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Batavia

Location 20 Darling Street, SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141 - Property No 24406 Level Included in Heritage Overlay

[1/2] Undated photograph of Batavia [2/2] 20 Darling Street, South Yarra

Statement of Significance

What is Significant?
The building at 20 Darling Street, South Yarra is a large, double-storey rendered masonry villa in the Victorian Italianate style. Constructed c1882-1883, and later known as Batavia, the villa remains substantially intact externally to its nineteenth century state.

How is it Significant?
Batavia at 20 Darling Street, South Yarra is of local architectural and historical significance to the City of Stonnington.

Why is it Significant?
Batavia is of architectural significance as a fine and substantially intact late-Victorian Italianate villa. Locally, the Italianate mode of architectural expression pervaded all strata of residential design and had, by the late 1880s, come to define the architectural character of Melbourne's inner ring of suburbs. The house's rendered entry porch is an unusual element which distinguishes the building from other, more typical, houses in this mode. Batavia also shows a degree of composure and restraint in its application of Classical ornament that sets it apart from the flamboyant Boom-era houses of the late 1880s, which generally relied more heavily on cast-iron lacework for decorative effect.

Batavia is historically significant as surviving evidence of the affluent character of the South Yarra hillside in the nineteenth century. Melbourne's prosperity through the latter half of the nineteenth century coupled with the growth of its public transport system, allowed many Victorians to opt for a home in the fresh air and tranquillity of the suburbs away from the noise and dirt of the city. Beginning as early as the 1850s, the subdivision of large land holdings in South Yarra, and other parts of Stonnington, created new middle class enclaves, populated by businessmen and their families pursuing the suburban ideal of a rus en urbe('country in the city'). These developments became common in the higher parts of the former City of Prahran, away from the low lying swamp land.

Batavia also forms part of a relatively small extant group of substantial double-storey Italianate villas within the Municipality which illustrate the role of houses generally, and classically-inspired houses in particular, as symbols of wealth, status and taste for Melbourne's middle and upper classes.