Fedeterranea

IN THE GLORY DAYS of blogging there was a grand blog, Marrickvillia, which coined some incredible phrases, including 'gut-n-smeg' (for the process by which an existing house with outdated fixtures is updated with new kitchens, bathrooms, and a new rental price). The greatest of these neologisms however was Fedeterranea:

These homes are found in every street in Marrickville. They're mostly owned by people who came to Australia from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s. A mix of Federation and Mediterranean aesthetics, they are a striking hybrid of architectural styles. Columns, stone lions, statues, terracotta tiling, palm trees and/or clipped conifers, olive & citrus trees, variations on the "Marrickville aegean blue" paint, arches, brick cladding... have all been added to the facades of sedate early twentieth-century homes that feature (or featured once) tuckpointing, coloured window glass, tesselated tiling, agave plants & camellia hedges.

Nearly twenty years on and these houses are becoming rarer and rarer through the inner west. The steel Corinthian columns are being replaced, brick arches brought low. Pebblecrete is dying as a path material, brick fences are being 'restored' to the former glory of timber paling or iron railings, and to say nothing of the utter passing of the 1970s interior deco that was utterly key to the style. Babas Place, a fancy Marrickville restaurant, took this decor on magnificently, though the aesthetic's probably best shown in Sooshi Mango's act (which isn't for me; it's probably funnier if you're not quite so Anglo as I am). The concrete lions are fewer and fewer. Sic transit gloria mundi.

This is a real moment of truth for capital-h Heritage in Sydney. These are a very well known and instantly identifiable architectural style, totally vernacular, in every case put there by the hands and sweat of the house owner, and not to be confused for the equally glorious, genuine architectural magnificence that's a house by Gino Volpato. They're adaptations of existing housings stock that, were it older, would be clearly the subject of conservation efforts---as 'workers' housing' is wherever it's found. By contrast, because the heritage system was codified and its culture set in the 1980s when these houses were common (and even locally dominant) Fedeterranea is being slowly and certainly gentrified away, or more commonly, 'restored' back to a perceived original state, somewhere in the early 20th century.

But which is the more authentic state for a house? Our system deals really very poorly at this level with the concept of layering of heritage, and cannot seem to cope with the idea that a Federation or inter-war house might have an equal claim to be a significant building by virtue of its backyard barbecue area and front yard vegetable garden. It's impossible to conceive of a modern-day DA being accepted to render the facade, install an aluminium sliding window, concrete the garden, and install tiles of the Virgin Mary on an existing early 20th century house. That leaves our suburbs all the poorer.