1/1297 Toorak Road

Location

1297 Toorak Road CAMBERWELL, BOROONDARA CITY

Level

Included in Heritage Overlay

Statement of Significance

The house at 1297 Toorak Road, Burwood is of local historical and architectural significance. It is fine and broadly intact example of a residential typology appearing in Camberwell in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in its simple rectangular composition, avoidance of stylistic flourishes and shallow hipped roof. As with other designs in this Camberwell group, the design is a distillation of earlier treatments of the two-storey house, but also looks forward to the builder-designed suburban vernacular of the post war period, 1945-70. The house has an elegance in composition, a planar sense to its walls and a lightness in detail that sets it apart from its consistently solid and gesturally more cautious Camberwell counterparts of the period. It is among the earlier phase of suburban houses of the Melbourne area to integrate its garage as part of the frontal composition, and it does so convincingly.

While it has been altered, most of the changes that have occurred do not affect the main presentation of the house to Toorak Road.

Group

Residential buildings (private)

Category

House