crafts) style double-storey villa may be found in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon.
Built in the years just after the Great War (1914), you can just start to see the transition from Edwardian villa to the lighter interwar styles of the early 1920s. The choice of exposed red brick to build the house with limited ornamentation is in keeping with the Arts and Crafts Movement. However, overall design with an arched canopy over the central balcony and porch and a low slung roofline are moving towards the Art Deco period, as are the geometric stained glass and leadlight windows and the plain rounded columns flanking the villa's portico and (now enclosed) balcony, which are more remeniscent of the Spanish Mission design period of the mid to late 1930s, and may have been a later feature to modernise the villa's facade.
Arts and Crafts houses challenged the formality of the mid and high Victorian styles that preceded it, and were often designed with uniquely angular floor plans. This house's floor plan appears to be more traditional than others, with a central hallway off which the principal rooms were located.
Essendon was etablished in the 1860s and became an area of affluence and therefore only had middle-class, upper middle-class and some very wealthy citizens. A large villa like this built in one of the finer pockets of the suburb (still maintaing its own private tennis court) suggests that it was built for an aspiring upper-class family of some means. A villa like this would have required the employment of a retinue of staff to keep it well maintained.
A Large Arts and Crafts Villa - Essendon
This symmetrical Reformist (Arts and Crafts) style double-storey villa may be found in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon.
Built in the years just after the Great War (1914), you can just start to see the transition from Edwardian villa to the lighter interwar styles of the early 1920s. The choice of exposed red brick to build the house with limited ornamentation is in keeping with the Arts and Crafts Movement. However, overall design with an arched canopy over the central balcony and porch and a low slung roofline are moving towards the Art Deco period, as are the geometric stained glass and leadlight windows and the plain rounded columns flanking the villa's portico and (now enclosed) balcony, which are more remeniscent of the Spanish Mission design period of the mid to late 1930s, and may have been a later feature to modernise the villa's facade.
Arts and Crafts houses challenged the formality of the mid and high Victorian styles that preceded it, and were often designed with uniquely angular floor plans. This house's floor plan appears to be more traditional than others, with a central hallway off which the principal rooms were located.
Essendon was etablished in the 1860s and became an area of affluence and therefore only had middle-class, upper middle-class and some very wealthy citizens. A large villa like this built in one of the finer pockets of the suburb (still maintaing its own private tennis court) suggests that it was built for an aspiring upper-class family of some means. A villa like this would have required the employment of a retinue of staff to keep it well maintained.