Back to search results

Baker House
305-307 Long Forest Road LONG FOREST, MOORABOOL SHIRE

All information on this page is maintained by Moorabool Shire. Click below for their website and contact details.
Moorabool Shire
On this page:

Statement of Significance

Statement of significance A large Modern house complex, designed by the eminent architect Robin Boyd in 1964 and built of local slate over 1965-66. A nearby smaller house was designed in 1966 and completed in 1968. When built, the site in the Long Forest Mallee, was remote and wild.

The complex is of State architectural significance as an innovative and extraordinary late domestic design by Robin Boyd which has survived relatively intact and in the same ownership. It is of state historical significance as an extraordinary embodiment of a particular way of life and its adherent social values, which crystallises some perhaps romantic aspirations of the period of the mid to late 1960s.

Show more
Show less

    • Physical Conditions

      Baker House - Physical Conditions

      Not recently inspected.

      Intactness

      Baker House - Intactness

      Understood to be intact and still in the original ownership, but occupied intermittently.

      SIGNIFICANT INTACT ELEMENTS:

      MATERIALS. FORM. VERANDAH. PLAN.

      DOORS. WINDOWS. PAINTWORK SCHEME.

      UNPAINTED FINISH. INTERIORS.

      VIEWS. CONTEXT.

      REMNANT VEGETATION.

      Physical Description 1

      Baker House - Physical Description 1

      The site in the Longforest Mallee area is "... a wild, lonely hilltop near the middle of a 200 acre (8 1 ha) property...." There was no reticulated water nor initially, electricity. The entirely symmetrical formal plan forms a low pyramidal-roofed square, 90 feet (27.4m) square with walls of local brown slate. There are 12 cylindrical water storage tanks (a few have other functions), punctuating the perimeter and supporting the edge of the roof Service rooms and the children's' sleeping cubicles, form an inner ring around the courtyard. Larger service areas intervene at corners, with glazing as timber window-walls between these. In the centre is a square courtyard, visible only from the living room and the cubicles. The living room fireplace, has a substantial pylon chimney. Corners to the masonry walls are all rounded.

      The separate Dower House, located a short distance below, was built later, of similar stone, for a separate member of the extended family. It has a less formal plan, an assemblage of similar elements: cylindrical stone tanks, wing walls and shallow hip roof. 5

      5 Illustrations: Boyd, op.cit., pp.122&123.

      Historical Australian Themes

      Baker House - Historical Australian Themes

      Townships

      Heritage Study and Grading

      Heritage Study and Grading

      Moorabool - Bacchus Marsh Heritage Study 1995

      Author: Richard Peterson and Daniel Catrice
      Year: 1995
      Grading:

Public contributions

Note: Developments may span multiple time periods
Timeline browser

< to 1849
< - 1849
1850 to 1879
1850 - 1879
1880 to 1909
1880 - 1909
1910 to 1939
1910 - 1939
1940 to 1969
1940 - 1969
1970 to 1999
1970 - 1999
2000 to >
2000 - >