Books received

Beaumaris Modern

Beaumaris in the 1950s was a veritable architects’ playground among Melbourne’s fledgling suburbs. The postwar period saw a flurry of development, which attracted architects and home builders alike. It is the suburb where a number of that era’s best-known Australian architects designed their earliest homes, some of them their own. Architect Eric Lyon recalled that “at one stage there were fifty architects living in Beaumaris.”

Beaumaris Modern, by Fiona Austin, Simon Reeves and Alison Alexander, is a “fitting celebration of the postwar flowering of modern residential design in Beaumaris [with] houses that epitomise Good Life Modernism,” writes architectural historian Philip Goad in his foreword. The book features fourteen mid-century houses in the area that are largely in their original condition or that have been sympathetically restored and renovated.

Among these are four architects’ own houses, designed by David Godsell, Ken Atkins, Eric