Eryldene is a heritage-listed former family residence and now house museum located at 17 McIntosh Street in the suburb of Gordon, on the Upper North Shore region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by William Hardy Wilson and built from 1913 to 1936 by Rudolph G. Ochs. The property is owned by The Eryldene Trust. The house and its garden, which is noted for its camellias was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999 and was listed on the Australian Register of the National Estate.The Heritage of Australia, p. 2/33
History The real spirit of the 20th century came to Australian architecture with the domestic work of a quartet of practitioners after the World War I. Between them, they encompassed all the virtues and the vices, the strengths and the weaknesses which have marked the last 50 years. The only thing they had in common was a conviction that architectural thinking had to start at a more basic level than anything that had been known for a hundred years.
The group of thinking-architects responsible for ushering in the 20th century were Hardy Wilson, Robin Dods, Harold Desbrowe-Annear and Walter Burley Griffin. They worked in different places and they worked individually. But between them, they covered most of the ideas and attitudes that followed. Because, with the exception of Griffin, they worked almost exclusively on houses, their effect was strongest on domestic work. The same depth of thought and changes which they brought to homes did not begin to percolate into other types of building, which merely acquired from them the vices of individualism to compound their blatant stylism, for another 40 years.
William Hardy Wilson
William (later Hardy) Wilson had been born in Sydney in 1881. His search for architectural truth, a deep love and appreciation of beauty, an interest in history and an abiding faith in the concept of the artist-architect led him to strive for the pre-Victorian virtues. But his was not mere copyism. Sensitive to the underlying qualities of colonial architecture, he sought to apply their timeless principles to his own work.Freeland, 1982, 236–8
In 1905 Wilson went to England and enrolled in the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and also worked as a draftsman for William Flockhart in Bond Street. The chief draftsman in that office, Leonard Rothrie, introduced him to the Chelsea Art Club, where he met English sculptor Francis Derwent Ward and Scottish painter George Henry, as well as Australian artists including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and George Lambert.
In 1908 Wilson and Stacy Neave (another architect from Sydney) commenced their grand tour of Europe and North America, where they found the work of McKim, Mead & White and the American Colonial Revival style particularly impressive. It was during this tour that Wilson realised the influence of geography was crucial to the development of art and architecture.
In 1911 Wilson changed his name legally to William Hardy Wilson and joined Neave to form Wilson & Neave. When Neave served in World War 1, Wilson closed the practice and concentrated on writing and completing his drawings of old colonial architecture in NSW and Tasmania and building his own house, Purulia (completed 1916).Edwards, 2013, 768
The positioning of the summer house at Purulia, on the cross-axis of the central path and diagonally to the right of the front door, is similar to the positioning of the more sophisticated one at Eryldene. The simple stone-flagged central path is common to all the gardens, yet it is a cottage detail, not found in the old colonial gardens of the County of Cumberland which Wilson knew.Broadbent, in National Trust of Australia (NSW), 1980, 65–70.
Another notable Wilson designed house of this era was Macquarie Cottage, Pymble (1919) for H. Dunstan Vane.Edwards, 2013, 769
In 1920 Wilson & Neave took on John Berry as partner, becoming Wilson, Neave & Berry (1920–27), a firm noted for the Colonial Revival style of architecture for domestic design: fat, low-squatting Georgian boxes with colonnaded verandahs, spider-web fanlights on entrance doors and multi-paned windows with shutters. The firm's style followed the Colonial Revival based on the United States idiom, but also looked to Australian colonial architecture for inspiration. This style became very popular in the 1920s.Edwards, 2013, 770
In 1921 Wilson went to China and took lessons in Chinese painting under Kungpah King (Jin Chen); his travels to China's major cities, Peking (Beijing), Hangzhou, Shanghai, Canton (Guangshou) and Macao had a profound influence in his architectural philosophy and design. After Wilson's visit to China in 1921, the firm incorporated Oriental motifs and details, examples of which are found at Eryldene, Gordon (1914–36) and Peapes Department Store, Sydney (1923). In 1922 Wilson sold Purulia and travelled to England and Europe, where, in Vienna, he supervised the collotype reproductions for "Colonial architecture in NSW and Tasmania" (1924), his publication that would foster great interest in an Australian Colonial Revival. In 1925 Wilson returned to Sydney, where he became disillusioned with the state of Australian architecture and began writing his view sand ideas in a fictionalised biography "The dawn of a new civilisation" (1929) under a pseudonym of Richard Le Mesurer. In 1927 he completed his last design – the tennis pavilion (later called the Tea House) at Eryldene in Gordon for Prof. E.G. and Janet Waterhouse – the epitome of "a new style in architecture, the development in one style of Chinese and European classic", retired from practice and left for England.Edwards, 2013, 769, 770
Eben Gowrie Waterhouse and Janet Waterhouse
Eryldene was built in 1913–1914 for Professor Eben Gowrie Waterhouse (1881–1977) (commonly known as E. G. Waterhouse) and Mrs Janet Waterhouse and named after the house in Kilmarnock, Scotland where they married. Designed by William Hardy Wilson, it reflects his interest in the Georgian Revival style of architecture, adapted for Australian conditions. Professor Waterhouse also had a distinct influence upon the design of the house and is responsible for the simple hipped roof now apparent, rather than the gables often favoured by Wilson.
E. G. Waterhouse was a linguist and from 1924 Professor of German at University of Sydney, as well as being an avid gardener at his home, Eryldene and (later) a leading world authority on camellias. Eryldene's garden was increasingly a collection of camellias, many that he'd collected in Japan and China and all individually labelled, bilingually.
The garden was designed by both Wilson and Waterhouse. Conceived as an extension of the house with particular "rooms", it was to become an expression of Waterhouse's individual character. It is now well known for its introduction of camellias back into the twentieth-century garden.
In seeking out and drawing the buildings for his "Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania", Hardy Wilson became aware of the siting and gardens of early colonial houses. He was the first to recognise and appreciate a characteristic mid-19th-century style of gardening in New South Wales. For nearly 50 years his was the only voice stressing its importance and his descriptions – as vivid and full blown as the late summer gardens he visited – are still the most evocative. Wilson looked at these gardens with a painter's eye, not the analytical eye of a designer. He was neither botanist nor horticulturist. He appreciated their siting, colour and texture rather than their layout and details.
Of large forest trees he admired only the picturesque angophora (A.floribunda or A.subvelutina), the "apple oak" of the colonists; and, presumably the turpentines (Syncarpia glomulifera) which he planted along the rear boundaries of Purulia. He designed five gardens: Eryldene (Gordon), Purulia, Macquarie Cottage (Pymble), a garden for "An Ideal Australian Home" and for a "Standard Cottage" for the William Moore Trust at Gordon. The latter were not carried out. Purulia and Macquarie Cottage have been altered. Eryldene presents a problem as in its final form it displays so much the taste and horticultural expertise of its owner, Professor Waterhouse, that Wilson's contribution is difficult to assess, and since it predates the other gardens, the influence of "Professor Pymble" on these should be considered. The similarities between all Wilson's garden plans are marked.
From his love and knowledge of colonial gardens came his choice of plants. The range is limited, but it contrasts with the ubiquitous palms, brush box and hybrid roses of contemporary gardens as stringkingly as his unbroken colour-washed walls contrasted with the redness of his neighbours' "multangular villas".
Waterhouse managed to acquire twelve advanced Camellia japonica cultivar (cv.) plants high in 1914 and planted six in the garden at Eryldene: two at the front gate, two in front of the garden temple, and two in the courtyard; and gave six to Hardy Wilson. This is mentioned in the book "E G Waterhouse of Eryldene" by Mary ArmatiFine Arts Press 1977 reprinted by the Eryldene Trust 2004, p37 which says:
This quote was read and approved by him before his death in 1977.Penny Holden, pers.comm., 3 August 2012
In the early 1920s he was asked by the vice chancellor of Sydney University, Professor McCallum, to lay out a garden in the Vice Chancellor's courtyard. Here he planted a number of twenty-year-old azaleas, some fuchsias and some camellias.
The camellia had been the subject of a "rage" in gardening and botanical circles between its first "discovery" and export to the west. By the 1870s Australia was at the cutting edge of Camellia hybridisation and cultivar naming, along with England, Antwerp/Belgian and Florence/Italian breeding. By the 1890s camellias were waning in popularity, starting a slide lasting till the 1930s. Waterhouse's interest from 1914 was well before 1937, when English writer Sacheverell Sitwell's book Old Fashioned Flowers included camellias, leading to a revival in growing them.Read, 2012
The genus "Camellia" was named (i.e., published) by the great Carl Linne (Linnaeus) in 1735, in his Systema Naturae, for a plant described in (surgeon to the Dutch East India Company, Engelbert) Kaempfer's Amoenitatum Exoticarum 1712. More species have been "discovered", exported and named since as investigation has continued in China, Japan, Burma and Indo-China. Vietnam is yielding more species, including purple-flowered, in recent years. The name was in honour of Jesuit apothecary and naturalist from Moravia (now Czech Republic) Georg Josef Kamel, who worked in the Philippines in the early 18th century.
The most important species are C. japonica and C. sasanqua (first "discovered" in Japan but the former also native to Korea, and both long cultivated in China) and C. reticulata from China. Species used recently in inter-specific hybridising which have produced some excellent cultivars are C. saluenensis, C. pitardii var. yunnanica, C. granthamiana and C. fraterna.
In 1921 a garden retreat was built for the Professor's use. The curved wall and fountain in sandstone outside (east of) the garden retreat/ study was designed by Hardy Wilson and built in 1921. The glass-fronted bookcases inside were designed by Wilson's partner, John L. Berry. In 1924, after a trip to China, the professor commissioned the design and construction of a tea house and "Moon Gate" as an adjunct to the tennis court.