White Cottage (Now White Lodge)

(*) Nepean Highway, Frankston

History
Built: 1934, 1952
In 1932 W.A. Fowler (q.v.), then of Queen Street, Melbourne, owned Lots 6 and 7 in Section 4, Parish of Frankston. These Lots were located across the Nepean Highway from the Griffin cottage designs, The Gumnuts and Marnham, which Fowler had owned in the mid-1920s.1 Fowler sold the White Lodge Lots to Mrs. N.M. Flatan in 1933, who in turn passed them to Mrs. N.M. Scott-Scott in 1934 (change of name or owner?).2 Mrs. Scott-Scott had a residence built on Lots 6 & 7 and also owned a property called Dillwood on Lot 5 (640 Nepean Highway).3 Mrs. Scott-Scott owned and occupied the property until late 1949.4

The present house was built after World War Two (c1952) for Mavis and Alan Powell (engineer), reputedly resting on a 600mm thick concrete raft foundation.5 Because of the uncertain nature of the foundations in that area, the concrete slab was further fortified by 600mm diam. Concrete piles 24 feet long.6 The house is reputed to have been placed on eight 100 ton jacks resting on the piles, allowing relevelling at any time.

By the early 1950s, Mrs. Mavis G. Powell resided at White Lodge, Nepean Highway, Oliver's Hill Estate, (so described in that year's rate books).7 Mrs. Powell's city address was St. Georges Road Toorak.8

Description
The first cottage (weatherboard?) was incorporated in the present house. Later than with Mewton and Ground's Henty house (Plummer Avenue), two-storey painted brick and timber design for the second White Lodge house also illustrates the American influence on local architects, but in more of a Colonial revival rather than Modernist sense and at a much later date. Brick on ground-level and board on the upper levels, the house has the intersecting gabled profiles of the Henty house, but is far less functionally planned in terms of sun access. Instead of corner windows, there are the six-pane Georgian-revival windows. The roof is of slate and the chimney painted brick.

Landscape
Perhaps the most important aspect of this property is its garden. In total contrast to the coastal tea-tree it replaced, the landscape is undulating with sculptured lawns with serpentine paths and curvilinear beds. The zig-zag path down to the house garden was laid out and graded for concrete truck access when the present house was being built but today provides a sense of mystery as it winds through the garden. Reputedly the Powell garden concept used many white flowering shrubs (now no longer prevalent) and included extensive lavender borders to the graveled drive and pathways, some of which remain. Ornamental trees dominate around the house, but the twisting driveway, leading down to it, is flanked by 'native' and exotic planting arranged in an informal and wild fashion. The property has beach frontage.

The approximately two hectare garden is divided into two levels of different landscape character, the upper an informal predominantly native garden and the lower a more intensively maintained and essentially an informal exotic garden of approximately half a hectare. Some early plantings include Erythrina sp., Lavendula dentate hedge and Populus deltoids.

Early structures include timber garden seats and more recent furniture includes a 19th century fountain, relocated from the Armadale mansion, St Kilda Road, a recirculating water channel, stone seats and an urn. There are also a small glasshouse and nursery.

External Integrity
Second house generally original.

Context
One of the diminishing number of large houses from the War period, set in extensive landscaped grounds along the sea's edge.

Significance – Study Grading C
Architecturally, although not in the mainstream Modernist idiom, the house displays the American modernist reinterpretation of the traditional gabled forms and white-painted weatherboarded construction of American east-coast housing and Colonial Georgian revival prototypes. Compared with other contemporary designs, both this and the earlier Henty house displayed a change of pace for large house designs, stripping ornament away and recoiling from the exotica of the Spanish and Italia revivals; although this example is much more conservative and much later than Henty's.

It is also one of the later examples of the now diminishing group of large houses built in extensive grounds along this section of the Point Nepean Road, between the wars, when the motor vehicle and better roads made a larger capital investment more feasible for holiday use: of regional interest and local importance.

Landscape: an extensive design which blends exotic and native, formal and 'natural' garden elements: of local importance.

(* Address withheld at owners request)