Former M H Baillieu House

What is Significant?
The former M H Baillieu House, 729 Orrong Road, Toorak is a large Georgian revival style house designed by celebrated Australian architect Harold Desbrowe Annear. It was built in 1926 for Maurice Baillieu, a member of one of Melbourne's (and Australia's) best known dynastic families. The house site was created through subdivision of the nineteenth century Trawalla mansion estate.

Elements that contribute to the significance of the place include (but are not limited to):

- The original external form, materials and detailing, particularly to the facade.
- The high level of external intactness including the unpainted state of face brick elements.
- The legibility of the original built form from the public realm.
- The general absence of modern vehicle accommodation in the front and side setbacks.
- The domestic garden setting - but not the fabric of the garden apart from the following elements surviving from Annear's original garden plan: the terrace and circular steps at the rear of the house and the terrace wall running east-west alongside the sunken garden.

All modern fabric, including recent landscape elements, is not significant.

How is it significant?
The former M H Baillieu House is of local architectural significance to the City of Stonnington.

Why is it significant?
The former M H Baillieu House is architecturally significant as an outstanding and largely intact interwar Georgian revival style house displaying Harold Desbrowe Annear's flamboyant and idiosyncratic approach to domestic design in this idiom (Criterion E, TEH 8.4.2 Functional, eccentric and theatrical - experimentation and innovation in architecture). It is one of the most spectacular of the Toorak town houses designed by Annear in the 1920s for his wealthy clientele (Criterion F).

Group

Residential buildings (private)

Category

House