Back to search results » Back to search page »

Julius Wachs House

Location

5 Chatsworth Avenue,, BRIGHTON VIC 3186 - Property No B7224

File Number

B7224

Level

Local

Statement of Significance

What is Significant? The Wachs House is a large single-storey red brick house with a flat roof and elegant minimalist facade articulated by a row of four deep brick piers. It was built in 1962 for Polish immigrants Julius and Dorothy Wachs, to the design of local architect Peter Hooks.
How is it Significant? The Wachs Houseis of considerable aesthetic and architectural significance at a Local level.
Why is it Significant? Architecturally, the house is perhaps the finest surviving example in the municipality of the work of important local architect Peter Hooks, who was born in Brighton, built his own house there in 1948, and remained living there until only a few years before his retirement in 1980. Hooks trained in the offices of some of the more notable Melbourne architectural firms of the 1950s, including Mussen McKay & Potter, Bates Smart & McCutcheon, and Eggleston McDonald before commencing his own practice in 1958. His residential work is characterised by a strong tendency to design from first principles, and to reflect the client rather than imposing any particularly style of his own. An undeservedly little-known architect - principally because of his own disinterest in having his work published or submitted for awards - Hooks is perhaps best known for the series of highly-regarded and atypically luxurious project houses which he designed for Leighton Homes in the second half of the 1960s.
The house is important at the local level as a particularly fine and remarkably intact example of a large architect-designed house of the type built for wealthy and urbane clients in the affluent Brighton area in the early 1960s. Once proliferating in this area, these houses are now becoming increasingly rarer, with many having already been demolished or unsympathetically remodelled. Aesthetically, the house is a very fine example of what Dr Philip Goad has codified as the 'mature modern' style of post-War Melbourne residential architecture, practiced by a relatively small group of local architects from the early 1960s including such highly regarded designers as Neil Clerehan, Guilford Bell and David McGlashan. The style is characterised by a sense of elegance, formality and minimalism, achieved through open planning, stark planar surfaces, flat roofing, the use of simple materials such as face brickwork and stained timber, and large areas of glazing to create a dialogue between the indoor and outdoor spaces.
The Wachs House can be considered as a textbook example of this 'mature modern' style, exemplified in its network of semi-enclosed courtyards, its elegant frontage with a row of brick piers supporting deep eaves over a slate-paved terrace, and its stark red brick walls alternating with full-height windows and glazed doors to create an interplay of solids and voids. This intrinsic significance as an archetypal architect-designed house of the early 1960s is enormously enhanced by its remarkable level of intactness - both externally (in terms of retaining its unpainted brickwork, and original landscaped garden setting) and internally (where original patterned wallpaper, heavy silk curtains, spun aluminium and opaque glass light fittings and built-in furniture, all remain intact).
Classified: 17/05/2004

Group