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Nurses Home & Gatehouse - Former Heatherton Sanatorium

Other Names

Heatherton Psychiatric Hospital , Kingston Centre

Location

Kingston Road,, HEATHERTON VIC 3202 - Property No B6929

File Number

B6929

Level

State

Statement of Significance

The Nurses Home and Gatehouse at the Heatherton Sanatorium, designed by Percy Everett, and completed in 1950, are architecturally and historically significant at the State level.
Architecturally, the Nurses Home is significant as an unusual, striking and stylish example of a very large institutional building influenced by inter-war European modernism. The long horizontal form, with its dominating areas of glass arranged as strip windows, counterbalanced by various solid and glass vertical elements, could easily be a German or Scandinavian Sanatoria transplanted to Melbourne. The north face, with its long strips of steel framed windows, terminated at one end by a vertical semi-circular bay, is especially impressive. It is one of the most distinctive works by Percy Everett, Chief Architect of the Public Works Department between 1934-1953, who was responsible for a large number of distinctive institutional buildings, many of which display a confident handling of the dynamic form making possibilities of modernism.
The Gatehouse building, with its semicircular glass walls, and wide, projecting flat roof, is also a daring, modernist design.
Historically, the site is important as the second substantial institution dedicated to the treatment of Tuberculosis in Victoria. The Nurses Home, as well as the two large contemporary Ward blocks (now altered), are important for representing Commonwealth Government efforts in the post war period in eradicating TB, which ironically was so successful that the investment in buildings was soon redundant.
Classified: 04/10/1999

Group

Health Services