Tightly-held pocket of Eaglemont where locals live a decade longer than average

Destined from the get-go to be a top people’s suburb, Eaglemont remains tightly held after 100 years. And buyers intent on bulldozing and rebuilding can pay $2 million plus to get a site foothold.

With the sub-neighbourhoods laid out in 1914 by one of the best urban designers ever to work in Australia, the top addresses have Heidelberg School-defined outlooks and small private parklands behind their back boundaries.

Before he tackled the masterplanning of Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin planned the curving roads of the Mount Eagle estate high on Melbourne’s highest urban hill, and later and lower down the slope, the Glenard Estate that skirts the still-bucolic Yarra Flats parklands.

In the suburb he called “the perfect place for the ideal plan”, only those who agreed to pay £500 to build their houses could buy land.

In one of the many anomalies of a place of such provenance, Griffin and wife Marion Mahoney built themselves a very tiny house there.

Pholiota, “the mushroom house” that Mahoney said was “the cheapest, most perfect house ever built” still exists as a single, square room with six metre long walls within a much extended home on Glenard Drive.

Today, Glenard Drive is replete with a pricey variety of housing that Nelson Alexander agent James Labiris says is on the top people’s hit list.

20 Glenard Drive, a four bedroom home on 1176 square metres, is due for auction on Saturday.

Quoted by Labiris and co-agent Liz Walker in the $1.85-$2.12 million range, the property with uninterrupted views over the Yarra Flats could go for much more. In the past six years, only six sales have occurred in Glenard Drive, so well ahead of sale day “good interest” is reported.

And why not? Eaglemont is a place you go to, not through which has preserved a rare atmosphere. “You could be in country Australia. Every time we’ve had an open (at Glenard Drive)”, Latiris says, “people have been amazed to see horses and kangaroos grazing together.

“Only 15 kilometres from the CBD, it’s surreal to see such things through the kitchen window!”

The highest sales have historically topped $4 million, usually for properties at the top of the hill. There isn’t anything in that ballpark now, a situation exacerbated by what Miles Real Estate agent John Levingston says is the 17 year average stay of Eaglemont residents compared to the six to seven year suburban mean.

Levingston is selling a four bedroom house at 76 Castle Street that even on 730 square metres is being quoted in the $1.6-$1.7 million range.

From the get go, Eaglemont was a place where the top architects counted themselves lucky to work. The list includes Burley Griffin, of course, Harold Desbrowe Annear and Robin Boyd.

Today, the sign boards of some of Melbourne’s top contemporary practises are dotted around the streets, confirming that the new generation of architects is actively extending, renovating or building new houses that, according to James Labiris, are starting to show up with price tags “with no ceiling”.