We’d like to bust out the full-power adjectives, joyful expletives and celebration for this c.1968, family residence designed in the domestic project prime of pedigree firm McGlashan Everist (completed around the same time-line as their celebrated Heide II building). What stops us is the exhausting and repetitive story of this building sitting in the enclave of Melbourne’s financially elite (though hardly the elite of culture, integrity or even basic taste these days) in Brighton. The ghouls at the helm of this listing proudly posting photoshopped images of sliced-up land and the promise of building a ‘grand home’ (read: Neo-Georgian vomit castle), townhouses and/or usual other polystyrene clad infill which slowly oozes over and consumes the green spaces and streetscapes of this bronzed and botoxed ghetto. They, of course, can commit such offenses safe in the knowledge that as Bayside Council have shown scant interest and even less fortitude in protecting their patch of valuable heritage and beauty, they’ll most likely get away with it and this wonderful work of architecture, space, light and materials (which has also been updated by latter-day archi-legend David Godsell in the 1970s) could very well be rubble by August.
Now, though we make it our business to alert you all and bare our teeth at those so involved with this campaign, we’d suggest there is no use in any of you, dear readers, getting personal. As per the knowledgable foot-soldiers in this constant MCM battle – the historians, community groups and planning layers – the real argument here remains with Bayside Council and perhaps by extension the Victorian State Planning Minister so if the desire so strikes please feel free to direct any and all correspondence about urgent legal protections for this residence, to them.
As for us and the rest of you – now is the time to spread the word and locate the last remaining person of Bayside with the bucks and the inclination for elemental elegance to take on this gorgeous legacy home and enjoy its Australian Modernist splendor, lest is disappears before our eyes. Get moving, the clock ticks.
