Juniper Hall, also known as Ormond House, is a heritage-listed former residence and children's home and now retail building and exhibition venue located at 1 Ormond Street, Paddington, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1824 to 1825 by Robert Cooper. The two-storey Old Colonial Georgian house was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999 and is listed on the (now defunct) Register of the National Estate
Juniper Hall was originally the home of Robert Cooper, a gin distiller. He reportedly designed the house himself and had it built circa 1825, including a cellar and attic in the structure. Unlike most Georgian homes, it features an upstairs balcony, which looks out onto Oxford Street. As time went by, Juniper Hall became hidden behind a row of commercial buildings on Oxford Street. A restoration project was undertaken by the National Trust of Australia in which the commercial buildings were demolished so Juniper Hall could be seen clearly, and it was fully restored by Clive Lucas Stapleton and Partners in 1988.
The house is currently being used for the annual Doug Moran National Portrait Prize exhibition, a rotating calendar of exhibitions by portrait and photographic artists.
History The suburb Paddington, which took its name from the London borough, lies in what were once paddocks adjacent to Victoria Barracks. It was the first of the early Sydney suburbs that was not self-sufficient - its inhabitants, unlike those of Balmain or Newtown, where work was available in local industries, had to go away each day to their places of employment. Development of the Eastern Suburbs (Edgecliff, Double Bay, Point Piper and Woollahra) surrounded this area with wealthy people's homes so this small hilly suburb lost all hope of harbour views.
The area developed after a road was constructed to link up with a pilot station that was to be built at Watsons Bay on South Head Road. John Palmer, the settlement's commissary, refused to allow people to cross his land grant at Woolloomooloo, so the road had to follow a roundabout way through Paddington to bypass his . Only a handful of workers lived in the area, and it was not until 1838, when it was decided to build a new military barracks in Paddington, that life came to the area. From 1848 when Victoria Barracks had been opened (designed by Lt.-Col.George Barney) and homes for the soldiers and their families had been erected, Paddington began to assume a real identity. The barracks site land was sandy - in fact a huge sandhill was located on the western side of the Greens Road area, and the foundation trenches had to be dug very deep, to locate firm stone for the foundations. Stone was mostly quarried in the area: the stonemasons were free settlers who had worked on erection of the Customs House at what was then Semi-Circular Quay. Once the soldiers and their families moved here, shopkeepers followed. Builders moved into the area and put up 3,800 houses between 1860 and 1890. These terraces give today's Paddington its air of individuality. The first school in the area was opened in the Presbyterian manse in Oxford Street, built in 1845.
Today few of the area's original working class residents remain, as the suburb's proximity to the city has made it popular with business and professional people who prefer inner-city living in this historic area. The shopping centre, concentrated on the north side of Oxford Street, has also changed from one serving local needs to one of cafes, speciality shops and boutiques...Much of this is related to the changing population and the Village Bazaar, or Paddington Markets. The bazaar, which has operated since the mid 1970s, draws visitors from all over the city and has contributed to Paddington's development as one of Sydney's favourite tourist spots, along with Bondi Beach and The Rocks.Pollen, 1988, 195-7
Juniper Hall Robert Cooper
It is hard to imagine that in 1822 the mansion Juniper Hall, on the eastern side of Oxford Street opposite the Paddington Reservoir and Paddington Town Hall and Paddington Post Office stood alone, without the many neighbours it has today. Set in a flagged garden, it had attic windows that gave panoramic views to Rushcutters Bay and Botany Bay. Juniper Hall was built for Robert Cooper, (distiller and emancipist merchant), who with partners James Underwood and Francis Ewen Forbes, received from Governor Brisbane in , covering the whole of north Paddington, and they agreed to erect three mansions and a distillery there. As part of their agreement, the three partners agreed to each take three acres for the erection of their own homes.Dunn, 2008 A distillery was built at the foot of Cascade Street near Taylor Square and Cooper bought out his partners, and only Juniper Hall was erected. The Coopers were part of the social scene of their day and entertained many notables of that time.Pollen, 1988, 195-197
Emancipist Robert Cooper (1776–1857) had lived a varied life as a gin-distiller, architect, builder, cedar cutter and wealthy London publican. He was transported in NSW in 1813 and granted a conditional pardon in 1818, by when he was eager to put down roots in the infant settlement, having joined in partnership with Underwood and Forbes, two fellow emancipists. Together with his third wife Sarah May, he built a house big enough to cope with 14 children (reputed to have increased to 20 by the time he died). He built the large two-storey house on a large block elevated above Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay.ACNT, 1988, 68 In June 1824 Cooper claimed that he was "at present building" Juniper Hall and there is evidence of his subsequent occupation of the place by April 1829. Cooper is said to have promised his third wife Sarah would have "the finest house in all the colony". No architect is known to be associated with the project but Cooper was himself a part-time builder and perfectly capable of producing the comparatively simple design and erecting it with the help of specialist tradesmen.
He built a two-storey Victorian Georgian building with a basement. Four large rooms occupied each floor, while the basement contained the kitchen. To the rear were a coach house, stables and servants' quarters. The position on the top of the ridge line meant it had views across Sydney Harbour to the north and to Botany Bay to the south. He named his new home Juniper Hall, after the juniper berry used in gin's distillation, and recalling Juniper Street, the location of his former distillery in London. Cooper by this time needed a large dwelling, having 14 children from his first two marriages (both wives having died), with another 14 children to come from his union with Sarah. During the 1830s Cooper is likely to have made fashionable improvements to what had rapidly become an old-fashioned house.
Cooper left Australia in 1831 with his wife and children for England and let the house to John Kinchela, an Irish lawyer who had arrived in June 1831 to take up the post of Attorney-General in the colony, recommended by his Irish patron, the Marquis of Ormonde. Kinchela renamed the house "Ormonde Hall" in honour of his patron. Kinchela himself stayed at Ormonde House only until 1838, when the returned Cooper family moved back in. The "e" was dropped shortly after and to this day the adjacent street is named Ormond Street.
Cooper during the 1840s made an attempt to enter politics, standing for the first partially elected New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843. Despite building up to forty houses for his workers to make them eligible to vote, he failed disastrously, coming last on the ballot. Cooper blamed a sustained campaign against him in the conservative press, who had scrutinised his convict past and colourful career before the courts. In 1849, having over-speculated during that decade, he was declared bankrupt and forced to leave his house once more, mortgaging Ormond House in July 1848 for A£1,900.
Ormond House, private school for girls and other charitable uses After the Coopers left the house was renamed "Ormond House" to dissociate itself from the gin image and passed through many hands. Its uses included a private school for girls.ACNT, 1988 In May 1852 Ormond House and land was leased to A. H. H. Stephen and James Comrie. Stephen was the Founding Secretary of the recently formed Society for the Relief of Destitute Children. Up to 130 children called Ormond House home during this time. In 1858 the Society removed the Asylum to the buildings designed for it by Edmund Blacket at Randwick. Ormond House was occupied from 1858 to 1884 by a number of lessees or tenants. Robert Cooper died in 1857 and in 1858 Sarah Cooper moved back into the house. Before she died in 1863, she refurbished the house, possibly with a view to selling it. On her death it passed to her trustees, who in turn leased it to a variety of charitable and educational organisations, including the NSW Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (1868–72), a ladies' college (1873–79) and the Children's Relief Board (1884–85). From available photographs it is evident that the layout of Juniper Hall's garden was altered in various minor ways between 1870 and 1920.Mayne-Wilson, 1992, 11
In the early 1880s the NSW Government adopted a new policy on poor and destitute children which favoured boarding those in Government care with selected foster parents. This meant that a central metropolitan "home" was needed where such children could be placed pending the selection of a foster home. To this end (a renamed) "Ormond House" was leased in the first half of 1884 as a "receiving house" and office for the State Children's Relief Board. The following year the government purchased the property for A£5,800 and it was to remain in Government ownership for forty years. During 1891 and 1892 substantial additions were carried out with a large addition to the eastern end. The extension was built in a similar style to the original, and used as the probation office for the Metropolitan Shelter for Children and the Children's Court, a role it maintained until 1911. This was NSW's first Children's Court.
Potential redevelopment and subsequent protection and conservation In 1921 Joe Gardiner, the shoe manufacturer, purchased the property for demolition and redevelopment as flats and shops. There was such a public outcry that he changed his mind and turned the house into flats and built a row of six shops in (completely displacing) its front garden facing Oxford Street. Following Gardiner's bankruptcy the property was acquired by a Melbourne firm, Avrom Investments.
At the end of World War II, an Avrom employee, Elizabeth Randall, was despatched to Sydney as a local manager. Two residents in the building interested her in its history and being a tough campaigner, she defended it successfully against the ravages of The Landlord and Tenant Act, termites, the elements, the Sydney City Council and Avrom. The defence against the last named threat was only achieved by a policy of improvement and rental increases which made Juniper Hall (as she renamed it) a paying proposition; a process which caused some distress to old established and theoretically protected tenants. Community groups such as the Paddington Society tirelessly campaigned for the conservation of Juniper Hall.Clement, 2014, 18 In 1981 an Interim Conservation Order was placed over the property. A detailed report on the history of the house and garden was prepared by James Kerr.