2.2 Houses and Holidays

During its first fifty years of European settlement, Frankston remained a small village with few permanent buildings. The outer parts of the Shire were then even more sparsely settled and the townships appeared to consist essentially of rough huts, tents and a few small public buildings. As the Shire grew from the turn of the century or more especially from the Second World War many of the surviving smaller structures were swept away so that the present city is largely composed of quite recent buildings. The older houses are for the most part properties in the southern, higher areas of the present city.

20 Mount Eliza architect designed house overlooking the bay as illustrated in building journals of 1889 and showing a Queen Anne style design: one example of this type survives nearby at Mount Martha but this house appears to have gone [Jones, p.106 cites 'Building and Engineering Journal'].

21 Source: Jones, 'Frankston', p.98ff

The domestic building of Frankston can be divided into several waves.

1. From the 1850s until 1914 much of the building was rudimentary, using rough materials and simple design. Most houses were small and had few services apart from sleeping space an attached cooking area and perhaps a small sitting room, all at ground level and with a simple floor plan.

2. From 1880 through to the First World War, wealthy Melbournians made Frankston a favoured site for holidays and thus second homes. At first these were large, often two-storeyed, mansions which replicated the form of houses in Melbourne's wealthiest suburbs (see Fig: 20). Their seaside location and siting for views, breezes and their surviving grounds and plantings distinguish these from similar buildings closer to the city.

3. A third wave began in the twentieth century and characterised Frankston from the late-1920s onwards. The more experimental designs of these holiday homes resulted in a range of floor plans, materials and siting. Some Melbourne professional families turned to the followers of the International Style for their holiday homes in Frankston seeking convenient yet unusual buildings, supposedly designed to ensure easy maintenance and trouble-free holidaying.

4. A fourth form of housing appeared in Frankston after the Second World War. As the suburb was drawn more closely into the orbit of Melbourne some of the smaller holiday houses and old shacks were converted into permanent housing. A lot of the new building, especially in the north of the shire was small and extremely basic. Council struggled to control this wave of building and wrestled with new by-laws in an attempt to ensure that better housing would be built.

5. The final wave of building, in the 1960s and 1970s did produce larger, better-serviced dwellings on more systematically planned subdivisions. In both public and private estates, Frankston helped change the shape of many of the new suburbs of the 1960s. Ideas first implemented during the 1950s and developed in the 1960s at Frankston became standard in other parts of Victoria.