February 2026

This remarkable house in Ivanhoe popped up on Facebook in a rather good photo by David Landis-Morse – with those cubic volumes and flats roofs it’s very European Modernist, rarely seen in houses in Melbourne – so I spent a pleasant hour researching something I only vaguely knew about.

Built in 1937, it’s on a corner of Melcombe Road, which was created as part of the Beaumont Estate, the third venture by Bert Jennings – who pioneered the creation of whole subdivisions with roads, houses, plantings, all complete, ready to sell. He employed just one architect, Edgar Gurney, and on this estate he designed the houses in variations of Old English or Moderne. And this one, the most striking, was his own. It only had two small rooms upstairs, always intended to be extended, but it was pretty unchanged until c2010, when it got a rather unfortunate grey box on the back.

Pics 6, 7 and 8 are other Modernist houses he did both here and in other suburbs. I’d say he was possibly directly influenced by the work of Mewton & Grounds / they did a number of pioneering cubic cream brick houses like the 1935 one in Essendon, pic 8, as well as the 1936 flats in St Kilda West, though boxy brick designs were in all the magazines by then. Pic 2 is Robin Grow from the @admsa_inc magazine in 2005, pic 3 is from Building Magazine, 1942. The next is from streetview. The rest the internet, last one mine.

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