TOORAK

Milne House, Toorak, designed by Robin Boyd, has a price guide of $3.85 million to $4.2 million.

JONATHAN CHANCELLOR

Pure and simple

The stylishly simplistic Milne House in Toorak remains a legacy of the revered mid-century modern architect Robin Boyd.

It was completed in 1970, just before Boyd’s death in 1971 at age 52, reflecting his holding to functionalist precepts rather than the more popular featurism aspects of architecture.

The recently listed and niftily renovated home ranks as one of the last of 200 homes Boyd designed mostly across Victoria.

Split into its pioneering two wings, its accommodation quarters has four bedrooms, one a master with marble ensuite. There are two living areas at the Glenbervie Road house, which was designed for pharmacists Ian and Patricia Milne in the late 1960s.

It sits on 650sq m within the former 1.5ha Ingleburn estate of the Guest biscuit family, which had taken the name from the Guests’ prior Finch Street, East Malvern, home called Ingleburn.

William Guest, the biscuit company chairman, was Victoria’s commissioner of titles for 20 years and, for 14 years, lectured in property law at Melbourne University.

It was in the 1920s Guest undertook the initial subdivision, selling land to Charles Ruwolt, who built what was later to become the initial Toorak Teachers College premises.

Following his 1932 death, and further subdivision, Ingleburn became the home of surgeon George Scantlebury and his wife, Lilian, who helped oversee the development of the Australian Red Cross Society scheme to train members to cope with natural disasters and civil-defence emergencies. There were progressive Ingleburn subdivisions, the most recent four lots coming a year after the 1965 death of Ernest Wagstaff, manager of the Australian subsidiary of British Imperial Oil Company.

Their three-day house contents auction in February 1966, including a 23 inch television, attracted newspaper headlines.

The bulk of the Wagstaff probated £506,736 estate, provided incomes for nieces and nephews in England until their deaths; then the principal was shared between the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind.

The Milnes sold the all-white Robin Boyd home in 1974 for $116,000 having bought the building block for $18,595 in 1966.

It last sold for $2.225 million in 2014.

Kay & Burton South Yarra agents Michael Gibson and Robert Fletcher have a $3.85 million to $4.2 million guide, with offers closing March 16.

Its pavilion style zones resonate with buyers some five decades on. Ditto the compact courtyard that brings the outside inside. And there’s the curious use of cork boards for its ceilings. Boyd opted for a home with strikingly tall bagged brick walls for the home, one of just two of his home designs in Toorak.

There’s also the Richardson House designed in 1955 on Blackfriars Close. In nearby South Yarra, it’s hard to miss Domain Park, the Robin Boyd-designed time-capsules in the architect’s 1962 apartment block, which took high-rise living much higher than the usual parkside three storeys.

And, of course, 250 Walsh Street, the house Boyd designed for his family in 1957, now the headquarters of the Robin Boyd Foundation, co-directed by granddaughter Amy Boyd.

Walsh Street was bought from Boyd’s widow Patricia Davies in 2006 shortly after the foundation was established.

The talented, innovative architect once forthrightly noted, “all the founders of modern architecture disparaged the terrible buildings that were done in the name of art and creativity throughout the 19th century. They had to fight the ornament, the contrived symmetry and fakery of popular buildings to clear the way for a true architecture.”

His 1960 book, The Australian Ugliness, suggested “most Australian children grow up on lots of steak, sugar, and depressing deformities of nature and architecture.”

The book attacked the Sydney Harbour Bridge for “its entirely redundant pylons built as features to camouflage the honest steel.” Then adding, “they may be the crowning achievement of Australian Featurism, but the pylons differ only in scale, not in principle, from most things on three million Australian mantelpieces.”

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