Heide ModernA History

In the early 1960s John and Sunday Reed began to think about the future of Heide, including their ambition for it to remain a park out of the grasp of developers. Throughout the 1950s the old orchards and farms in the local area were being converted to housing and light industry and the Reeds were determined to preserve their little piece of the Yarra Valley. They devised an ambitious and visionary solution, a concept for a residence with a dual function that could take Heide into the future: ‘a gallery that could be lived in’.

The Reeds approached an adventurous young architect David McGlashan of the firm McGlashan and Everist to design the new building, located down the hill away from the growing road noise and closer to the river. They determined a few qualitative instructions by way of a brief: ‘a romantic building, ageless in the sense of avoiding architectural fashion, and with a sense of mystery; a quality of space and natural light appropriate to a gallery; walls to be the most significant architectural and building elements; the sense of walls within and extending into a garden’. They wanted it to look as if it belonged to its environment, as elegant as a sculpture, and as timeless as a ruin.

The floor plan reads as an abstract painting in the de Stijl manner: asymmetrical rooms and intersecting planes on an orthogonal grid dispersed from the centre of the building, which is the beautifully restrained hearth. Built from Mt Gambier limestone, the house is based on a 12-inch module, with no internal doors, no paint and a limited selection of materials, including concrete, timber and glass, with terrazzo tiles and leather cupboard pulls. McGlashan also designed the furniture.

Building began in 1964, but due to the complex nature of the project and idiosyncrasies of the materials—for example, the absence of skirtings or plaster meant that the limestone blocks required precision placement—it was mid-1967 before the Reeds were able to move in. Architect Neil Clerehan wrote about the house the following year when it won a Royal Australian Institute of Architects medal, describing it as ‘the shining paradigm of Victorian Modern. In plan it is Mondrian. In space it is antipodean John Johansen. It is International Style set down amongst the melaleucas’.