Hawthorn home Friesia, built for German consul, sells
Friesia, an 1888-built Italian Renaissance-designed Hawthorn house and one of Melbourne’s most captivating residences, has been sold.
The single-storey mansion was designed for the German consul William Brahe by architect John August Bernard Koch, who later designed Labassa in North Caulfield.
It’s been bought by Caulfield North couple Valeri and Irma Danilova. He hails originally from Makhachkala in the Russian Federation and resided in Sydney’s North Bondi in the early 1990s. He heads Australia's Quality Sheepskin Pty Ltd, whose core business is to supply raw sheep and lamb skins to tanners and dressers worldwide from its processing plant at Leongatha North in Gippsland.
The Hawthorn house was last traded in 1970 for $49,000 totally derelict – with no electricity, no hot water, no internal toilet, and the sky could be seen through most rooms.
It was listed by Kay & Burton agent Scott Patterson, who on its listing last November hoped to secure $6.5 million plus.
No sale price has yet been revealed for the property, which was inspired by the works of Filippo Brunelleschi, father of Italian Renaissance architecture in Florence.
From its Corinthian-arcaded entrance, Friesia exhibits the grandeur, glory and grace of Melbourne's magnificent boom period during the 1880s.
It’s been sold by Warwick Forge and his wife, Sue, who have been running the biennial Australian Landscape Conference for 10 years in a bid to bring together creative landscape designers from overseas and Australia.
It is set in the small Isabella Grove enclave near a bend of the Yarra, and a pocket of German high culture was formerly centred on Friesia.
The flow of German immigrants began within 10 years of Melbourne being established in 1835, with vignerons laying the foundations of the Victorian wine industry in the Lilydale and Geelong districts during the 1840s, and many were attracted by gold discoveries in the 1850s.
