The first iconic apartment building by Robin Boyd

The mid-century architectural colossus Robin Boyd pioneered and promoted many admirable and lasting aspects of Australian residential design.

And if the immediate reaction of people inspecting a South Yarra penthouse that was marketed in an expression of interest process last month is any indication, the wow factor was one of them.

The $3-million plus – “way above the owner’s expectations” – result of the campaign for the eastern, two-bedroom Domain Park Flats penthouse that had been occupied by just two owners in 62 years, was pretty wow too.

Jellis Craig agent Nathan Waterson says a  lot of interested locals, even those living in newer, bigger apartments on St Kilda Road and East Melbourne, “could not believe” how much better the view of Melbourne’s green spaces was from this vantage.

Quite a few threw in comparable offers in a bid to own it and reinstate it as an unrepeatable one-off that so casually treats Melbourne’s horticultural jewel as its front yard.

But then, focusing all attention on the verdant foreground of an 18 storey international modernist style tower on the edge of the Botanic Gardens that was one of Boyd’s rare projects of scale, was the main purpose of his design strategy.

The brown brick building with the two white lift towers at the rear is narrow, so each apartment has outlook to the north and the south. The penthouses and some of the upper units see the whole compass of Melbourne’s surrounds to mountain and bay horizons. For most units, the city skyscrapers are mere scenic infill.

The units below the penthouses are arranged four to a floor, and are relatively low-ceilinged, which is another device to “compress the space” and telescope attention to the outlooks.

The more subliminal effect of the simplicity and refinement of what looks like a plain and functional building – Boyd loved the practical and unadorned and believed that all good architecture is “restrained”  – is, according to critics “that it has a heightened sense of isolation and suspension in space”.

And because, as Waterson explains, its location “is unrepeatable”, that quality of being an iconic development in a desirable neighbourhood will ensure it remains, “Melbourne’s bit of New York”.

It was by dint of a brief window of planning opportunity that opened up in the mid 1950s to allow high-rise development on the fringes of Melbourne’s parks that allowed Lend Lease to buy the Domain Road property, gain building permission and request a design from the then uber Melbourne architectural firm of Romberg Boyd.

The final plan for the tower, that for 10 years was Melbourne’s tallest residential building, was, however, all Boyd.

The first residents took up occupancy in 1962 and the first owner of the eastern penthouse was the late Irvin Rockman, who fitted it with walnut cabinetry and who would later go on to serve as Melbourne’s Lord Mayor in the late 1970s.

The walnut looks dated and at odds with Boyd’s intent now, and the interiors are tired and need wall-to-wall refurbishment. So Waterson says, basically, the new owners have paid for an old shell.

But wow! The building has twice been recognised by big citations, being National Trust listed, and last year winning the Victorian AIA’s 25-year award for enduring architecture.

There really is no surprise in that, for it distils, in Boyd’s thinking, the perfect formula of an enduring, iconic building with a “soul”: Unique location, brilliant architect following a simple, even “frugal” plan that collates surface, texture, colour, tactility, positive external mass and negative internal space to bring forth a quality that he called “the living psyche of a building”.

robinboyd.org.au