Friday, July 23, 2010

Day tripping on the edge of the Yarra Valley.





Actually, it's not really a day trip for me, more of a 15 minute drive up the road.

Back in April, the Robin Boyd foundation held an open day of some significant Boyd designed houses. As I'm not a member of the Boyd Foundation, I had no idea that this was on and only found out about it after reading it over at Modernist Australia. My disappointment at missing this event turned to surprise when I read the suburbs that these houses were situated. Lilydale, Ringwood East, Warrandyte and Research. Ringwood East is the suburb next door to mine and it turns out that the Patrick Hegarty house is around the corner from a friend of mine. When I drove past the other day I was going to take a photo, but the weather had other ideas. And the Stanley Blott house in Lilydale is actually in Chirnside Park on the cusp of Lilydale. And it's only 15 minutes up the road.
I drove up there yesterday (I say up as it's high on top of the hill, overlooking the Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges) and managed to get a few photos of not only the Stanley Blott house, but some other wonderful houses that were built sometime in the 60's or 70's. The whole area is a real mishmash of houses, with a lot of redbrick 70's and 80's houses, some flat-roofed styles from the 50's and 60's and the odd McMansion springing up.
I didn't go searching for the homes in Warrandyte or Research as both of those areas are heavily treed and I doubt they would be visible from the roadside.

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