Burnham Beeches (Australia)

Burnham Beeches is a 1930s streamline-moderne mansion built for Aspro-brand sales magnate Alfred Nicholas on Sherbrooke Road, Sherbrooke, Victoria in the Dandenong Ranges, 40 kilometres from Melbourne, Australia.

Built during the late 1920s and 1930s, the property was named after the English National Forest of Beech trees in the county of Buckinghamshire, near the location of Nicholas's United Kingdom Aspro factory.

The architect was Harry Norris, who had toured Europe and America in 1929 for G J Coles to research the latest elements in chain-store design and construction before he finalised the plans for Coles store No. 12, the Bourke Street store, in Melbourne. Nicholas and Norris were neighbours in Melbourne, and Norris was engaged to design a house with the brief that it was to have “fresh air, sunshine and an outlook of command, yet under control”. Nicholas visited the Chelsea Flower Show in 1929, obtained many plants and engaged a Cornishman, Percival Trevaskis, to do the landscaping.

Norris’s design was for a three-storey mansion in the Art Deco Streamline Moderne style. The house was completed in 1933. The lines are said to be reminiscent of an ocean liner. The zig-zag motif was used as decoration on the decorative wrought-iron work and the balcony balustrades. The exterior of the house was of reinforced concrete, painted white and decorated with Australian motifs of koalas and possums in moulded relief panels.

A contemporary journal article cited in a 1980s pamphlet stated that the house included a “private theaterette with talkie equipment”, an “electric pipe-organ” in the music room, orchid houses, a dairy with “prize Jersey cows”, and the gardens included artificial waterfalls, a lake and floodlighting at night.

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