Burnham Beeches (Australia)

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Burnham Beeches was a house built by Alfred Nicholas in the late 1920s and 30s in the Dandenong Ranges, 40 kilometres from Melbourne, on Sherbrooke Road, Sherbrooke, Victoria, Australia.

Nicholas had been co-developer of the aspirin known as ‘Aspro’. The property was apparently named with reference to the English National Forest of Beech trees in the County of Buckinghamshire. The United Kingdom Aspro factory was nearby.

Nicholas visited the Chelsea Flower Show in 1929, obtained many plants and engaged a cornishman, Percival Trevaskis to do the landscaping.

The architect commissioned by Nicholas was Harry Norris. Norris had toured Europe and America in 1929 under the commission of G J Coles in order to discover the latest elements in chain-store design and construction before he finalised the plans for the Bourke Street, Melbourne Store, Coles Store No. 12. Nicholas and Norris were neighbours in Melbourne and Nicholas engaged Norris to design a house with the brief that it was to have “fresh air, sunshine and an outlook of command, yet under control”.

Norris’s design was a three-storey mansion in the Art Deco, or more specifically the Streamline Moderne, style. The house was completed in 1933. The lines are said to be reminiscent of an ocean liner. The zig-zag motif was used as decoration on the decorative wrought iron work and the balcony balustrades. The exterior of the house was reinforced concrete, painted white and decorated with Australian motifs of koalas and possums in moulded relief panels.

A contemporary journal article wrote that the house included a “private theaterette with talkie equipment”, an “electric pipe-organ” in the music room, orchid houses, a dairy with “prize Jersey cows”, and the gardens included artificial waterfalls, a lake and floodlighting at night.

Nicholas died in 1937.

In 1941, during World War II, the house was loaned as a children’s hospital. After the war from 1948-50 it was redecorated by Nicholas’s widow. Mrs Nicholas moved from the house to Toorak in Melbourne in 1954. Two additional wings called the Garden and Forest wings were constructed during the 1950-1960s.

From 1955, the Nicholas Institute used the house as a research facility. The gardens were donated to the Shire of Sherbrooke in 1965 and had been named the ‘Alfred Nicholas Memorial Gardens’. The gardens were transferred to the Forest Commission of Victoria in 1973. In 1981 the house was sold. It was restored to operate as a small hotel. The hotel closed down in the 1990s and the house was unused since 1992 and as at 2005 the main building had fallen into disrepair. In 2004 council applications were lodged for restoration of the house and development as tourist accommodation. It was owned at the time by Burnham Beeches Retirement Living Pty Ltd. In 2005 the buildings were unused apart from a caretaker's cottage.

[edit] References

• (c. 1989) Burnham Beeches Country House: the first sixty years (pamphlet). Sherbrooke, Victoria, Australia: Burnham Beeches Country House Estate. 

[edit] External links

• Burnham Beeches, Sherbrooke Road Sassafras, 1930 - 33. Modern in Melbourne 1; Melbourne Architecture 1930 - 1950; Harry Norris. RMIT. Retrieved on 2006-02-02. includes photographs taken in 2000 after several years where the house was unused.
• Shire of Yarra Ranges, Council Meeting Tuesday, 26 July 2005 Agenda (pdf). Yarra Ranges Shire Council (2005). Retrieved on 2006-02-02.
• Burnham Beeches, Sherbrook, Victoria. Preservation News. Art Deco Society (2005). Retrieved on 2006-02-02.