31-42 Mitchell Street, Glebe. Sydney, New South Wales
Terrace Houses: 31-42 Mitchell Street, Glebe. Sydney, New South Wales
The Glebe Estate contains numerous long and uniform rows of single and double storey terraced homes, many very similar in style and most featuring similar roof features. Pictured is part of a row of thirteen single storey Victorian terraced homes on Mitchell Street.
The cottages are narrow and most of the focus architecturally is on the roof, in particular the blade style party walls which protrude above the slate tiles culminating in a moulded chimney for each house giving the row a picturesque quality.
Corrugated iron verandah roofs painted in alternating vertical bands of red and cream give the row a sense of colour. The smoothed party walls also bullnose out to frame the verandah. The ends are decorated with a patterned inset moulding set above an acanthus scroll corbel. All the surfaces of the facade are cleanly rendered. A picket fence frames the front courtyard and is colour matched to the cream facades lending some consistency to the streetscape.
Unusually on this row there is no cast iron ornament on these terraces – even on the fringe of the verandahs, however it may have been removed at some stage in the past. Certainly the fringes and brackets of some nearby terraces are subdued and subtle, sometimes so fine and narrow that they are barely attached. Or perhaps they were deliberately omitted to allow light through the single window and skylight above the door or to reveal the attention to detail on the facade which features moulded bracketed ledges beneath the double hung windows and capitals which appear out of the walls above the windows to form part of the sash.
The Glebe Estate, of which this terrace is located is on the National Register. I’m not sure of the date of the terrace, although it would appear to be somewhere in the late 1880s or 1890s.
