21 August 2025
This trio in Yarra Street Hawthorn looks like they might be San Francisco! With those tall thin proportions complete with towers, they’re quite unusual for Melbourne- another place I knew of but had never actually seen.
If you look closely you can see that they’re all the same plan, but with different colour bricks, window forms and tower tops. I like the first one the most, it’s more elaborate, especially that bell cast tower with cast iron cresting.
They were built in c1891, after the skating rink that was there before burned down, perhaps explaining the very long thin blocks. They were designed by John Beswicke, the prolific architect who lived in Hawthorn, and built for the Albert Building Society; he also designed the great three storey brick shops in Auburn Road, and the Beswicke Building in Brunswick Street for them.
His stuff could be ordinary but he often went off in sometimes unusual directions, like these three.
They were all divided into flats in the early 20th century, looked rather shabby, but along with the Shakespeare Grove area adjacent were heritage listed in the late 70s (I think), and since then all three have been restored and renovated, they’ve even got matching fences.
The central one is the most intact (real estate pics), with no rear extensions, and the tuckpointing was reinstated in 2022.
The architects for the restoration of the end one that was missing it’s tower roof contacted me to say they based the new roof on other Beswicke houses, and fair enough – it would definitely have been different to the other tower roofs.
Storey of Melbourne 