Shops & Flats

The shops are built on land along the main thoroughfare through Red Hill, Musgrave Road, between Federal Street (formerly Newman Street) to the east and Confederate Street to the west. The building is not the first to be constructed on the site. An 1888 estate map for Lilley’s Hill Estate shows “Wishart’s Store” in the same position. Development along Musgrave Road occurred relatively early in Brisbane’s settlement as the Enoggera Reservoir constructed in 1866 was accessed via Musgrave and Waterworks Roads. Musgrave Road was referred to as part of Petrie Terrace in the 1860s and as Waterworks Road until circa 1890. 

The site was part of portion 596 granted to Isaac Markwell in 1865. Markwell almost immediately subdivided his land into the allotments which have survived until the present. Two of the three subdivisions which make up the present property of 109 Musgrave Road were purchased in 1875 by Robert Wishart. He mortgaged the property on purchase and again in 1890 and 1891. Presumably he constructed a store on the site from which he operated his drapery business from the late 1870s until the late 1890s. Wishart sold the property in 1898 and it had several owners before being purchased by Robert Frederick Harvey in 1928.

The third allotment, on the corner of Musgrave Road and Confederate Street was purchased by George Winstone in 1867 and remained in the Winstone family until 1884. 



In 1892, the property was transferred to the Trustees of St. Bridget’s Branch No. 189 Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society. Postal records reveal that the Celtic Lodge of Ithaca operated from this section of Musgrave Road for several years from around 1900 to 1906-07. Perhaps the Hibernian society built a hall on the property as postal records from 1915 to the late 1920s record a “Picture Palace” on the site. This was named the “Apex Picture Palace” in the mid-1920s.

Robert Frederick Harvey, a “civil servant” purchased the corner site in 1927. In the following year, Harvey leased all three allotments to the Queensland Fibrous Plaster Company for 5 years. An article on the progress of Red Hill published in the Brisbane Courier in 1930 noted that the “Queensland Fibrous Plaster Company Ltd. has its factory at the Federal Street section” of Musgrave Road. A 1937 BCC sewerage detail plan shows the site partially occupied by a large building, presumably the plaster factory. Further research may reveal whether this is the same building as that was used as a picture theatre in the 1920s.

In April 1940, Harvey sold all three allotments to John Hutchinson, John Hutchinson Jnr., and Eric Hutchinson. An application to construct a “shop and flats” was submitted to the Brisbane City Council by J.J. Hutchinson of South Brisbane in June of 1940. The cost of the work was estimated to be £6,500. The application gives no architect’s name for the builder and the contractor is given as “selves”. Hutchinsons continued to run their boot factory from the site during at least the 1940s.

Large, masonry, blocks of flats over ground floor shops, built prior to 1946, such as this one are relatively uncommon in Brisbane.  “Carmel Court” at 768 Brunswick Street (Cnr. Browne St.), New Farm, is a three storey block of flats of a similar 1930s Mediterranean style, but did not originally have shops on the ground floor, and is smaller (only two storeys, with a small frontage to Brunswick St.).  The three storey 1930s block of flats at 548 Brunswick St. (Cnr. Harcourt St.), New Farm has shops on its ground floor but is in a Tudor, half-timbered style rather than Mediterranean.  “Colwill Place” at 180 Albion Road (Cnr. Lutwyche Road), Windsor, is another example of a pre-1946 Mediterranean style building with offices or flats over shops but is a two rather than three storey building, as is the building at 888 Brunswick Street (Cnr. Merthyr Rd.), New Farm.  Council’s Heritage Unit is not aware of any other comparable Brisbane buildings.

Today, the building continues its use as flats above ground floor shops. Current occupants of the shops include a restaurant, chiropractor, violin shop, and hairdresser.

The walls are roughcast finished brick construction with the stepped parapet capped with terra-cotta pan tiles. The colour of the pan tiles relates to the face brick window lintels and sills (the casement windows have no expressed lintels).  The side and rear elevations contain a mix of casement and double-hung windows. Balconies, stairs and servicing provisions, dominate the rear elevation of the flats.

The awning over the Musgrave Road footpath is cantilevered with steel rod ties back to the facade. Of particular note are the shopfronts, which appear to be relatively intact in their original design.  Entrances are recessed with stepped thresholds and timber framed, glazed, double entrance doors. Vertical mullions in the shopfronts are fine and elegantly moulded to a traditional design.  Most traditional shopfronts throughout the city have been changed over the years. This building appears to have avoided this process.

1. Brisbane City Archives. BCA 0069 Building Application Register 1925-44. Volume for 1940. Microfilm copy held in TSG, BCC

2. Brisbane City Council Water Supply and Sewerage Detail Plans

3. Brisbane Courier, 21 June 1930

4. Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland Certificates of Title

5. Environmental Protection Agency, Site File

6. JOL Estate Map Collection and photographic collection

7. Lawson, Ronald Brisbane in the 1890s: A Study of an Australian Urban Society. St Lucia U of Q Press, 1973

8. McKellar’s Map of Brisbane and Suburbs. Brisbane: Surveyor-General’s Office, 1895

9. Queensland Post Office Directories