Sunday is one of several small terraces arranged amid an assortment of houses, repurposed factories and a pub in a typical Fitzroy backstreet. This area lays claim to the earliest terrace housing in Melbourne, with examples from the 1850s still standing in nearby streets. In the book Fitzroy: Melbourne’s First Suburb (1989), professor Miles Lewis suggests that these rows of similar houses are not an inevitable solution to inner-city density but rather a social construct. Professor Lewis draws parallels to London examples where speculative builders jammed together compact versions of an idealized “gentleman’s residence,” maintaining stereotypical arrangements and quantities of rooms but miniaturizing scale to suit site and budget.
The owners of Sunday had lived in the house for some
