Fedeterranean Houses
These homes are found in every street in Marrickville. They're mostly owned by people who came to Australia from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s. A mix of Federation and Mediterranean aesthetics, they are a striking hybrid of architectural styles. Columns, stone lions, statues, terracotta tiling, palm trees and/or clipped conifers, olive & citrus trees, variations on the "Marrickville aegean blue" paint, arches, brick cladding... have all been added to the facades of sedate early twentieth-century homes that feature (or featured once) tuckpointing, coloured window glass, tesselated tiling, agave plants & camellia hedges. I plan a series of postings on this theme but to begin here are two fine examples of the column feature.
5 comments:
Personally I think this is an excellent subject for a blog post, so I can't understand why there are no comments yet. I've been watching...
We don't have these sort of structures in Campsie, as far as I've been able to tell. There are a couple of McMansions across the street from me as I write, but the ethnic influence is not visibly noticed here, in my suburb.
Marrickville is only a couple of stones' throws away, but the ethnoscape seems to be different. In Campsie there are basic brick bungalows and blocks of brick flats. That's about it.
Hi Dean,
Isn't it interesting how things can change so dramatically over the course of a couple of kilometres. Doesn't Campsie have all those fantastic Korean neon signs?
The guy who had my flat before I bought it was Greek and he painted the inside blue. It's still blue -- I've only been here six months. But I know what you mean about colours.
Yes there are many Chinese and Korean signs and a few are neon, but I'm not often in the shopping centre at night so I haven't really noticed.
I love these houses! And your neologism is beautiful, too.
I used to live in Enmore, and the Marrickville side featured plenty of these - there were some absloute crackers around Enmore park.
And my sister in law lives at the Canterbury end of Campsie - where there's a few fedeterranean gems in the back streets
This has been a so interesting ..I appreciate your effort..
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