Fears East Melbourne mansion Valetta House may become case of demolition by neglect

It is one of heritage-rich East Melbourne’s most stately and prominently-sited properties, but 1856 Valetta House, once home to Sir Redmond Barry — the judge who sentenced Ned Kelly to hang —  is in a sorry state.

The association to the Kelly saga, the provenance of its architect Osgood Pritchard, also author of next door neighbour Clarendon Terrace, and the proximity to the Fitzroy Gardens over the road makes Valetta House a genuine gem of Melbourne’s built history. It is heritage registered as being of architectural, social and historical importance to Victoria.

Yet, empty of occupants for well over a decade, today it has boarded-up windows and doors, missing sills on some windows, and rubble and rubbish in the garden behind the chained front gate. The name listed on the building permit displayed on the fence, issued in June 2013, belongs to a builder made insolvent in July 2015.

The house’s owner, psychiatrist Despina Mouratides, who lives and practises in East Melbourne, explains that she has current permits and is in the process of renovating the house for her own eventual occupancy, but that she has been let down by builders, affected by the death of her husband, and has had no help from Heritage Victoria or “concerned people who are not contributing to its upkeep”.

She says she needs to get a new builder and when the floors, windows and bathrooms are completed, she will move in. “It can be the building I love again. This will be my future home,” she says.

Dr Mouratides is well aware that numerous complaints have been made about how she is proceeding with the protracted restoration of such an important and prominent property.

She claims “some sort of war is going on in the neighbourhood”.

Valetta House, held to be one of the earliest homes in what is deemed Melbourne’s most distinctive Victorian-era residential precinct, has been of immense concern to one of Australia’s oldest conservation lobbies, the 63-year-old East Melbourne Group, and its associate, the East Melbourne Historical Society, for many years.

Both have closely monitored and visually documented the progressive “dilapidation” of a house that they say by 2012 was in “a parlous state” after being repeatedly vandalised.

Barbara Paterson, convener of EMG’s heritage and planning committee says that openings punched into the north side wall for new windows “were left open to the weather for over two years”. They were eventually re-bricked.

“The Valetta saga has been going on for years and we are all pretty angry,” Paterson says. “People keep asking us, can’t we do anything?”

Like the owner, who says Heritage Victoria has been one of her problems, the EMG feels that up to now, Heritage Victoria has had little effective power to forestall what Paterson feels could become a case of “demolition by neglect”.

And yet, in late November 2016, state parliament passed a new hefty heritage bill to address the care and conservation of the state’s built, maritime and landscape history.

Osgood Pritchard’s “outstanding” Valetta House – for which the most recent building permit elapsed last month, might therefore become a primary test case to gauge if the new law has any real teeth.

Within the 202 pages of its fine grain regulations is a reference to “repair orders”. “The owner of a registered place or object must not allow that place to fall into disrepair … must not fail to maintain that place or object to the extent that its conservation is threatened.”