Monday, January 25, 2021

The Mount Pleasant Estate

The following information is taken from "The Mount Pleasant Ridge at Holland Park: A Case-Study of Brisbane Domestic Architecture of the 1930s" by John W. East. East has written a number of essays on Brisbane and Queensland architecture. His works are an excellent resource for those wishing to gain a geater understanding of the Brisbane home and the architects and builders who provided the landscape of more character homes that we see today

The Mount Pleasant ridge is an elevated area of the Brisbane suburb of Holland Park, stretching for a little less than a kilometre, with a roughly south-west to north-east orientation. At its western end it rises abruptly above Logan Road, undercut by one of the tributaries of Norman Creek. At its eastern end it falls away more gently, merging with Loreto Hill to the north. At its highest point, near the eastern end, the ridge reaches an altitude of just over 60 meters. It is an outlier of the larger massif of Whites Hill (112 meters), which lies to the east. The roadway which follows the spine of the Mount Pleasant ridge is made up of three separately-named streets: Beryl Crescent at the western end, followed by Percival Terrace at the centre of the ridge, and finally the upper part of Abbotsleigh Street (between Wilbur Street and Geelong Avenue) at the eastern end. The precise location of the summit of Mount Pleasant is a matter for debate, but currently the Queensland Place Names database locates Mount Pleasant in front of the property numbered as 55 Beryl Crescent. .......

By road, Mount Pleasant is about 6 km from the centre of Brisbane, and Moreton Bay lies about 15 km to the east. These two factors, when combined with the elevation, explain why the ridge was seen as a desirable location for residential development in the 1920s. In hot weather, the afternoon sea-breezes from the bay bring noticeable relief to the more elevated sections of the eastern suburbs of Brisbane, an important consideration in the era before airconditioning, when even electric fans were still seen as a luxury. Although the Depression years (1929-34) significantly retarded real-estate development, houses had been erected on most of the subdivisions along the Mount Pleasant ridge by 1941. Because of its cooler location and attractive views, Mount Pleasant was seen as something of a prestige real-estate development. Although it did not have the cachet of Hamilton or Ascot, it was still a desirable address. For this reason, the houses built along the ridge were generally of above-average quality, and a few could even be described as elite housing. Most of the original houses survive, although they have often been extensively modified. 2 The 63 houses which were built along the Mount Pleasant ridge between 1925 and 1945 provide a useful sample of the better-quality domestic architecture of Brisbane in the 1930s. It is the aim of the present study to examine these houses more closely, to see exactly what they can tell us about Brisbane's inter-war residential architecture.

1936 The Opening of The Estate

The Courier Mail November 16, 1936 an advertisement for blocks of land on Mount Pleasant


Newly built home November 1936 promoted as the house of the future design.

Below are photographs taken in January 2021 of homes in the Mount Pleasant ridge encompassing the Stonehaven Estate.














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