House

17 Trentwood Avenue, Balwyn North, built to a design by A V Jennings Architectural Department (design architect: Taddeusz Karasinski) in 1958-59, is significant. Elements that contribute to the significance of the place include: • elongated street façade which is double-fronted and asymmetrical • flat roof with deep overhang and exposed timber rafter ends • walls clad with vertical timber boarding • broad recessed street facing deck and simple metal balustrade • projecting bay to the north • original pattern of fenestrations and door openings and original joinery including a full-height window wall (comprising tall timber-framed windows, glazed doors and highlights above). • massive slab-like chimney-breast in uncoursed random stonework. • concrete steps to the front door • uncoursed random stone retaining walls

The house is of historical and aesthetic significance to the City of Boroondara.

17 Trentwood Avenue, Balwyn North, is of local historical significance for the evidence it provides of Boroondara as a locus for leading architect-designed public and private buildings from the 1850s into the Post-war period. Built in 1958-59 to a design by A V Jennings Architectural Department (design architect: Taddeusz Karasinski) the house displays a sophisticated design approach to its elevated site, appearing to hover above the landscape and yet anchored to it by its massive slab-like chimneybreast in uncoursed random stonework. The house exemplifies the high concentration of architect designed modernist houses built in Balwyn and Balwyn North during the 1950s and 1960s. (Criterion A) Historically, the house is also significant as one of the first houses to be erected on the Trentwood Estate, an ambitious residential estate conceived in the late 1950s by industry stalwarts A V Jennings (Melbourne's leading homebuilding company since the 1930s) as a high-end development of prestigious dwellings with community facilities (shops, infant welfare centre, medical clinic) provided. The estate was not an immediate success, with only a relatively small number of blocks sold and developed (including this one) in 1958-59. It was not until 1960, when the company introduced a broader range of more conventional house designs, that the estate finally filled out. One of the most intact, evocative and architecturally sophisticated of the houses dating from the initial (pre-1960) phase of development, the house at 17 Trentwood Avenue illustrates the company's original intent to provide elegantly-designed high-end modern residences. (Criterion A) 17 Trentwood Avenue, Balwyn North is of aesthetic significance as a notable house designed in 1958 in the Modernist style. With its stark rectilinear massing, its expression as a partially elevated box-like volume, and its wide bay of full-height windows interrupted by a massive projecting stone chimney breast, the house shows the influence and regional expression of International modernism. This particular house is a fine and evocative surviving example of this type of residential architecture that was built (and of fewer still that survive largely intact) in the Trentwood Estate. Its aesthetic significance is enhanced by the retention of early landscaping including the front random coursed retaining wall that matches the chimney. (Criterion E)