Parnwell Residence

The subject house is situated on the corner of Logan Road and Donaldson Street on what was originally known as the Mount Pleasant Estate. This area was subdivided for residential development from the 1880s but was not well populated until after the tramline along Logan Road to Chatsworth Road was extended to Holland Park in 1926. The elevated sites at Greenslopes and easy access to the city attracted many new residents and fashionable homes in the latest architectural styles became a feature of the growing suburb. In the Interwar years, this area of Greenslopes along Logan Road was still often referred to as Coorparoo.

A 1936 article in the Courier Mail, noted the modern architecture appearing in the rapidly developing suburbs of Coorparoo, Holland Park, Greenslopes and Camp Hill :

Four suburbs – Coorparoo, Camp Hill, Greenslopes and Holland Park – by reason of their topographical relationship and their grouping in Brisbane’s tramway system, possess a community of interest. Being within easy distance of the city, yet far removed from its bustle, these suburbs are increasingly attracting the interest of the builders of new homes.

In this part of Brisbane, fortunately, the conventional idea of house-building of 10 or 20 years ago has been forgotten, and in the process of applying original ideas, the people have adopted styles that might well become a pattern in subtropical suburbs. There has been a boldness in conceptions of home design, a generosity in building itself, and more than a little inspiration in artistic ideas.

Albert Joseph Parnwell was born in Essex, England in 1895, to Albert Parnwell, a farmer, and his wife, Rosa. He immigrated to Queensland in 1910 at the age of fourteen with his parents and four sisters. Parnwell worked as a carpenter before enlisting to serve overseas with the Australian army during World War I. A few months before the war ended, he married Agnes Talbot. After the war, the Parnwells lived in Stanthorpe under the Soldier Settlement scheme, and Albert Parnwell resumed work as a carpenter. In 1925, Albert and Agnes Parnwell were residing in the growing suburb of Coorparoo in Galway Street.

By the 1930s, Albert Parnwell had formed a construction company with Harold Wood. Wood and Parnwell became a successful firm, building many commissioned and speculative boarding houses and flats in Brisbane’s inner suburbs. Examples of their work include Arran House (1936), a three storey, brick and concrete building with 42 serviced rooms on Gregory Terrace, Spring Hill and Alma Flats (1936), in Upper Roma Street. An advertisement in the Courier Mail of 19 August 1936 described Wood and Parnwell’s services: “Old established builders prepared erect, finance modern homes, designs to suit, easy terms; land taken; plans, specifications free...”.

In 1941, the Parnwells purchased a 28 and a half perch allotment on the corner of busy Logan Road and Donaldson Street. An application was submitted to construct a “brick and tile” house for an estimated £1,200 on the property that same year. It appears likely that Parnwell designed the house himself rather than using the services of an architect. The house, built in the fashionable Mock Tudor style, was the Parnwell’s home from the 1940s until they sold the property in 1962. Albert Parnwell applied to Brisbane City Council in 1958 for an addition to the house in 1958 – probably at the rear of the ground floor where a bathroom is now situated. The property included a large garage near the rear boundary along Donaldson Street.

The Mock Tudor (a subset of the Old English category of Interwar Architecture) style was one of several new architectural trends to appear in Australia during the 1920s. At this time, the population of Brisbane was predominantly Anglo-Saxon and still attached to notions of Empire and the Mother Country. The Interwar Mock Tudor style had an air of prosperity and solidity as well as nostalgia for an England that many Australians had never seen. It was popular with Brisbane’s middle class professionals and businessmen, particularly in the affluent suburbs of Ascot, Clayfield and Greenslopes.

Like other fashionable architectural styles, such as Spanish Mission and Californian Bungalow, Mock Tudor homes and flats were mostly masonry (frequently stuccoed) with terracotta tiled roofs – a move away from the traditional Queensland timber home elevated on stumps. These houses were more expensive to build than the timber vernacular, and often cost several hundred pounds due to their materials and additional features such as internal joinery. As a successful property developer, who had taken advantage of the building boom of the 1920s and the need to provide additional housing for Brisbane’s large numbers of unemployed during the depression of the 1930s, Parnwell had the means (as well as the skills and labour) to build himself such a house.

The subject house displays several of the features common to this nostalgic style which suggested the quaint architecture of rural English villages. These include the asymmetrical massing of the design, the use of imitation half-timbering decorating a prominent gable end, tiled medium pitch gabled roof and casement windows with leadlight glazing.

Wood and Parnwell made a significant contribution to the development of inner city suburbs of Brisbane such as Spring Hill, Hamilton and New Farm, and helped popularise a new form of accommodation – purpose built flats and boarding houses built in response to the changing population and economic conditions of the Interwar period. The residence at 684 Logan Road, Greenslopes, demonstrates the success and aspirations of a successful businessman such as Albert Joseph Parnwell.

1. Apperly, Richard et al. A pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1989

2. BCA. 0069 Building Registers and Indexes. 1941 Jan to December.

3. BCA. Surveyor’s Field Book. Greenslopes – Logan Rd 684-c236-51 17 Oct 1944.

4. Brisbane City Council Building Cards

5. BCC Detail Plan. No. 436 (no date).

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

7. Queensland. Post Office Directories

8. Bennett, Helen, Interpreting the Modern: flatland in Brisbane 1920-1941, PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2011

9. Digitised newspapers and other records. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper

10. Brisbane Courier, 27 Sept 1918, p.11

11. Brisbane Courier, 6 Dec1930, p.21.

12. Courier Mail. 5 Feb 1936, p.22.

13. Surveyor-General’s Office.  McKellar’s Official Map of Brisbane and Suburbs. Brisbane, 1895

14. Realestate.com website. http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-greenslopes-115549519. Retrieved 5 Jun 2015.

15. Commonwealth Electoral Rolls

16. Qld, Australia Passenger lists 1848-1912

17. Australia WWI Service Records, 1914-1920. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestrylibrary.com/. Retrieved 3 Jun 2015.