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GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN #19
Jarvis House
5 Coral Avenue, Beaumaris
This smart but long-vanished little number is another sterling example of what can happen when an enlightened client colludes with an enlightened builder without the intermediary interference of an actual architect. Before settling in Beaumaris in the late 1950s, medico Dr Barry Jarvis and wife Lorna were self-confessed “house-watchers” who pored over glossy home magazines from many lands, cast a critical eye over just about every house they ever encountered IRL, and kept fastidious notebooks of any layouts or details that happened to take their fancy.
So, who needs an architect anyway? When the Jarvises came to build a house for themselves in Coral Avenue, they took their bulging minds and bulging sketchbooks to builder Lindsay Burghard (1921-1972), himself a relative newcomer to Beaumaris but one who had already established himself as a talented designer/builder of local dwellings. For the Jarvises, Burghard rose effortless to the occasion with a flat-roofed brick house on a zany J-shaped plan that incorporated the fashionable full-width glass-walled gallery space opening onto a crazy-paved terrace with a no-less-crazy polygonal fishpond.
But that’s not the half of it. Drawing from the Jarvis’ metaphorical and actual catalogue of homebuilding hints, the house incorporated all sorts of quirky details. One aspires to have been a fly on the wall of those client/builder meetings: “Hey Lindsay, we want a front door with a wide rendered surround, OK? And the living and dining rooms must be separated by a multi-paned window wall with built-in shelving to chair rail height. Is that a problem? We want an open plan kitchen but don’t want our dinner guests being able to peer into it … how about a swinging half-door so Wifey can see out but they can’t see in? Oh, and she wants a strip heater under the counter to keep her feet warm. And by the way, a kitchen isn’t a kitchen without a tea-towel drying rack, pigeon-holes for cake tins and set of concealed steps that can be folded out so that we can reach the high cupboards”. And that was just for starters.
Clearly, builder Burghard never rolled even one eye at these or any other wild caprices, as the house duly incorporated all that the Jarvises desired. While the house went on to grace the front cover of a certain populist home journal, the couple and their two sons resided therein for only a few years, later relocating to a more conventional cream-brick pile on Beach Road. Alas, their former home in Coral Avenue, once heralded in print as “a house worth watching”, was demolished in the early 2000's when someone looked the other way.
Research and text by Simon Reeves ... See MoreSee Less
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