Straight-on view of the elevated main level on its stone base: glass walls, coloured curtains, entrance below. Daylight with dappled tree shade. Includes a small museum sign on the ground.

Rose Seidler House

71 Clissold Road, Wahroonga

Harry Seidler. 1948 to 1950. Modernism.

Size
Two floors. No overall size found; the drawing is estimated
Material
Bush stone, reinforced concrete, timber, glass
Status
State Heritage Register, 1999. A house museum, open Sundays

Seidler was 24, days short of his 25th birthday, when he arrived in Sydney in June 1948 to build a house for his parents. He had studied under Gropius at Harvard and worked for Marcel Breuer. The house carries his mother’s name alone because she started the commission and made the main decisions. The site was at the end of a dirt road beside Ku-ring-gai Chase, on land once mined for pottery clay. Glass walls, a flat roof and an asymmetrical plan caused a sensation, and in 1951 it won the Sulman Medal, the first of five for Seidler. Inside there is still late-1940s furniture by Eames and Saarinen.

Read about Modernism in Sydney

Sources

  1. Rose Seidler House, Wikipedia
  2. Harry Seidler, Wikipedia
  3. The Last Bauhaus Student, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, on Google Arts & Culture
  4. Harry Seidler’s career, State Library of NSW
  5. Rose Seidler House Group, Docomomo Australia