9 Chetwynd Street

What is significant?
Walter Duke, who at first operated a carriage building company with his brother, and later served the Victorian Railways Department, had this house built by local builders, McConnell and McIntosh, in 1898 and lived there until his death in 1906. Prolific and locally prominent North Melbourne architect, William H Webb, designed Shoreham. When sold in 1907 Shoreham was described as `one of the best built houses ever erected in Melbourne.’

Contributory elements include:
-an ornately decorated, two-storey face-brick and stucco house;

-brown and red bricks to the facade, side and rear elevation, white bricks as part architraves and quoining;

-a two-level ornate cast-iron verandah with iron posts and brackets and masonry side walls with archways set with coloured glazing at the ends;

-double-hung arched sash windows, with intricately ornamented cemented architraves;

-iron picket fence on a dressed stone plinth;

-two-level brick Victorian-era stable on rear boundary;

-rare ornamental brick side fence connected to the stable (stable and fence bricks painted over);

-a piered and balustraded parapet, with a central raised segment-arched entablature bearing the name Shoreham and the date 1898 set in cemented Arts and Crafts leaf patterns,

-a dentilated cornice with a foliated frieze to the secondary entablature and tympanum;

-candle-snuffer pinnacles to the verandah walls supported by deep brackets which are repeated at the storey line, as are the pinnacles on the fence piers;

-balloon arches in the iron friezes, reflect the full arched openings, which are picked out with white brick and flanked by colonettes; and

-a richly detailed fanlight to the doorway with its richly panelled side-lights.

The northern fence post is missing a pinnacle and parapet urns are missing. Bricks painted over on stable and garden wall.
The house is a significant and contributing part of a group of 19th century houses pivoting around 1-3 Chetwynd Street and including 8, 2 Stanley Street, 5-7 Chetwynd Street and the distant but similar 21-25 Chetwynd Street; its flanks a stone pitched laneway that leads past the rear stable.

How is it significant?
Shoreham is significant historically and aesthetically to West Melbourne and the City of Melbourne.

Why is it significant?
Shoreham is significant.
-Aesthetically, as a richly and skilfully decorated, near original house that has been described as one of the best of its type in Melbourne and part of a significant and related streetscape. Also one of the best works of the local architect William H Webb who was a prolific house
designer and prominent in local community groups and movements; and
-Historically, owned by a man of the horse-trade allied industry of carriage building and later with the railways department, two occupations that are particularly pertinent to West and North Melbourne with their proximity to the horse markets and the large railway complex nearby.

source: West Melbourne Heritage Review by Graeme Butler & Associates 2015.