Wing Shing House (former)

The former Wing Shing House at 26 Kyora Parade, Balwyn North, designed by architects Godfrey, Spowers, Hughes, Mewton & Lobb and built in 1950 is significant. Elements that contribute to the significance of the place include: 

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

26 Kyora Parade, Balwyn North, is of historical significance for the evidence it provides of Boroondara as a locus for fine, leading architect-designed public and private buildings from the 1850s into the Post-war period. Built to a design by prominent Melbourne architects Godfrey, Spowers, Hughes, Mewton & Lobb in 1950, this house is one of relatively few private residential projects that the practice completed. The firm is better known for their larger-scale industrial, commercial and institutional projects. The arresting design of the Wing Shing House was featured in popular home magazine, the Australian Home Beautiful not long after it was completed. The house is important for its association with the emergence of Post-war homebuilding in Balwyn North and exemplifies the high concentration of architect designed modernist houses built in Balwyn and Balwyn North during the 1950s and 60s. (Criterion A) 
Aesthetically, 26 Kyora Parade is significant as a striking and highly intact example of early Post-war residential architecture in Balwyn North. Completed in 1950, it was amongst the first tentative wave of architect-designed houses to appear in the area after the Second World War. Aesthetically, the house is significant for its unusual and striking integration of features: its stark rectilinear expression with a highly distinctive angled window bay at ground floor, its stepped roof-line, and the contrast of smooth cream brickwork with stone feature walls, elongated window bays (with white-painted joinery) and deep roof eaves. The facade of this prominent house, virtually unaltered since 1950, remains an eyecatching element in the streetscape. (Criterion E)