Burwood Road Estate Precinct

Burwood Road Estate Precinct, comprising 1-27 & 2-24 Oberon Avenue; and 1 & 2-14 Tara Street, Hawthorn East, are significant. It was subdivided in 1885 and 1888, and all but one house in the precinct was completed by 1903 (with the final one built shortly afterward). 

 

All properties within the precinct are Contributory, and the bluestone pitched kerbs, channels and laneways also contribute to its significance.

Burwood Road Estate Precinct is of local historical, architectural and aesthetic significance to the City of Boroondara.

Burwood Road Estate Precinct illustrates the rapid growth in the northern part of Hawthorn East that followed the opening of the Auburn and Camberwell railway stations in 1882. After the estate was subdivided in 1885 and 1888, rows of timber cottages were built rapidly, with more than half of them completed by 1888 and all but one of the others by 1903. The division of the original wide ‘villa sites’ into narrower allotments occupied mostly by single-fronted cottages illustrates the more modest means of their early occupants, workers in the trades and service industries, who were nonetheless able to share in Melbourne’s high level of home ownership and improved living standards in the 1880s. The irregular pattern of streets with a single outlet and dogleg in Oberon Avenue illustrates the private nature of road creation during the late Victorian period. Its street layout was made even more irregular by the 1882 railway line forming a diagonal boundary to Tara Street, and its subdivision in two stages resulting in a dogleg in Oberon Avenue. (Criterion A)

 

The precinct is of architectural significance for its collection of Victorian Italianate cottages and houses that illustrate the modest yet stylish dwellings occupied by trade and service-industry workers of Hawthorn East in the nineteenth century. They display the principal features of this style, including low-pitched hipped roofs, chimneys with a rendered cornice, bracketed eaves (many with raised panels between them), front or return verandahs with slender posts or columns and cast-iron ornament, double-hung sash windows often with sidelights, and four-panelled front doors with raised cricket-bat mouldings. While most are timber houses with ashlar-look boards to the facades, there are a few built of polychrome brickwork utilising the local Hawthorn bricks. The majority of the houses are single-fronted cottages, along with five double-fronted houses with symmetrical or asymmetrical façades, both typical of the Italianate style. (Criterion D)

 

While most of the houses in the precinct have quite standard Victorian Italianate forms and details, their rapid construction by a small group of builders has created by an unusually high level of overall consistency in the streetscapes, as well as a small point of difference. Half of the c1885-88 cottages in the early part of the subdivision are characterised by distinctively small-scale ashlar board to their facades (14, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25 & 27 Oberon Avenue and 4 & 6 Tara Street), marking them as the work of a single builder. The streetscapes are enhanced by the retention of bluestone pitched kerb and channels and laneways, and the irregular course of the two streets in the precinct provide additional visual interest. (Criterion E)