Coonara Springs has high local significance as an early 1890s selector's

house with 1940s additions, including the "Big Music Room"

with its fireplace of locally quarried stone added by the 1940s owner,

the former opera singer, Grace Angelau. The property has significant

associations with the growth of tourism in the Dandenongs from the

1920s, when it was run as the Coonara Springs Tea Gardens. Coonara

Springs has associations with a number of prominent district people

including Simeon Kent, teamster and timber worker during the 1890s and

at the turn of the century; Frederick Le Juge, district baker and

councillor after the First World War; Mrs Hall and Mrs Faulds, who

opened the Coonara Springs Tea Gardens in the 1920s; and the former

opera singer Grace Angelau, who ran the tea rooms and a nursery at

Coonara Springs.

Coonara Springs is a single storey building of Victorian origin, located within a mature landscaped setting. The fence of the property is set back from the road to allow off-street parking while the extent of the property is lined at the roadside with a row of imposing, mature palm trees. The garden of the restaurant is a cottage garden with mature shrubs lining the fence. These shrubs largely obscure the west face of the rectangular plan building.

The building is made up of three identifiable, rectangular plan forms with a combination of hipped and gabled roofs. The additions are located to the north and south of the original dwelling, facing the Olinda-Monbulk Road. The older, recessed central section of the building has a hipped roof and is delineated to the west facade by a modern, gabled portico and timber framed, double hung shuttered windows to either side.

To the north-west a skillion roofed addition projects beyond this older, hipped roof section, and is delineated by an articulated stepped brick chimney and a verandah to the north. To the south-east is a gable roofed section which projects beyond the hipped section to the centre. A brick chimney is located to its south elevation.

The picket fence and gate to the street boundary are in keeping with the historic building, but are not original.

Physical Conditions: Good

Integrity: Evidence of stages