Davis Residence

The former Davis House at 32 Ursa Street, Balwyn North designed by architect and planner Harcourt Long while still a student in 1950, is significant. Elements that contribute to significance include: • J shaped plan with north facing central courtyard • prominent skillion roof • pale brick walls with brickwork notched at the external corners • decorative pattern of projecting header bricks to the garage wall • original pattern of fenestrations, door openings and window and door joinery • prominent timber-framed and multi-paned window wall with spandrel clad in vertical timber boards • early additions designed by the same architect include a basement storeroom and detached garage (1953) and a third bedroom at the rear and a second garage along the street frontage (1956) • front garden open to the street (no front fence).

The house is of historic and aesthetic significance to the City of Boroondara

32 Ursa Street, Balwyn North, is of local 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. Designed in 1950 by architect and planner Harcourt Long while still a student, this house is one of relatively few modernist residences that survive in Boroondara from the austere early Post-war years of the late 1940s to early 1950s. The house is notable for its sophisticated and evocative manipulation of modernist features which include a unique J shaped floor plan that zones living and sleeping areas and a wedge shaped living/dining room with steeply pitched skillion roof and large north facing window wall. The house exemplifies the high concentration of architect designed modernist houses built in Balwyn and Balwyn North during the 1950s and 1960s. (Criterion A) Aesthetically 32 Ursa street, Balwyn North is significant as an unusual, early and substantially intact example of an early modernist house in Balwyn North. The house demonstrates many of the qualities that interested the emerging generation of progressive young architects in the immediate Post-war period, notably the use of north-facing courtyard plans, sundecks, generous glazing and skillion roofs with broad eaves (all to take advantage of the passive solar heating principles) as well as zoned planning. In this case, however, these basic tenets of modern residential architecture were transformed through Harcourt Long's own distinctive vision, introducing such particularly bold elements as its J shaped plan and wedge shaped living room wing, with notched corners and huge timber-framed window wall with grid-like configuration of glazing bars. Although altered by two very minor and discreet stages of addition (both designed by the original architect), the original 1950-52 building dominates, and remains an evocative example of early Post-war residential architecture. (Criterion E)