Film - Tribal Media, 'Early Victorian society and the desire for privacy', Heritage Victoria

I'm Dr Kerry Jordan and I'm a conservation officer for Heritage Victoria. I work in assessments, and we assess places that are recommended for addition to the Victorian Heritage Register.So that's my job - to carry out that initial assessment.

I was looking at the larger houses that were built in Victoria during the 19th century and basically looking at the planning of the houses - how the rooms were organised and laid out within the house.

And what I wanted to particularly look at was how that compared to Britain, because of all the initial settlers in Victoria obviously were British and the sort of houses they built were based on the houses they would have lived in in Britain.

And I want to look at whether those houses changed when they came to Victoria, because there were huge changes that occurred in society in Victoria compared to in Britain, even things like greater informality of society and less rigid social hierarchies, etc.

So it was interesting, then, to look at the houses and see how they change in response to the changes in society at that time. Well, the houses stuck very, very closely to the rules in Britain, and these were quite rigidly laid down.

There were quite a lot of publications put out during the 19th century in Britain and in other parts of the world as well - in America and Europe - which laid out how a house should be designed from the exterior - you know, the sort of style that you might use - but also the interior arrangements.

And some of them went into enormous detail about how it should be laid out, but also why they should be laid out in this way, and there were quite rigid, as I say, social rules about why this might be done.

In Britain, they had a couple of absolute obsessions when it came to their houses. They had an obsession with personal privacy, for a start.

So this meant that all of the rooms and the people in those rooms should be quite separate to everyone else. And there was also an obsession with social hierarchy, so you wanted to be separate from, say, any servants that might be working in the house.

So this meant that the planning was very separate and it led to what we call corridor planning where, when you came into a house, you went into a hallway and all of the rooms could only be accessed from that hallway.

And if you want to go from one room to another, you had to go back into the hallway, walk along the hallway and into the room - which may sound very obvious to us, but it wasn't the way in Europe and in America at the time.

In France and in Germany, for example, and also in America, the rooms might open directly into one another. So if you want to go from the drawing room into the dining room, there'd be a doorway that you could just go through.

If you've been to, say, the Palace of Versailles, for example, you'll know that the rooms just connect up. You can just walk from one into the other. And that was just terrible as far as the British were concerned. That was way too informal.

And so, this corridor planning, because of this obsession with privacy, was very typically British and it also occurred throughout Victoria in the 19th century.

Even though they were in contact with America, they saw American books and American journals and saw that wasn't the case there and knew it wasn't the case in Europe and even though society here was more informal, they still stuck to that corridor planning right through the 19th century.

And it didn't start to break down, really, until the 20th century, where we get more open planning, and of course now with family areas particularly, they're totally open, so it was quite different to today.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Kitchens in the Early Victorian period', Heritage Victoria

If you had a moderate-sized house, for example, you'd definitely have a drawing room and a dining room.And that's where any visitors to the house might be entertained.

But if the house was big, it might also have a library and a morning room and a breakfast room and an afternoon room. And they might double up and just be used at separate times of the day.

For example, a morning room was basically the same as a drawing room but it was used at different times of the day. Similarly, a breakfast room and dining room were still eating rooms but used at different times.

So they became very specialised, and this was especially true in the service functions of the house, so that whereas now we have a kitchen where we store everything and we do the washing up, etc, these functions were much more specialised then.

So that you'd have a kitchen but the kitchen was basically just for cooking in and you'd have a separate scullery off the kitchen where you prepared all the dirty, you know, did the washing and so on first and then afterwards, you'd do the washing up of the dishes.

And similarly for storage, you'd have separate pantries and larders. The pantry's usually for storing dry foods and things like china and glassware, etc, and a larder for storing wet goods, meats and cheeses, etc. And again, this could be infinitely specialised.

So in a very grand house, you might have a separate meat larder, cheese larder, fish larder, bacon larder. So it got a bit ridiculous, in fact, in the end.

So yes, that specialisation of function was very typical of the 19th century.

But for a smaller, less modest house, obviously, that wasn't possible. But often, you still also would have, say, a kitchen and a scullery separate.

So it meant because the kitchen was only used for cooking, you didn't have the built-in storage that we have now. You'd have a big table in the centre, you'd have the stove.You might not even have a place for washing, 'cause that would be done in the scullery.

The kitchens were quite different then.As well as being laid out differently, they were located differently.

In the earliest houses - in, say, the 1840s - the kitchen was most likely to be detached. It was a separate little structure a few metres from the back door of the house, and you can still see this sort of thing in the National Trust house McCrae Cottage, down at McCrae, which was built in the 1840s.

And it's commonly believed that this was largely to prevent fire - that because you're cooking in the kitchen, if there was an accident, the fire wouldn't spread to the house.

But considering that they had fireplaces in the bedrooms and the other rooms anyway, that's not the only reason. But it was also - and I read this in a letter written by a lady in the 1840s - that if you had the kitchen near the house, the servants were more likely to overhear what was going in the house, so it was another way of separating the staff from the family.

So the very earliest kitchens, then, were always detached, but from about the 1850s on, it became much more common to include them in a separate service wing.

And you can see this in most of the terraces around Melbourne, for example, at the moment, that you've got the main part of the house and then you've got a separate little wing, which is lower at the back, and this was for the kitchen and those service functions.

And it wasn't till the late 19th century that the kitchens start to be incorporated into the main body of the house, and of course now we know that it's a very important part of the house because there are no longer servants that need to be kept separated - the family is doing the cooking. Usually, still the housewife, but not always.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Introduction of services and utilities to Victoria', Heritage Victoria

In Melbourne, there was no water supply until the 1850s, when the Yan Yean reservoir was developed.

And before that time, water was got out of the Yarra and taken around in a water cart, delivered to your water butt, which is just a large barrel outside the house. And there was no formal sewerage - there were drains in the main streets - and the water tended to drain into the Yarra, and the water was got from the Yarra, so there were epidemics of typhoid and cholera, especially in the late 1840s.

By 1849, the first mechanical pumps were set up on the Yarra banks, so you could draw the water up and put it into a dray without having to actually drive your cart into the Yarra.

And in the late 1850s, gradually most of the inner suburbs were linked to the Yan Yean reservoir so there was a pipe to water supply.

Most houses in the city would have a cesspit for sewage, which was supposed to be emptied, so there was a big underground tank, and, at intervals, somebody was supposed to come and pump it out.

What happened often was that - A - the tank leaked, it wasn't fully sealed and it seeped into the surrounding ground, and often it wasn't emptied enough and it overflowed.

So they weren't very desirable, and, later on, they in fact were banned.

Then a night cart service was largely used, in which somebody came at night took away your pan from the back dunny on the boundary of the property.Often to save time, they would tip that into the Yarra as they crossed it, and that caused problems as well.

So regulations were established and a manure depot was established where the Children's Hospital now is to dispose of this material and deodorise it.

And then in... from about 1888 onwards, the Melbourne sewerage system was developed, and very quickly spread out through most of the suburbs. There were fuel stoves before that time, quite elaborate stoves.

American stoves especially were favoured, which were freestanding stoves which you could heat the room with and also cook upon to a small extent.

And then there were leading English ranges, like the Flavel range, which were 'kitcheners', that is, they were a complete equipment which would heat water as well as cooking.

People tended, of course, to use candles to get around the house, to get out to the dunny outside, that sort of thing. But most lighting, especially from 1870 onwards, was kerosene.

Before that time, whale oil was used. It was more expensive. Electric lighting comes in gradually in the late 1880s in the richer houses. But in some cases, well into the 20th century, houses were still being lit by oil.

When electricity comes in at first, people are unsure about it, and you might often have a light point with gas and electricity connected to the same place, just in case the electricity failed.

Gas was introduced in Melbourne in 1855, but, in other towns, mostly a bit later. And gas was at first used only for lighting, but, by the 1870s, was more and more being used for gas cooking, so that had an impact as well.

At first, you would rent your cooker from the gas company, and only later on did people tend to buy their own gas appliances. Gas caused no dramatic change over kerosene lamps.

More importantly, perhaps, was its effect on street lighting, which was huge, because people... Until at that time, hotels were required to keep a light outside in the street, but there was very little public street lighting, until gas was installed.

The first power station was in Richmond. It was a private company.Later on, councils established their own power stations.

Yes, and often the power systems were incompatible - different voltages and so on were used in different council areas.

And then only under Sir John Monash after World War I was a State-wide system gradually developed. Well, electricity comes in gradually from the late 1880s in domestic uses, but only really in the richer houses.

And after 1900, becomes more and more common as a standard element in ordinary houses. And from that time onwards, the use of oil reduces.

At first, electricity is used almost entirely for lighting.

Electric appliances are very rare almost until World War II. I mean, they were a small minority of regular household appliances until that time.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Growth of Melbourne in Victorian times', Heritage Victoria

In the 1850s, Melbourne was largely a city with villages around it.

That is, places like Richmond were partly isolated from the city. And they would have dairying on the flats near the river and industries like brick-making surrounding them.

What happened from the late 1850s onwards was gradually the spaces in between these areas filled out, and the pressure of population, especially in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond, created a very dense population, and then areas like St Kilda became linked in.

But places like Brighton, for example, were still separate, and you went by train through areas like Hillwood, which was still largely swampy, undeveloped land.

And, I suppose, more than anything, it was the transport system which changed the structure of Melbourne more than the services.

If you bought land in a place like Brighton, you might be given, as part of the deal, a season ticket by rail.

And in many ways, the rail services were not servicing the existing suburbs so much as creating them. So, part of a land deal was to provide the railway service to it, so the land became saleable.

From, I suppose, the mid-18th century onwards, there was a great boom in suburban development - and speculation, which gave rise ultimately to the crash towards 1890, in which there were auctions held and free champagne provided, people were encouraged to speculate in buying these blocks in distant areas.

Even in places like Doncaster, terrace houses were built on the anticipation of them becoming dense areas. And people would open up an estate, build one or two large mansions on it to try and encourage people to think this would be a prosperous, dense development, and some of those estates collapsed and almost were never developed, at least until late in the 20th century.

The well-known property Medlow in Surrey Hills is an example where the subdivision was all planned out. One house was built, which survives today, and none of the other houses were built on that estate.

In the 1850s, there were large numbers of single men from the goldfields, and they lived often in rooming houses, and they would regard the hotel as almost their living space.

So there were huge numbers of hotels in Melbourne. Almost every street corner in the inner suburbs would have a hotel.

And that only changed over time as a more normal social situation developed in the 1860s and the suburbs developed, and the idea of a suburban house with its own grounds became important from the 1860s onwards. And people wrote about the smiling parterres, the lawns and flowerbeds of suburbs like, say, Essendon, for example, from the 1860s onwards.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Wallpapers in Victorian era', Heritage Victoria

Well, I'm a retired architect, and my husband John and I ran our own practice for many years, and that included a lot of conservation work.

And there wasn't a lot of information available about conservation work as there is now.

And I started to read up and found out what I could, and I was very interested to find out exactly how people lived and what their houses were like.

And that led to my interest in wallpaper and decoration of interiors of houses.

Well, I think the first thing that surprised me was the incredible colour, because people often think of Victorian interiors as being brown and dark.

And I think a lot of that is due to dirt, of course, and the fact that a lot of wallpapers were varnished.

And the old varnish that they used tended to brown off, and that gave everything a sort of brown look. And you only have to look at some of the papers that I have collected to see these absolutely marvellous colours.

Victorians loved ornamentation and patterns, and everything was decorated. And I get rather amused at the very uninhibited combination of patterns, and then the upholstery on the chairs would be patterned and the curtains would be patterned and the wallpapers and the ceilings.

And then there'd be several colours used on the woodwork or light and dark stains. I've had people say to me, 'Oh, but they're so elaborate, these humble little cottages.' But I don't think they actually were.

They were humble... not in fact, because I think sometimes they were quite well-off farmers who lived there, and lived quite well, but all they had was a very modest house and they made the most of it.

And I think the home was very important, and I was at first amazed to find so many country cottages that had all this elaborate wallpapering.

There was one that I went to, and it had an 1850s newspaper behind it, 'cause they often used newspaper as the first lining, and it was some beautiful red flock, and this was just a very modest farmhouse, and this was, I suppose, their parlour.

It wouldn't have been a drawing room. But it meant that the house was so important, and I'm sure, you know, all their social activities were around the home. And very different from today, where many homes are just functional, aren't they?

Some quite well-known artists were employed, like Walter Crane.

The French employed a lot of their artists, but as the years went by and after the Industrial Revolution, they were all printed instead of being hand-blocked.

I think they just had big factories with trained artists working in them, but not people who had been painting pictures or anything. But yes, there was a great deal of artistry required.

This is a fascinating little one. It's a small book - normally they're this size - but this one's for the traveller or the salesman, and it's got very tiny samples, but lots of them. And beautiful borders. Look at the lovely colours. Gold backgrounds.

And these were not for wealthy houses. These were just normal sort of... What I'd have in my house.

Early in the century, the design was cut out on a wooden block, and originally they just did it all by hand, but then they started with the... they used pulleys, and the blocks came down and printed, so it was a simple assistance to the printing.

And if I come across a block-printed paper, I can recognise it because of the surface. It's almost like poster colour, whereas these are all mechanically printed.

And then with the Industrial Revolution, they started the roller printing and mechanical, and the prices came down, so of course more and more were sold, and I think that's also why it became so popular.

An enormous quantity was used in the late Victorian period, and I was interested. We did work on the Collingwood Town Hall, and of course that had a lot of stencils, stencil work and so on, but the engineer's room was wallpapered originally, and I thought that was interesting.

And maybe some of the other offices were too, but that was the only one we came upon. And I remember too in the bluestone mill out of Carlton, the mill manager's office had an 1860s wallpaper in it. And I knew that because I found newspaper behind it from 1860.

Well, this one, I believe, came from a painter and decorator in Fitzroy, and was, I think, in the basement. That's probably why it's rather damaged. But still, it has survived.

So these are just probably not quite as good quality as those, I think, just by the paper, because I've got very interested in the paper that they're printed on as well as the designs.

But they're just the sort of things that, yes, would be in... anybody's house, and it's very interesting, the way they were designed.

They'd often have different flowers coming from these different species coming from the same stems, you know? It was a very uninhibited sort of design.

A lot of the papers we used, although they're very elaborate and flowery, they were used in quite an architectural way. The dado was usually darker and often used in a dining room.

And it was meant to sort of have the heavy darker furniture against it. And there is something interesting about that - it's designed so that if it's in the hall, it can go up the stairs, because it has this sort of all-over pattern, the top and the bottom, and yet that can be cut.

And then the panels sort of go up the stairs and follow the line, and then the frieze went around the top of the wall under the ceiling so it accentuated the ceiling.

And what else?

Sometimes panels with small borders around them. So it was very interesting, really, to me, the way they were used.

And they were very much fashions. You know, they changed perhaps in ten years' time to suddenly be all Art Nouveau, and the old designs would be out of date.

And that's why I found layers and layers, one on top of another.

Oh, well, this is where I keep them. I've got these ones numbered so I can find what I'm looking for.

A lot of these are just smaller samples that I've collected or been given, and I keep them in Mylar bags.

Sometimes I don't get a full repeat, and I have to piece it together - see? - and mend it.

Well, I think it's just told me such a lot about how people lived and what they had around them.

And it's most fascinating, and I love the designs, and I love the colours.

And people say, 'Which is your favourite?' but, really, I love them all.

Film - Tribal Media, 'The Arts and Crafts aesthetic', Heritage Victoria

One of the things that strikes people when they go into any of the arts and crafts houses is that they are, from our point, of view rather dark.

And when Peter Crone was restoring his own house, the Chadwick House, he discovered underneath all the white paint that in fact the original colour for the walls of the living areas was this teal green, which he's used to repaint them, and it's an incredibly beautiful colour.

And I was recently in a Usher and Camp house down at Murndal in the Western District, and looking at the original drawings of it, and they used that same colour, that same tealy, greeny-blue colour.

And I was talking to the owner, saying that's probably the colour that they envisaged the house to be painted. We have to go back and think about their aesthetic.

While they opened the houses out to the landscape, that notion of... of whiteness, of glare that we have, was alien to them. They lit their houses differently. There was not an all-over light that we have.

So, one of the things when I was talking to an interior designer once, in the Chadwick House, and we were talking about this and he was saying, 'Well, if you think about the lighting, it would have been spot lit. We wouldn't have had uniform lighting like we do. It would have been quite soft lighting.

And against these wonderful sort of greeny-blue walls... the fashion for collecting at that time was highly polished brass and things like Japanese Satsuma ware, which was gilded. So gilded things, things that shone, could shine in the dark.

And it was an aesthetic that came out of the late 19th century, so the houses did present an alternative to the... a relief, if you like, from the glare of the outside.

And when you go through the Chadwick House or any of these houses, really, which are designed in a sort of in a 360-degree manner, so that as you walk through the rooms, you can look at the landscape and you get a different landscape picture, if you like, from every window.

So they were relating to the landscape in that way, and there was easy access to the outside. But the interior, I think, was seen as a contrast, as a refuge from the landscape, if you like.

And it was a very rich, luscious interior. We've stripped our interiors of colour. Now they're monochrome. And we paint, we produce paintings to suit those interiors.

When you think of what they were collecting, the frames they used, gilded frames, even for modernist paintings, and I'm just thinking of their passion for... Middle Eastern metalware, and the sorts of metalware that they designed themselves - if you think about the fireplaces and the highly polished copper hoods and the fire dogs and so forth.

So everything was... There was a real aesthetic there, but I think we find it hard to deal with, because we're used to a very bright sort of relentless interior that shows everything all the time, and that's not the way... These houses were for exploring, I think.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Renovating Chadwick House', Heritage Victoria

I think when we moved here, we wanted to sort of set a bit of a pattern to what we would do.

This room, I suppose, being the major room... it was the focal point of our investigation. And it had unfortunately been stripped of all the redwood panelling. The fireplace was non-existent. There was a nasty sort of brick front to it.

And so it's really a matter of getting an idea of how the whole thing went together, so I made little holes in the plaster that had been put on the wall and did a series of drawings... scaled drawing through all the windows and the walls, the doors, so that I had a total understanding of how this whole thing went together.

And the interesting thing that came about from that is that... I discovered that the whole house was consistent in its detailing - what was in one room was the same in another, what was with one window was the same with every window.

So, and I suppose crawling around underneath the house, I found lots of pieces of wood. Fortunately, they were old scraps from fireplaces and bits of panelling, and they all yielded clues.

Up in the roof... The roof's interesting, because the windows are counter-balanced with the ropes that go up. They go up via a pulley, and then up along the pitch of the roof via another pulley. At the end of the rope is a little metal cage that houses a house brick, and that counter-balances the windows.

So you go up in the roof and there's this myriad of bricks hanging down. But where the windows had been - that had been taken out - they'd left the pulleys. So the pulleys were directly above that space between the studs, 'cause there's no actual frame - the windows just slide between the studs.

So that, again, has given me the clue exactly where the windows went, the sizes, you know, whether they were a two-bay window or a three-bay window.

And that led on to me doing the kitchen, which had had nasty windows put in, sort of 1950s windows.

I've done nearly all the work on the house. Certainly, all of the timberwork, and that included stripping and restoring the timber, but where it needed replacing, I've done that.

Particularly this room that we're sitting in, I had to redo all the panelling. It's 20 years of work.

Just this sitting room took over a year. So, yeah, it was fairly exhausting.

I basically went through a tech school and learned woodwork and learned lots of things, to use my hands. And that's just one of the joys of being here.

I don't think I could have had someone else come in and do it. The satisfaction is just so important to say, well, 'I've done this.' It's taken a long time.

It could well have been that we paid a lot more for the house than we anticipated, and therefore I couldn't afford to get someone in, but I think all through owning houses, I've always done the work on them.

I won't touch the electrical work, I won't touch the plumbing work... but pretty well everything else.

It's seeing... seeing your ideas come to reality. The built form is really exciting. I think that's the best part of it, because that proves that the creative process has worked.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Style and character in Edwardian architecture', Heritage Victoria

In the 1890s, there was more a specific influence from the English Queen Anne and medieval or revival styles, so you began to get gable ends finished like half-timbered buildings - that is, with straps running vertically in the gable end of the building.

And that is applied to single-storey houses, whereas in Britain it mostly applied to two-storeyed houses.

And so you get a rather distinctive form of asymmetrical, slightly medieval red-brick building design in the 1890s, which is what we normally think of as being Edwardian - although, as I say, it appears about ten years earlier - and that persists through until about World War I.

In internal terms, Edwardian houses tend to be, as on the outside, less elaborate.They tend to have more Art Nouveau character.

They tend to have wallpapers which are... often quite sombre in colour, but often involving rich, dark greens and so on. A lot of varnished timberwork.

The designs being... involving more diagonals in plan, provided things like hall seats on the angle. You get elaborate ventilating centre flowers, because you have now almost universal gas lighting until the electricity takes over, and they require ventilation above them.

You often have a picture rail, well below the ceiling height, which was the fashion of the time, often in stained timber.

Usually, the flooring is still... Almost always the flooring is still in carpets and linos which have borders, so the concept of a wall-to-wall finish is still not really common at all. Even linos have their own border around the edge, like a carpet.

And runners run upstairs, and steps with a border along the edge, and don't go right to the side of the stairs. And the surrounding area might be varnished heavily or indeed painted in a black or Japan colour.

In the Edwardian period, you tend to have a lot of use of sconce fittings, that is, bracket lights on the wall - partly because, until electricity comes in, it still was inconvenient to light gas at the centre of the room, although there were pneumatic switches developed which could do this, and they were used in the more elaborate houses.

The light fittings tend to have glasses, which have colours of graded pink and violet colours in them. The suspension fittings... some are made of brass - there was an arts and craft influence - and you get elaborate brass fittings, and they carry on into the early electrical designs as well.

The fashion for natural materials - arts and crafts and so on - gave rise too, at first, Japan black timberwork around fireplaces and then naturally finished timber taking over from marble.

Well, in the Edwardian period, the fireplace often has a timber surround of a somewhat Art Nouveau character, and is often tiled, and, very commonly, you have a complete tiled recess and the fire's made on a hob, an iron hob, standing within the fireplace. And so you find these totally clean, crisp tiles because the fire was isolated from it, as opposed to the Victorian fireplace.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Californian Bungalows and their Gardens', Heritage Victoria

The Californian bungalow in its setting... did try to merge into its environment, into its landscape, rather than stand out from it, so that the pathways were more likely to be an S-shape running from the gateway rather than axially on line to the front door.You had... Certainly the larger areas, people were able to plant.

In other words, the ordinary suburban dweller that didn't have a lot of land to create a garden in, was now able to think about it and think about it in the round, in the sense that it was a detached house - like, landscaped all around it - and then there was the motorcar, which had to be also accommodated on the block, so that you had a driveway running down beside the house and out the front gate.

So there's a lot of... Instead of there being a front and a back, there was a lot of infiltration of the landscape running down the side of the house and out the back which linked the bungalow design to the outbuildings as well as garden character.

And, typically, people would have privet hedges along the front of the block - possibly as a reaction to the fact that, along with the great town-planning ideals of making the street a communal garden, rather than fencing each lot off and leaving just a bare road between, was the idea that fences should be transparent, so the fences in the bungalow period were typically wire fabric.

But, with that transparency, people felt that they then had to put an evergreen hedge along the back of it. And so you had the privet hedge, on the one hand, or, for those who wanted the ultimate privacy, the cypress hedge.

The privet hedge was archetypal, along with the wire fabric fence, for your typical bungalow, and then there would be the rose-lined pathway up to the front door. And that was the ultimate.

When entering a Californian bungalow... some of the early ones were very informal, in the sense that you walked straight into the living room without any form of passageway at all, which was quite different to Federation houses or Victorian houses.

But your more typical suburban bungalows, you would arrive into... go up onto the porch, or the front verandah, and past your brick piers with their stone cappings, and walk through into what was usually a timber-lined passageway which would be panelled up to door head height or the top of the door, and either side of you would be double doors, glazed, and one would go into the dining room, the other would go into the living room.

And from there, you'd proceed on to the kitchen and potentially bedrooms fanning off that entranceway. So it was a little bit different from the previous styles, and certainly the passage itself had less emphasis and didn't bisect the house as it did in the Victorian period, but some of that informal planning had already been underway in the Edwardian period.

The bungalow took it that much further in the sense that it, in some cases, did away completely with the passageway - you just went straight into the front room.

The interior of the bungalow is sometimes thought to be... Well, I think I've heard someone say that it was dark and dingy.

But I think this idea is probably taken from the architect-designed bungalows, which, because they had the money and the time, they created very large timber-lined interiors, which would, in other words, be lined interiors over and above the passageway.And that wasn't necessarily done in your typical suburban bungalow, because the timberwork, which was typically stained and lacquered plywood, set into a panel.

And so, apart from that, you really had plaster everywhere - fibrous plaster and the archetypal jelly-mould type ceiling pieces, the centrepieces that had that geometric design that people now call Art Deco.

But then it was part of, perhaps, the Australian approach to the interior decoration of the bungalows apart from the American approach which still had Spanish mission overtones and a ton of timber in there.

We tended to go more for the plaster look, and with, of course, the plate rail, potentially, or a picture rail running around at door head height and all the timberwork stained and lacquered.

The interior of the bungalow also introduced other newfangled things, like the electric radiant heaters and gas radiant heaters that would be set into fireplaces. The coal fire or the wood fire was thrown away... in most cases.

Out the back, you would have the two-firewood stove, which might be a Lux stove, cast iron in construction. And there might be a water heater set beside it in a pressed-metal-lined alcove.

The kitchen would be tiled, there'd be the scrubbed timber benches with the white porcelain sinks set into them, the big Shanks taps.

All of those characteristics that you think of - the fireplace in the kitchen would have the high mantle, obviously, for cooking on top of your stove.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Art Deco objects and architecture', Heritage Victoria

The relationship between objects and house architecture comes through in a number of ways, one of which is the materials that were used for some of those objects.

So, as well as fabric of the house being used, being designed in glass and metal, we see a lot of the objects in those materials as well.

There's also... A lot of the objects were very, very simple in their form, but they also represented changes.

So we see vases, we see... little decorative items such as animals, polar bears, etc, but redesigned, remodelled, if you like, so that they're a series of planes rather than soft and cuddly.

We also see a lot of internal lamps that were redesigned, and a lot of that came from Holland and Germany, 'cause this was in the era where all ornamentation, both in architecture and in objects, was being stripped away, so there were simple, elegant lines that were coming through from the smallest object up to the largest sculpture.

The style has gone in and out of fashion over the years. There's no doubt about that. Some of that's about how much of it is actually available.

But as far as architecture and places to live, it's relatively timeless, particularly in areas like St Kilda and Elwood, where a building in Art Deco style is actually a major feature that a real estate agent will concentrate on as a selling point.

So there's... I mean, who can ever work out what causes fashions to change?

But our members tell us that they're attracted to these buildings and have been attracted to these buildings for a long time.

One of the strengths of Art Deco is that it's across all of the items that we live with, and it's across a whole range of areas, such as graphics, jewellery, appliances, furniture design and fashion, dance, art, photography.

All of those things and more are affected by the restyling, the ethos that said things need to be simpler and easier to produce.

Because it was also very much a recovering world in a capitalist environment. And there was a great emphasis on sale and production of goods for sale.

And, in fact, the 1925 Exposition in Paris was designed for consumers as much as the artists of the day.

There was simplicity and paring back in materials and in the architecture and in the objects, but, at the same time, it was, for many people, quite a joyous era where they were trying to escape the memories of the horrors of the war and also of the Depression.

So, in the '30s when the economy started to pick up and there were more jobs available, people were receptive... to having a good time.

And one of the areas that we see that, particularly in Melbourne, was the dancehalls. There were numerous dancehalls, many of them in Art Deco styling. And this was a wonderful way for people to get together and have a good time.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Art Deco Architects', Heritage Victoria

There were a number of prominent architects who worked in Melbourne in the Art Deco era.

One of them as prominent was Harry Norris, who designed Mitchell House in Elizabeth Street, but is best known for his domestic commission at Sherbrooke called 'Burnham Beeches', which is a classic example of what's known as nautical moderne styling.

So it has ship's railings and it has portholes and it's a large property. It's currently being restored.

Another prominent architect was Marcus Barlow, and he designed primarily commercial buildings, and probably two of his most prominent ones are Manchester Unity and the Century Building in Swanson Street, commonly known as the 'Barlow Bookends'.

Another prominent architect was IG Anderson, and he was mainly responsible for blocks of flats around the city, and he was very popular with developers.

He worked fast and he worked... not cheap, but he kept to a budget. And he's responsible for some notable blocks around, such as Ostend on the beach at Brighton and also an enclave called 'Garden Court' in East Melbourne, a whole fully retained little cul-de-sac full of Art Deco blocks of flats.

Probably another one that had a major influence was Norman Seabrook, and he was responsible for the design of MacRob Girls in South Melbourne, which really set the scene for a lot of public buildings and factories for the next decade.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Design of homes in the Post-war period', Heritage Victoria

Hello, I'm Phillip Goad. I'm Professor of Architecture here in the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne.

Architecture is one of those wonderful things to teach, because building and designing is one of those great optimistic activities, and so architecture I think is just a fantastic thing to be teaching, and to take students out to see what's being built around us.

I guess I always am excited by seeing buildings which excite me. And so, I have a passion for buildings, and, in particular, houses, and I never cease to be amazed at how excited I am going to see, in particular, really fabulous recent Australian houses and, in particular, those of the post-war period.

I think the post-war period was really interesting because it was a time - this is the war, the war years - were essentially times of great hardship, rationing, shortages of building materials, shortages of labour and the like.

And because of that, after the war, there was an incredible sense of optimism, and I think a capacity of sort of can-do and experiment.

And, in the architectural world, this meant that young architects were free to experiment with exciting new shapes and, in particular, exciting new ways of actually describing how a family might live in the suburbs.

At the same time, you have the rise of speculative home builders, who were also interested in taking advantage of mechanised building techniques, new materials and so on.

So it's a really exciting time, and a number of us have talked about it being an unfinished experiment. There were so many things that were going on in the '50s that we haven't taken advantage of.

And I think what is quite extraordinary about that post-war period is that many of the things - like plenty of natural sunlight, the open-plan - have continuing relevance, and also too, at that time, you had very exciting things, like paint companies developing a whole new range of paint colours and people being, if you like, after World War II, being prepared to embrace things like sunlight and outdoor living.

Well, if we describe the style of the post-war architect-designed house, a flat roof was all the rage or the butterfly roof or the skillion roof. And this was a radical challenge, if you like, to the dominance of the hipped roof, the hipped terracotta tile roof.

And because, after World War II, there was a shortage of building materials, like brick and clay, it meant that there was a justified release for not having to use brick or terracotta tiles.

And so, you tended to have expansive areas of glass, unadorned wall surfaces, bright colours and flat roofs. It was really the house moving into ideas of abstraction and another... different, new images for what the house might look like.

In a city like Melbourne, you had wonderful opportunity to build these new houses in new subdivisions. In places like Beaumaris, Moorabbin, you do a sort of circumference around Melbourne - Ringwood, Box Hill, particularly in the Eastern suburbs, and suburbs like North Balwyn, Bulleen as well, are the great sort of post-war expansion areas for suburbs.

I think the influence in that post-war growth of subdivisions was that it was accompanied by the building of new schools, new kindergartens.

Previously, if you sent your children to kindergarten in the '30s, you were not terribly well-off. So the whole rise of the middle-class community building, like the kindergarten, the local swimming pool... to a degree, the maternal health and welfare centre, had an enormous expansion, the local library, after World War II.

So those, if you like, new civic buildings accompanied these... post-war expansion of the suburbs. And it was a pretty exciting time. And, in particular, in the '60s when Australia was more affluent, then these post-war houses expand in size.

You have the addition of the rumpus room, the playroom. The idea of the ensuite is something that parents can now afford and want, and the TV room became part of everyday living.

As opposed to immediately after the war where there were restrictions on house size until 1952. You couldn't build a house above 10 or 12 squares.

So, as the '50s progressed, as Australia became richer, and into the '60s, you have this growth of material culture.

Chadstone gets built in 1962.

The growth of the suburban shopping centres as well aids this incredible suburban expansion.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Homes built for Post-war living', Heritage Victoria

The kitchen becomes the undoubted centre of the world in the post-war house.

One of the great things that happens is that the stove and the fridge go from cream to white. There's this new colour change.

Stainless steel sinks are now de rigueur - they're common as opposed to being something of a novelty during the 1930s. And you have an increasing focus on the kitchen as not only the, if you like, control centre for the house but it also becomes increasingly the social centre.

And so you have the kitchen having direct access, open access to where meals are served as opposed to a separate dining room. It's in this post-war period that the idea of the kitchen-dining room becomes a unified space.

The kitchen-dining room, family room becomes a unified space, and that's what we know as incredibly common today - of where we live, we also eat and we also cook.

And that notion, which we take for granted, is really a post-war invention.

There's no doubt that, after World War II, there was an incredible reassertion or reconfirmation of traditional gender-based division in the household.

Dad went to work, Mum stayed at home in the kitchen, and that was, if you like... some might say quite a regressive step, when, during the war, many women were able to enter the workforce with ease because many of the men were overseas in military service.

So, after the war, when you have this need for the re-education of returned servicemen, an incredible housing shortage, an amazing baby boom that's about to take place, the gender-based divisions of work and labour really reassert themselves.

And I think that that's actually accentuated by the kitchen becoming this sort of centre of consumption for the house and also the rise of television.

The home becomes a private entertainment centre as well as the sort of private consumption centre.

And there's incredibly concentrated efforts in the '50s and '60s of the home really replacing many of the sort of public-realm functions.

I think this increase in consumption meant that there was an increase too in home entertainment, so you had living rooms that opened onto back gardens and the rise of the swimming pool - not as being a luxury item, but something that the middle class could afford.

And you had progressive dinner parties at home rather than dining out, and these were probably competitive progressive dinner parties.

But you also had this idea of home entertainment being indoor and outdoor so that you could go from the living room or the family room to the outdoor patio, and there wasn't this, if you like, neglect of the backyard - it now became a back garden.

And so the rear of the house now looked directly onto a garden and there was direct interaction, rather than it being where the laundry or the back door... You might have had an outdoor toilet, for example.

These were often at the back of the house in the 1930s, no longer in the 1950s and 1960s.

You had your private home entertainment outdoor space at the back as well.

The kitchen really saw gadgets like Magimix... the Mixmaster and so on, and these high-tech objects - new forms of toasters.

And where in the '30s they'd been streamlined, now they became almost sort of space age in their design.

And, of course, you have to remember the '50s is the age of Sputnik - 1957 - and so there is this romance of space and... technological, if you like, progress.

And so the television is part of that. New designs for telephones into the '60s.

We would move from the Bakelite telephone into the plastic telephone by the 1960s and so on and so forth. And it's the same you can see on the motorcar - we have sort of rocket fins on the backs of Holdens in the 1950s and early 1960s, and they progress through into the 1970s.

The other interesting aspect to this idea of technology is the role of the carport and the garage.

The carport comes to be... In the 1930s, the garage was discretely down the side of the house.

You would have a driveway with a little grass strip where the oil could drop discretely but not stain the concrete. By the early 1960s, the carport had really brought the car into the open, and the car was displayed to the street.

You owned the latest Falcon or latest Valiant. And it was on show, and if you had two of them in the driveway, that was even greater status symbol.

One of the interesting aspects of the car and domestic design was that it now became an expectation potentially for the lady of the household to drive - to drive to the supermarket, come home, get the bags of shopping from the car and be able to go directly under cover from the carport to the front door.

It was about convenience. And this is, I think, actually one of the interesting aspects of the '60s - this idea of convenience, access from the car to the front door, and the closest distance between the car and the kitchen generally was what was being examined closely.

And in some houses, you find that the kitchens are actually brought to the front of the house to actually decrease that distance between carport and kitchen.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Introduction to Robin Boyd', Heritage Victoria

My name's Tony Lee. I'm an architect, and I work with the Robin Boyd Foundation.

The foundation was established two years ago. The reason for establishing the foundation was really to promote the work of Boyd, who's Australia's most significant architect in many people's eyes.

Robin worked from the late '40s through to 1971, when he died, during which time he was responsible for a lot of very innovative design, particularly in housing, that has led the agenda for many of the houses we live in today.

But Robin was quite unique in that he was also very active in the broader community in talking about design and promoting good design, so he was a public educator.

So the foundation was established, really, to continue the work that Robin was doing in promoting the benefits of design to the broader community, and making sure that a house like this could be retaining perpetuity as an example of the best of the work of the '50s and '60s.

TONY LEE: We're currently sitting in what's known as the Robin Boyd House II or 290, Walsh Street, South Yarra. It was a house that Robin designed for his family in 1957.

It was built in 1958, and the family moved in in '59. As I said, it's the second house that Robin designed for himself, the first being in Camberwell, which was a very small, basic house they lived in just after they were married.

And this house came about when Robin and his wife, Patricia, came back from the US, where Robin had been lecturing at MIT, and they decided they wanted to live closer to the city.

So they wanted an inner urban house, and Robin designed this house.

This is a very unique house in that it embodies a lot of the principles that Robin Boyd was so keen to develop and promote.

It's a modern house. It displays incredibly innovative planning.

It's an open-plan house that reflects today's living needs more so than the living needs of the '50s.

Incredible use of materials, very, very simple, elemental design detailing and just a wonderful space to be in.

It has an incredible courtyard, which is an integral part of the house, which becomes an external living environment - which, again, is an aspect of Robin's work that's pretty unique in the days, which was controlling the external space to be part of the living space of the house.

One of the key elements of Robin's design that transpired over his whole career was the notion of platforms for living within a volume.

So he developed this series of platforms that had different activities within the larger volume of the house. It all feels like it's part of one single volume.

The house is essentially two pavilions, and there's an incredible story as to how those pavilions came about.

Boyd had designed a new house for himself and his family here at the front of the site. It was a three-storey volume. And the design was virtually completed, it was in for planning permit approval.

Robin was finishing the work off.

During school holidays, the kids were running around the house that he was working in, and the activity and the noise, he found really disturbing.

He threw those drawings away and started again and designed the house as two separate units - one, the formal living area for himself and his wife and secondly, a wing for the children, so they were quite separate.

And the children refer to that as the 'Far End'. It was visible from this pavilion and linked by bells, but they were discrete, separate buildings on either side of this incredible courtyard.

In order to live comfortably in such an open environment, one had to be very aware of the other people in the house and work comfortably with them. Otherwise, it would be total chaos.

Downstairs, we have a space that is what would today be called the family room.

There's a living area, there's a TV, stereo, there's a formal dining area and open to that, there's also a combined kitchen and laundry.

The kitchen is a galley kitchen - which, again, is very similar to what many people are designing and living in today.

There's an incredible photograph taken by Mark Strizic in the early '60s of Robin's wife, Patricia, standing in the kitchen, and the photograph was used as an advertisement for the Gas and Fuel Corporation, and the caption on the time was 'The modern woman's ideal kitchen'.

The whole house is incredibly progressive. When we walk through it today, it feels very comfortable and very familiar. But when you think that the house was actually designed 50 years ago, it's incredibly progressive and quite radical for its time.

Because at the time it was built, most people's houses consisted of individual cells - one for the kitchen, one for the laundry, one for the dining room, etc.But this house basically exploded all of those cells into one single, combined volume, which was an open-plan space like most of our houses are today.

Film - Tribal Media, 'Boyd and Modernism', Heritage Victoria

I think Boyd was a functional modernist.

He was also a very emotive modernist in that his work exhibits all of the aspects of modernism that most people, or most architects, are renowned for.

There's an honest use of materials, there's very open planning, that reflects sort of lifestyle.

But where Boyd was different to many of the other people of his era, he had an innate understanding of his client's aspirations and lifestyles.

So he designed the houses that really reflected what people wanted.

And quite often, it's interesting, when you're talking with people who commissioned a house from Boyd, they'll say that he delivered what they wanted, but he then took them beyond that into places they didn't really anticipate going.

But he knew how far to push each particular client and work within their expectations and allowances, which was very unique.

It'd be very hard to attribute one house to Boyd as his most successful.

Over his career of 30 years, there's quite a number of outstanding houses - Walsh Street, this house, being one of them.

There's also the Featherston House, which he designed in Ivanhoe for friends and colleagues Grant and Mary Featherston.

There's a wonderful house in Kew called the 'Haughton James House'.

There's quite an incredible body of work that Robin undertook, and, in their own ways, many of these houses are quite exceptional.

I always feel it's incredibly special sitting in this house of Robin's because one just gets such an appreciation of the work that Robin undertook and what he was trying to do in terms of creating a beautiful but functional living environment.