It’s not often we get the chance to own a piece of Australian architectural history, but with Robin Boyd’s Dandenong Ranges-located Hegarty House arriving on the market, that’s exactly what we’ve got. Modest and unassuming but brimming with Boyd’s trademark Modernist style, 20 Byways Drive, Ringwood East, would make for an ideal, elevated family home.
Located approximately 15 minutes from the forever popular Kokoda Track Memorial Walk (better known as the 1000 Steps Walk) and around 45 minutes from the heart of Melbourne, it’s one of Boyd’s lesser-known projects. Despite this, it’s arguably one of his more important, representing the final chapter in his architectural career. In fact, it’s the last design that he completed.
Boyd’s career spanned around three decades from the late 1940s and included the Domain Park Flats (Victoria’s tallest residential building at the time), Walsh Street (his family home) and the leafy Featherston House. His contemporaries included the Frank Lloyd Wright-trained American architect John Lautner (whose Los Angeles house was in Lethal Weapon 2) and Bauhaus proponent Harry Seidler who designed many of Sydney’s CBD towers.
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Hegarty House was completed in 1972 and this is just the third time it has come onto the market since then; the last time being 25 years ago. A bookend to the remarkable career of Boyd — whose legacy continues via The Robin Boyd Award For Residential Architecture — 20 Byways Drive, Ringwood East, is a home that reflects its verdant surroundings in the natural materials found throughout its construction.
Featuring three bedrooms and two bathrooms, there’s also space for two cars to park off-street, while the residence is positioned slightly off-parallel on its block. This creates an asymmetric parallelogram of gardens around the structure, with ample room for winding paths, a courtyard and an elevated area with a fire pit.
Inside, you’ll find high ceilings with exposed timber beams, windows aplenty that allow huge amounts of natural light inside and simply zoned spaces that separate living, dining and kitchen areas. Hegarty House at 20 Byways Drive, Ringwood East, is heading to auction on the 22nd of July via the team at Jellis Craig, with a price guide between $1 million and $1.1 million. Given its importance, we’d expect to see that figure passed.
