'Exclusive' Warawee

 

Warrawee is believed to have come from an Aboriginal word meaning rest a while, stop here or to stand.[3] and its residents seem to have taken this to heart for they tend to live in the same home for decades.

• Warrawee was a prime timbergetting area from c. 1815, where vast stands of cedar, mahogany, turpentine, ironbark and bluegum were removed from the land.

• The suburb is rich in architectural history, with a number of houses designed by prominent architects.

• The earliest significant homes were 

  • Pibrac (1888), 

  • Cheddington (1890) and 

  • Wirepe (1893), all very fine houses.

 

• Most houses were two storeys and, between the 1920s and 1940s, brick and stone were the most common building materials.

• Roofs were tiled, although some of the earlier examples used slate.

 

No single style typified the character of the area, ranging from stately and grander styles on one end of the scale to the distinctive, individualistic styles of more modest architects on the other.

• These styles included: shingle style, Georgian, Federation, stockbroker Tudor, Romanesque, Mediterranean, Queen Anne, post-modern, Hollywood dream style, arts and crafts, California bungalow, stripped classical and variations or combinations of these.”

– from www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/warrawee

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“There (are) significant and extraordinary architectural gems in Wahroonga and Warrawee.”

 

–  Safeguarder of these gems: Zeny Edwards

 

“Warrawee is a repository of domestic architecture at its best, with many significant heritage-listed buildings.

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• Houses known by their names rather than addresses, such as

  • Pibrac, 11 Pibrac Avenue, Warrawee

  • Kooyong (Upton Grey), 55 Hastings Road, Warrawee

  • Cheddington, 52 Hastings Road, Warrawee

  • Maiala, 7 Warrawee Avenue, Warrawee

  • Audley, 37 Bangalla Street, Warrawee

  • Bangalla 20 Harrington Avenue, Warrawee
    and

  • Rowardennan, 5 Warrawee Avenue, Warrawee
    were designed by notable Australian architects. 

  • The houses in this area were designed by prominent architects including

    • Sir John Sulman,

    • John Horbury Hunt,

    • Leslie Wilkinson,

    • Howard Joseland,

    • Emil Sodersten,

    • women architects Ellice Nosworthy and Eleanor Cullis-Hill,

    • prominent North Shore architects/residents Leith McCredie, Hugh Venables Vernon and Augustus Aley, and

    • more contemporary architects including Glenn Murcutt and James Muir.

 

Pibrac Avenue is, without a doubt, the Upper North Shore’s most consistently high-priced pocket of real estate.

The Pibrac mansion, now on only 4465sqm, sold for $7.5m in June 2007, and 27 Pibrac on a similar lot size sold for $6.6m back in 2003. 

 

• “The exclusive residential character of the area became more pronounced after the opening of the railway station [in 1900, as prominent wealthy residents, particularly Joseph Beresford Grant, gazumped commercial developers by buying up every site with a possibility for commercial use  and building houses on the sites].” 
  Battleaxe Lots:

• Another interesting aspect of Warrawee’s early growth is the prevalence of battleaxe blocks long before the post-war subdivision of large estates gave the term “battleaxe block” provenance in Sydney real estate circles.

• This was mostly the result of the 1917 subdivision of the Warrawee Garden Estate and the 1920 subdivision of Pibrac.

• Aside from the newly laid out Pibrac Avenue, no other streets interfered with the 1890 street plan of Warrawee, meaning that large estates (Upton Gray/Kooyong included) were largely invisible from the street and only accessed via driveways sandwiched between inter-war homes that strutted their stuff to the street
  - from Radical Terrace (archive) 

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People move to Warrawee because …

• Warrawee’s east side has beautiful homes on big blocks with tennis courts, pools and gardens. The west side has smaller and more affordable houses.

• Price range – Houses from about $1,700,000 to $15 million.

Best addresses are Warrawee and Pibrac avenues; Chilton Parade; Hastings Road; Bangalla and Cherry streets.

 

Warrawee  contains a large number of architect-designed heritage listed items built from the late 19th century, many of these designed by the most prominent architects of their period, including some large pre-Federation and Federation houses.