Single Fronted

Terrace gardens observed: Richmond, Vic

There should be some technology that offers the passer-by a timelapse of the passing buildings; a quick sequence of images unfolding to tell the tale from construction to the present.

That said, those images alone would be a poor substitute for a full history, of place and people mapped over time. A house would be nothing if not for the people in it.

We come and go into these buildings, and they flex and change around us. Often as not they are reflections of a moment, of our heritage and taste. Of birth and death. Hope, and grim determination.

When did the window change here? Some gesture to modernity, perhaps, prising out the timber sash for this triptych framed in slim-line aluminium. The faux-stone timber cladding: surely not original but an aspirational makeover? The delicate wrought iron veranda posts must have replaced far less decorous, less lightly elegant wood.

This whole front is a statement of intent, to lift this home a step or two in style and grace beyond the routine Victoriana of the flanking cottages.

What was the thinking? Who hatched this plan? What inspiration did they draw on? Were eyebrows raised?

The precise lines of the glazed terracotta boundary make a bolder impression than the picket fence those bricks probably replaced. Then the pebbled terrazzo of the ‘garden’, a poured concrete border and perfectly set square steps ... but not steps, just punctuation in the wash of gravel. This is a small triumph of sterile form, an antidote to the wandering mysteries of nature, a place stripped of leafy life or its possibility. Was it done for show or to savour the absence of effort? The effect is to salute the fashionable oddities of the late mid-twentieth century, a time so in the thrall of minimalist modernity that a front yard could be made over to echo the formica laminates within.

The execution is so prefect, so witheringly precise that it stands the test of subsequent decades, as stonily pristine now as it must have been when those pebbles were raked into the geometric gaps between the concrete and the screen door first opened on this proudly sculpted desert.