Lavender Lane

13 Fenton Crescent, Frankston

History
Robert Timms, the younger, the founder of the famous firm of coffee and tea merchants, bought Lots 18, 19, 20 & 21 from Harold Elliott, a Melbourne solicitor, in 1933. The four lots had a Net Annual Value of £20.1

Robert and Veda Timms, an ardent admirer of the celebrated landscape gardener Edna Walling, visited Walling at Mooroolbark to ask her to draw up plans for their property in Frankston.2 A builder, Eric Hammond, worked for Walling from 1924 and the two had a close working relationship. Walling would draw up sketch plans, then visit the site with Hammond, where they set out the design on the ground. Hammond and his team would then build the dwelling.3 The Timms had the cottage constructed in 1936-7 by Hammond on Lot 18, which was located on the corner of Fenton Crescent (formerly Campbell Crescent) and Liddlesdale Avenue.4 Lavender Lane was built
as a weekender or holiday home and has retained the charm of a small English-type cottage. It is believed to be the only known example of a Walling-designed cottage outside Bickleigh Vale village.5

An English couple, George and Pamela Walsh, bought Lavender Lane from Robert Timms in 1967.6 Pamela Walsh had spent part of her childhood at Wimbourne in Bickleigh Vale, England, and was delighted to learn that the cottage and gardens were Walling designs.7 After her death in 1988, her ashes were scattered in the garden she had tendered so lovingly. George Walsh was a television and stage actor, who had formerly lived in a castle. On his death in the late 1980s, the property was sold at auction. Subdivision has substantially reduced the size of the original garden.8

Robert Timms
Robert Timms was born in Hobart, Australia, in 1908.9 The son of a general manager of a large grocery chain, he later moved to Auburn in Victoria and worked as a grocery boy in Burke Road, Camberwell. His father believed `starting at the bottom' would teach his son perseverance, respect for customers and the value of hard work.10

About 1938, Timms began the Associated Tea Company and later took over Gibsons Teas Pty. Ltd., changing the name of the firm to bear his own name in the 1950s. It was one of the first sponsors on Graham Kennedy's `In Melbourne Tonight' and the company prospered. It took over a few companies, roasted coffee in every city except Sydney, and employed 100 employees who were encouraged to buy shares in the company. The firm had a reputation for producing top quality coffee all over Australia and supplied the Queen during her 1954 Royal Tour of Australia. In 1969 the firm was taken over by an American company. Robert Timms still lives in Frankston.11

Edna Walling
Edna Walling was born in England in 1898 and spent most of her formative years in a small village called Bickleigh, in Devon. She emigrated to New Zealand in 1911 and then to Melbourne three years later, where she studied horticulture at Burnley College.12 In the early 1920s she began a garden design practice. Influenced by her love for simple stone cottages and their gardens, developed in her formative years in Bickleigh, she designed a village of sixteen cottages at Mooroolbark, named Bickleigh. Through her garden designs and numerous books and magazine articles, Walling became one of the most influential Australian garden designers and conservationists. She dominated the garden design scene from the 1920s to the 1950s and designed many gardens for clients living in Melbourne's wealthy suburbs and the hill stations of the Dandenong and Macedon ranges. Walling moved to Buderim, Queensland, and died there on 8 August, 1973.13

Edna Walling included the property in `Cottage and Garden', which featured photographs and sketch plans. She stressed that cottages should be simple but comfortable, and that there should be a harmonious relationship between house and garden. Local materials should be favoured in the construction and the house should blend into the landscape by the use of walls, terraces and pergolas. Walling wrote of Lavender Lane:

`STONE, weatherboard, and shingles are ever a pleasing combination and have a setting of grey-green foliage of Coastal Tea-tree (`Leptospermum laevigatum') and English Rosemary, is seen as example. With the exception of one or two stones, which have been placed on end instead of flat, the stonework in the chimney on the opposite page is good. The joints are well broken and not too deeply raked. The windows in the room pictured above are low enough to see the landscape whilst still seated... The modern trend for windows to the floor is not fitting to all houses, and a little disconcerting to those who enjoy a feeling of privacy and protection... I am with those who like their landscape or garden views broken up by the fine glazing bars of well proportioned windows... to feel that when I'm inside I AM inside, and when I'm out I'M OUT!'

Description
Recent descriptions and photographs show the two-bedroom house as clad with painted weatherboard, with gabled roof forms and shingle roof cladding. Like the both Bungalow and English Domestic Revival cottage-style, the roof dominates the design with gables on all but the east elevation. Instead of the half- timbering or shingling of the above styles, vertical boarding has been used in the gables; presumably this was originally stained. Typically for Walling, the windows were six-pane casements, timber-framed. Rubble stonework adds rustic charm in the form of a broad, tapering chimney serving the living room, which merges with a stone `crazy paved' terrace at the west side.

Pergolas at ground and `basement' levels were placed on the north and west, the latter presumably as a carport - in front of the garage under.14 Original planting appears to have been both native and exotic, with lavender, rosemary and coastal tea-tree. Inside, the entrance hall was large, (perhaps to take a future stair?), with two bedrooms opening from it, along with a bathroom via an angled lobby, and a large living room. This, in turn, opened into the kitchen and on to a northern terrace, sheltered by a pergola: a gesture to the sun/s orientation and its control.

External Integrity
Timms reputedly added a `sunroom' in the style of the house in the 1940s, replacing the pergola, which now possesses a multi- paned bay window. The Walsh family extended one of the bedrooms, adding a sympathetically designed toilet and store to the east end of the house in 1974 (builder G & M Sweeney)15. Subdivision has substantially reduced the garden area. Other added elements (compared to the original plan) is a gabled porch over the kitchen entry and a pergola (with roof and tank) on the east.

Context
The house is obscured from the street view

Significance
Architecturally, this is the only Walling house and garden design outside Bickleigh Vale, Mooroolbark, and hence a special work from this nationally important landscape designer, albeit in a style which was by then unrelated to mainstream house design: of regional importance and national interest.

Historically, associated with both Walling and the Timms family: Robert Timms, tea retailer, being a household name in Australian tea-drinking circles and others (because of his sponsorship of `In Melbourne Tonight' (a possible connection with Graham Kennedy's residence in Frankston) and close to other Walling landscape successes such as the Murdoch Cruden Farm: of State importance.

Historically, especially significant for its connections with the Timms family and with the work of Edna Walling. A contribution to a group of sites (houses and gardens) for this era in Frankston. The connection with `In Melbourne Tonight' is of local interest because of Graham Kennedy's residence in Frankston.