Surrey Hills Redvers - Kennealy Street Residential Precinct

Redvers Street Residential Precinct is concentrated on RedversandKennealy streets, Surrey Hills. The precinct, which is predominantly of 'contributory' heritage properties dating from the 1890s to1940,comprises two parallel streets running south off Canterbury Road. The two streets, unusually, strongly reflect the two main periods of residential development in the precinct, albeit with intervening bursts of development. This occurred from the 1890s (Redvers Street, after the street was created in 1889) and from the 1920s (Kennealy Street, after the street was created in 1914). Redvers Street contains houses from the late Victorian and Federation eras, mostly constructed of timber. The street also contains some interwar dwellings, including Californian bungalows, but the majority of 1920s and 1930s houses are located in Kennealy Street, where they are predominantly of brick construction.

How is it significant?

Why is it Significant

Redvers Street Residential Precinct is of historical significance, as along-standing residential area in Boroondara which demonstrates aspects of the growth and consolidation of Surrey Hills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precinct was substantially developed in two main stages from the late 1880s and from the mid-1920s,with the subdivision that created Redvers Street under taken in early1889. Kennealy Street is named for the Kennealy family, who resided on a large property, with dairy, fronting Canterbury Road from c.1891.This property was subdivided in 1914, creating Kennealy Street, although development largely stalled until the 1920s. The stop-startnature of development in the precinct is reflective of a common pat tern in Boroondara, as elsewhere in Melbourne: initial development of the late nineteenth century, in this case spurred on by the arrival of the Surrey Hills railway station in 1883; this halted with the1890sdepression; development picked up again in the 1900s only to bear rested once more by World War One; then a postwar burst which also stuttered with the depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s.Unusually, the two parallel streets of the precinct strongly reflect the two main periods of residential development.
The precinct is also of aesthetic/ architectural significance, and has a comparatively high level of intactness with contributory dwellings dating from the 1890s through to 1940. Redvers Street is not able for its late Victorian and Federation houses, mostly of timber construction, including several Victorian Italianate houses. The latter have bracketed and hipped roofing, some with block front detailing to resemble stone,and corniced chimneys. Federation dwellings in the precinct are marked by hipped roofs played off against a single projecting gable, or two projecting gables set at right angles, or more commonly simple L-shaped plans with a single projecting gable. The interwar period of the 1920sand 1930s is also represented in Redvers Street, as it is in Kennealy Street, where brick houses are more common, including use of red facebrick, decorative tapes try and clinker brickfinishes, and rendered brick. Bungalow houses in the precinct, particularly of the 1920s, are generally Bungalow variants, influenced by contemporary American Bungalows. Wider housing blocks to Kennealy Streethave also enabled the construction of several triple-fronted residencesin popular interwar Tudor Revival and Spanish Mission styles.

Grading and Recommendations

Recommended for inclusion in the Schedule to the Heritage Overlay of the Boroondara Planning Scheme as a precinct.

For a full list of individual place gradings within the precinct, please refer to the attached PDF citation, or individual child records attached to this parent record.

Group

Residential buildings (private)

Category

Residential Precinct