Property Details
| Block Size | 2.35 acres |
| Shire Rates | $2,600 |
Description
**PLEASE NOTE: ACCESS TO PROPERTY IS VIA GLIDDON ROAD**
Jane Brook has been running through this block for longer than anyone’s kept records, and the house that sits above it has been standing since the early 1930s built for the watercolourist and silversmith James Walter Robert Linton – a name that belongs as much to Western Australia’s art history as it does to this address. Grade II-listed, this is a home with provenance, a brook running through the block, and a setting that still looks much as it did when Linton painted it a century ago. It’s a short trip to Mundaring Village, situated opposite the bridle trail, and close enough to make John Forrest National Park part of your regular loop. This is a home for someone who wants history under their feet and the Hills right outside the door.
- 4 bedrooms 2 bathrooms
- 1938 -built grade II-listed
- Arts & Crafts Architecture
- High ceilings, jarrah floors
- Seamlessly extended plan
- Powered studio and sheds
- BG pool fruit trees veg beds
- Tanks, dam & scheme water
- 2.35-acres wide frontage
- One-of-a-kind Hills home
The front gate opens to a path meandering to a brick-paved terrace, ringed by a north-facing garden of deciduous trees – including a venerable old pear tree – and spring bulbs. A winter suntrap, it turns lush and green through the warmer months, a good spot to sit on the wide decked front verandah with a book and cuppa tea.
Step inside to discover jewel-toned jarrah floors and a run of south-facing glazing that carries the light deep into the living space, original timber-framed windows and a coffered jarrah beamed ceiling in the original living room, a lovely, considered piece of Arts and Crafts design. Across its hundred-odd years, the home seems to have been looked after by people who understood what they were caring for, treating the place with a kind of quiet respect rather than remaking it in their own image. Later extensions follow the same instinct and sit alongside the original build rather than competing with it, true to the idea that form should follow function. Large casement openings tie old and new together, jarrah floors run underfoot through both, and the ceiling heights don’t suddenly drop or lift as you move from one era to the next. It reads as one home, not two stitched together.
The property’s life as a place of artistic endeavour continued under WA potter Georgie Boddington and her family, who oversaw much of the home’s expansion. Her eye for the original architecture shows in the south-facing sunken sunroom, the open-plan pine kitchen and meals area, the larder with open shelving and a shopper’s entry, and a family room built for slow afternoons and competitive board games. The kitchen and meals area flow straight onto the deck, with large windows framing the garden and brook beyond ready for the next artist to make their mark. Ducted reverse-cycle air conditioning runs throughout the home, with evaporative cooling in Boddington’s pottery studio.
Two generously proportioned junior bedrooms face north with views over the front garden.
The principal bedroom is huge and highlights stunning views south over the brook through a wide window, with a full wall of robes for storage and an ensuite that features a shower/bath, WC and vanity. A fourth bedroom, currently utilised as a large office, sits in the home’s original footprint adjacent the main foyer with views over the garden. The family bathroom is functional and has a WC, a shower and a vanity. A large utility/mudroom sits at the end of the bedroom wing, opening onto the verandah that traces the brook along the home’s southern face before reaching a decked entertaining area under an old grape vine – views over the garden, brook and Heritage Trail on one side, a below-ground salt pool on the other. Below the deck, a shaded grotto offers a cool retreat on hot days.
Jane Brook runs east to west across the block, its rhythm shifting with the seasons – audible from the house in winter, with a chorus of frogs striking up along the water as the light fades, gentler by summer. Large granite boulders line the water’s edge, their sinuous, weathered forms appearing in Linton’s own watercolours, and the original granite bridge pillars still stand on the bank nearby. Whatever your version of a Hills life looks like, the makings of it are already here and waiting – a proper Hills Garden with six raised vegetable beds and old fruit trees, the pottery studio with evaporative air conditioning, space for chickens, a carport, a powered workshop with drive-in access, two rainwater tanks and scheme water connected.
James Walter Robert Linton trained at The Slade School of Fine Art, arrived in Western Australia in 1896, and went on to help shape this state’s art education while building a reputation as a watercolourist and silversmith whose work was collected by the V&A and the Australian National Gallery. He built his studio in 1921 and this home in 1938. If you know his work, you’ll recognise the country around it – Bent Tree, Parkerville, The Creek, Evening. He was painting his own backyard, and in doing so, put this small corner of the Hills into the public record of Western Australian art. It’s rare to find a property with a history that hasn’t been smoothed over into something generic, and rarer still to find one where the life waiting to unfold here is just as easy to picture.
