Cliff Lodge Flats

4 Cliff Road, Frankston

History
In the 1934-35 rate book, W. Marsh of Orrong Road, Toorak, was listed as owner of a partly constructed house on Lot 15, Cliff Road.1 By 1936 the house was listed and rated as two flats.2 W. Marsh owned the flats until the mid- 1940's, when Bert Reginald Marsh, a builder, of Edna Street, Frankston, became the owner.3 By 1967 Reginald, an aircraft worker, and Sydney Marsh, a builder, owned the flats.4

Description
Representing a rare accommodation form for the era and area, these two-storey stuccoed flats take on an English domestic revival style in the Arts and Crafts manner. The steep attic gabled-roof forms (clad with two colour's of slate), shingling in the gable ends, and the flared shingled balconettes under the upper windows, are all elements similar to those used by English ARTS & Crafts designers' such as C.F.A. Voysey and M.K. Baillie-Scott, albeit erected some 30 years after their buildings.5

A rubble stone front fence, with hedges, is typical of the era's landscape treatments.

External Integrity
Generally Original.

Context
Sited near the hilltop, the two-story flats are prominent. Some contemporary houses are in the area.

Significance – Study Grading C
Architecturally, the Cliff Lodge is unusual for the area as 1930s flats, and stylistically similar only to a few large Frankston houses, built in the 1920s, (i.e. Cob Cottage, Marathon, and Westerfield). It is also an unusual style-use combination for the State, although very late in the style's application: of high local importance and regional interest.

Historically, this is an unusual building type for Frankston, which missed the metropolitan flat boom of the 1930s and was only lightly touched by the spread of flats during the 1960s.