Timeless Living with Tim Ross
Tim Ross is currently touring the country with his live show The Australian Dream?, which features a film about the Merchant Builder’s development Winter Park. He also uses his popular @modernister Instagram account to promote his passion for Australian design, previously showcased in his ABC TV shows Designing A Legacy and Streets Of Your Town.
What sets Winter Park apart as a housing project?
The houses on their own are wonderful, and I remember them vividly as a kid growing up in Mount Eliza in Victoria because there were lots of them around, the display homes were popping up, and people I knew were living in them.
They became the backdrop for anyone my age across Melbourne and they’ve always stayed with me. Winter Park adds to the initial idea of a great house being the hero by positioning them in a way that enables a holistic way of living with a little more public space that embraces the landscape in a way that we sometimes avoid. It has become a time capsule of space and place but it remains thoroughly modern in so many ways. Strangely enough, having it small scale makes it very contemporary today because a lot of people are having to swap to smaller spaces and smaller homes, so when that kind of living is done well – which Merchant Builders certainly did – it becomes more relevant than ever.
Winter Park is cluster housing in Doncaster - four groups of five houses with a large communal park. What are the advantages of this compared to a traditional quarter acre block?
Instead of carving everyone up into their own quarter acre, with this particular model you end up with just as many homes but there is more shared space. You still have a backyard and a front yard but it’s a little smaller, as you are receiving all that extra communal area. You can have a sense of community and age well there into your 70s and 80s because you have people to talk to and you don’t feel lonely. That there are older residents in Winter Park is testament to how successful it is as housing because people don’t want to move. But while there is a sense of community you don’t people up in your grill; it provides that casual connectiveness that people need, in the same way you feel like you’re friends with your barista. You don’t have to visit people in their homes or do anything social with them, but you can find meaning in the smallest of interactions in the communal areas.
What do you think of the interiors by Janne Faulkner of Nexus Designs?
One of the really exciting things about working on the Winter Park project was the unearthing of the archive and certainly one of the most important ways they sold the buildings was their interiors, which hold up so well today. I just drooled over the images and wish I could have put more of them in the film. At some stage Merchant Builders were getting actors from La Mama and the Pram Factory to come along and be in some of the display villages pretending to be families so people could walk in and interact with them. I think by most peoples’ standards if you looked at the interiors today they seem more contemporary than a lot of other interiors at the time as they are considered and thoughtful. Some of the furniture is incredibly timeless, and in some homes there is a slightly country style mixing with contemporary furniture, and that’s showing an intelligent understanding that people’s tastes were varied; a lot of houses from the 50s and 60s had the most modern furniture going on, but the build simply didn’t live up to it. A lot of people look at Mid Century houses on Instagram and say they love them but they really just love the chair that is going back in the truck after being in the photo shoot. I love seeing the houses when there is nothing in them.
A new generation of home-owners are now discovering the joy of Mid Century architecture - to what do you attribute this?
In Melbourne there’s been a deep interest in what people refer to as “Bush Modern.” It’s an earthier Melbourne take on Australian modernism with exposed bricks, big exposed timber or Oregon beams and earthier colours with tiles and timber cabinetry. There is a broadening interest in Australian architecture from the 60s and 70s and a lot of people, particularly younger people, are being drawn to Bush Modernism. They didn’t grow up with these houses, the architecture just speaks to them. It is lovely to see and what I particularly like is people not coming from a viewpoint of nostalgia, which is heavily loaded for me, but rather they are seeking out nature and the Australian bush in a combination of landscape with architecture.
Are we doing similar developments now, for examples Milieu, Nightingale and Assemble?
Most people would argue there are similar places going on, but often they are not truly embracing the landscape. If you are living in the inner suburbs, say Brunswick, it’s really hard to carve out greenspace and financially it doesn’t make sense so people use communal internal spaces instead. The Winter Park model is more often seen in the outer suburbs that have three to six storey high apartments and combined green spaces. There are a lot of those sorts of developments, which I visited across the country making my show The Australian Dream. They have communal areas, green spaces, they are close to the shops and better than the suburbs I grew up in as a kid. You can walk to Westfield, get to the footy, and you are connected to the city. What people want from their lives and their housing is varied and evolving, but the one thing for sure is the idea of the “Australian Dream” has evolved from how we wanted to live in the 50s – or how we were told how to live – and it is now unrecognisable from what it was then.
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