Cliffbrook - Coogee

Lyons Terrace - Sydney - DEMOLISHED

Lyons Terrace - Liverpool Street 

Drumoyne House -DEMOLISHED

Normanhurst House - Randwick - DEMOLISHED

Barham - Forbes Street - Darlinghurst

Barham - 

Barham is a heritage-listed two-storey Colonial Georgian mansion at 215 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. It was designed by architect John Verge and built in 1833 for Edward Deas Thomson, who later became Colonial Secretary of New South Wales in 1837.

Thomson was granted the land in 1831 as part of Governor Ralph Darling’s plan for elite villas on the ridge. He lived there with his wife Anna-Maria (daughter of Governor Richard Bourke) for about forty years until his death in 1879. The house was initially leased to Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass before Thomson moved in. It is one of the few surviving works by Verge and the only one of the original Darlinghurst villas still standing.

In 1900 the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School (SCEGGS) purchased Barham and moved there in 1901. It has remained the school’s main focus ever since, used for administration, boarders’ facilities and other purposes. The school added extensions, including a kitchen and laundry wing, and infilled parts of the verandah around 1909–1910.

The building features rendered masonry walls, a sandstone basement, tiled roof, verandahs on the north and west sides, and an elaborate timber entrance door with fanlight. Original joinery survives in several rooms. It is heritage-listed by the NSW Heritage Office and was previously on the Register of the National Estate. The site also includes mature Moreton Bay figs in the front garden.

Buckinghams Department Store - Oxford Street

Tusculum – 1–3 Manning Street – Potts Point – NSW

Tusculum – 1–3 Manning Street – Potts Point – NSW

Built c.1831–1836 · Architect John Verge · Standing — Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter HQ

On Woolloomooloo Hill — before the flats, before the Cross, before Manning Street filled in — stood a parade of white Regency villas meant to prove that Sydney had a gentry of its own. Most of that skyline is gone. Tusculum is one of the stubborn survivors: John Verge’s stucco villa for merchant A.B. Spark, episcopal town house for Bishop Broughton, Italianate-fronted mansion for the Longs, private hospital, American Red Cross wartime billet, near-ruin — and today the living headquarters of the architects of New South Wales.

At a glance

• Address: 1–3 Manning Street, Potts Point (AIA NSW Chapter lists 3 Manning Street)
• Built: c.1831–1835/36 (SHR construction years 1831–1837; Verge ledger through 1836)
• Architect: John Verge (original); later works associated with John Frederick Hilly (likely, Long era) and John Burcham Clamp (1905–06 stair / billiard room)
• Style: Colonial Regency villa, later overlaid with mid-Victorian Italianate two-storey Ionic verandahs
• Original owner: Alexander Brodie Spark (merchant); built largely as an investment
• Famous early tenant: Bishop William Grant Broughton, 1836–1851
• Heritage: NSW State Heritage Register #00027 (2 April 1999); Permanent Conservation Order 14 Dec 1979; Register of the National Estate #2034 (21 Mar 1978); National Trust #10587 (5 Apr 1976)
• Fate / current use: Standing — restored 1985–87; NSW Chapter HQ of the Australian Institute of Architects under long lease; events, meeting rooms, gallery

Site & setting

The Aboriginal name recorded for Potts Point is Derrawunn. In the late 1820s the rocky ridge inland from the point was still Eastern / Woolloomooloo Hill — close to town, high enough for harbour and mountain views, and far enough from the crowded Rocks to tempt Sydney’s “pure merinos.”

Governor Ralph Darling’s 1828 subdivision created large “town allotments” under strict villa conditions: one approved house per grant, set in gardens, generally facing the town, and built to a substantial standard. Spark’s grant of more than nine acres (September 1828) was unusual in going to a private merchant rather than a senior civil servant. From the water and from Sydney Town the finished white villas read as a civic advertisement — genteel New South Wales, on show.

Tusculum once sat near the centre of its own garden, lawn and shrubbery, with coach-house and stables, and a frontage that related to Woolloomooloo Bay. Subdivision from the 1840s onward (and especially late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cutting-up) ate the grounds. Manning, Hughes and Tusculum Streets tell the story in their names. Today the villa is hemmed by flats — Art Deco towers toward Macleay Street, lower blocks to the west — with a reduced forecourt and the 1980s AIA wing behind. The spacious marine-villa setting is gone; the house is not.

Timeline

• 1823 – Alexander Brodie Spark arrives Sydney as a free settler (*Princess Charlotte*); builds a shipping and mercantile fortune (ADB).
• 1 Jan 1827 – Spark writes to Colonial Secretary Alexander McLeay seeking a building allotment east of Woolloomooloo Bay (quoted MHNSW / Abbott & Little).
• Sept 1828 – Spark granted 9+ acres on Woolloomooloo Hill.
• 1 June 1830 – Spark sends a house plan to the Colonial Secretary, wanting it more “ornamental”; Verge’s ledger first records the commission in 1831.
• 1831–c.1835/36 – Tusculum built under Verge; liveable by about 1835; ledger details continue to 1836. Named for ancient Tusculum near Rome.
• 1836 – Alterations for first long tenant, Bishop William Grant Broughton; Broughton household moves in. Verge involved in modifications (including expanding rooms onto the verandah per MHNSW).
• 1836–1851 – Broughton’s almost entire Australian episcopacy centred here; garden, library shelves (1839), hospitality; after Government House, the colony’s leading domestic address (SHR).
• 1840s – Depression; Spark mortgages Tusculum (ADB: £6000) and sells assets; insolvency 1844. First estate subdivisions; Broughton loses part of his cherished garden.
• 1848 – Broughton renews lease seven years at £300 p.a.; SMH sale notice describes stone house, verandah, hall, drawing & dining rooms (~26 × 18 ft), study, basement kitchen/cellarage, coach-house and stables (MHNSW quoting *SMH* 6 Sep 1848).
• Oct 1850 – Conference of Australasian Bishops accommodated at Tusculum.
• 1851–52 – Broughton leaves; William Long purchases (DoS: £3010) and occupies from 1852.
• 1850s–1870s – Long-family modernisation: slate roof, windows, chimneypieces, SE extension; earlier verandahs replaced/extended as two-storey Ionic colonnades (cast iron and wood) — likely J.F. Hilly (stylistic attribution). Italian moulded stonework ordered for rooms (MHNSW).
• 1876 – William Long dies; son William Alexander Long inherits; later lets to approved tenants including Mayor W.P. (Sir William) Manning.
• 21 Oct 1904 – Auction; Lewis Edward Isaacs buys house lot for £3,750; Burcham Clamp alters staircase/stair hall (builder John White).
• 1906 – Orwell and Alfred Phillips purchase; Orwell later sole owner; billiard-room addition likely Clamp.
• 1919 – Harold Cazneaux photograph published in *Art in Australia* special *Domestic Architecture in Australia* (Hardy Wilson collaboration) — early architectural celebrity for the house.
• 1927–28 – Further sale and subdivision; from 1928 leased as private hospital (Isabel Christie); MHNSW dates the hospital chapter 1928–1939. Operating theatre and sterilising room inserted (1928 Ross & Rowe works in SHR).
• 1933 – Further hospital works (Spain & Cosh drawings, approved June 1933 — SHR).
• 1930s – Surrounding flats rise; curtilage shrinks to roughly today’s footprint (SLNSW notes flats obscuring front by mid-1930s).
• WWII – American Red Cross officers’ club / convalescent use; basement air-raid shelter reported (MHNSW).
• Post-war – Nursing home / later religious centre.
• 1954 / 1956 – C.C. Phillips measured drawing (1954); aborted hotel-room and 34-unit schemes (1956) documented in SHR — not built.
• Early 1982 – Vacant; squatters, vandalism, fires to rear additions; main joinery and panelled ceilings survive (SHR).
• Dec 1979 – Permanent Conservation Order (gazetted 14 Dec 1979).
• April 1983 – First compulsory resumption under the NSW Heritage Act 1977 (~$1.03m).
• 1985–87 – Clive Lucas conservation (~$785,000 — Heritage Council / SHR); Levine & Durbach competition wing for RAIA; restoration evokes early–mid Victorian period. Villa later held on a 99-year peppercorn lease to the Institute as NSW headquarters (SHR).
• 11 March 1988 – Official opening by the Premier of NSW.
• 2 April 1999 – Entered on NSW State Heritage Register (#00027).
• 2011–13 – Further renovations addressing damp (MHNSW).
• Today – AIA NSW Chapter headquarters; villa used for meetings, gallery and receptions; rooms for hire.

Architecture & interiors

Tusculum began as a large two-storey Regency villa in stuccoed brick — Verge at the height of his Sydney practice (ADB: colony’s high-water mark of austere Regency stucco). It is one of the few Sydney colonial houses that still show the full “villa” diagram: principal floors above, basement service rooms and stair below — upstairs/downstairs domestic administration made visible in plan (SHR).

Early descriptions and the 1848 sale notice give the bones: verandah; ground-floor hall opening to drawing and dining rooms linked by folding doors; study, store, butler’s pantry and servants’ room; four bedrooms and dressing room above; kitchen, servants’ room and cellarage below; substantial coach-house and three-stall stables with loft.

What you see from the street today is heavily shaped by the Long decades: earlier Doric colonnades were replaced with a fine classical two-storey verandah of the Ionic order on three sides (cast iron and wood — MHNSW), probably completed in the late 1870s (SHR), transforming a Regency villa into a mid-Victorian Italianate mansion. SHR notes the cast-iron balustrade pattern is very close to documented Hilly work at Fiona (Edgecliff), Guntawang and the Prince of Wales Theatre — the stylistic case for Hilly. High shuttered French doors open onto the broad verandahs. The matching portico/porte-cochère on the garden side was removed in the later twentieth century. Edwardian Clamp work remade the staircase and stair hall (retained in the 1980s conservation as significant). Hospital-era accretions on the verandahs were later stripped back.

Clive Lucas — leading Verge authority — directed the 1980s conservation to reveal original form while keeping key later layers. Behind the villa, the Levine & Durbach Institute building (national competition win) holds auditorium, offices and foyer gallery — 1980s architecture deliberately paired with the conserved colonial house.

Verge’s authorship of the original villa is secure (ledger + SHR). Attribution of the Ionic verandah campaign to Hilly is persuasive but stylistic.

People & anecdotes

A.B. Spark was the merchant who named houses after classical Italy (Tusculum, Tempe) and lived the boom-and-bust of the 1830s–40s. Tusculum marked his rise; his failure to settle there marked the slide — Bank of Australia collapse, guarantees for bankrupt friends, mortgage, sale, insolvency (ADB). He poured affection into Tempe on the Cooks River instead, entertaining hundreds there in a single busy year (1839). Tusculum was the showpiece investment on the Hill; Tempe was home.

Bishop Broughton made the unfinished house decent — housing-market pressure pushed him in, but he still bemoaned a missing water pump and the lack of a proper pantry (MHNSW quoting Shaw) — then planted roses and a kitchen garden, shelved his library against damp (1839), and grumbled that it was “a sad, imperfect place and anything but episcopal” — then renewed the lease anyway because the air and the outlook answered. For fifteen years church politics, education fights, and colonial hospitality ran through these rooms. In October 1850 Australasian bishops crowded in for their conference — Emily Crawley’s letter sketches the bedding arrangements. After Government House, this was the address that mattered.

William Long, emancipist publican turned wine merchant, bought respectability in stone and cedar. His and his son’s alterations — Ionic verandahs, Italian enrichments, slate instead of shingle — are why Tusculum reads mid-Victorian from the footpath. Later names on the visitors’ book of ownership and tenancy include politicians and lawyers (Kater, Sir James Martin), Lord Mayor Sir William Manning, and the Phillips brothers (Orwell’s name echoes in nearby Orwell Street / Orwell House territory on this blog).

Twentieth-century chapters are less glamorous and just as telling: private hospital beds where drawing rooms had been; Red Cross officers in wartime; then neglect so severe the State stepped in with the Heritage Act’s first compulsory rescue. That 1983 resumption is itself a heritage landmark — proof that NSW had decided some houses were not disposable. Paul Keating’s later association with lobbying for the architects’ lease (and a suite in the complex) is a modern footnote often repeated in secondary sources.

Image gallery guidance

Do not invent URLs — search these collections and embed with proper acknowledgement. The existing 2017 post already holds several historic views and estate plans worth keeping or re-crediting.

1. Early photographic views of Tusculum (c.1860s–1880s) Search: existing blog images; SLNSW / Trove digitised photos “Tusculum Potts Point”; City of Sydney archives. Caption idea: *Tusculum when the grounds still breathed — verandahs and garden before the flat boom.*

2. Harold Cazneaux, Tusculum, for *Domestic Architecture in Australia* (1919) Search: SLNSW archival record 110051389 (PXA 731 album); *Art in Australia* special number. Caption idea: *Already a classic by 1919 — Cazneaux’s Tusculum in Hardy Wilson’s circle.*

3. Matthew James MacNally, watercolour of Tusculum, 1932 Search: SLNSW archival record 110318466. Caption idea: *1932 — hospital years beginning, flats closing in (MacNally).*

4. Tusculum Estate subdivision plans (1842, 1852, 1871, 1928) Already on the existing post; also Trove / NLA map searches “Tusculum Estate Woolloomooloo”. Caption idea: *Watch the acres shrink — estate plans from Spark’s grant to the 1928 carve-up.*

5. Portrait of A.B. Spark, 1836, by Forbes Mudie Search: SLNSW (ADB cites P2/373). Caption idea: *The merchant who named it — A.B. Spark, 1836.*

6. William Grant Broughton portraits (e.g. William Nicholas, 1843) Search: SLNSW; ADB Broughton page. Caption idea: *First Bishop of Australia — Broughton, master of Tusculum 1836–1851.*

7. Contemporary AIA / Manning Street views Search: Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter media; Wikimedia Commons “Tusculum Potts Point”. Caption idea: *Still standing — Verge’s villa as NSW architects’ home, Manning Street.*

8. Compare set: Rockwall and Elizabeth Bay House Search: SLNSW *Villas of Darlinghurst* exhibition material; MHNSW. Caption idea: *Verge’s surviving hilltop kin — Rockwall next door in spirit; Elizabeth Bay House for McLeay.*

What stands today

Tusculum stands. It is not a house museum on daily public opening like Elizabeth Bay House, but it is very much alive as the NSW Chapter headquarters of the Australian Institute of Architects at 3 Manning Street, Potts Point.

What you can do:

• Walk Manning Street and read the villa from the footpath — Ionic verandahs, stucco, reduced forecourt, flats pressing close.
• Check architecture.com.au (NSW Chapter) for events, talks, and room hire — the restored villa hosts meetings, exhibitions and receptions; public access is typically via Institute programs rather than open-house tourism.
• Pair the visit with surviving neighbours on this blog’s beat: Rockwall (Verge), and across to Elizabeth Bay House (Verge for Alexander McLeay — Museums of History NSW house museum).
• Remember the lost setting: Woolloomooloo Bay frontage and multi-acre gardens survive only in plans, early photos, and street names (Tusculum Street included).

Sources & further reading

• NSW State Heritage Register — Tusculum (SHR 00027): https://apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5045157
• Heritage NSW HMS — Tusculum item 5045157: https://www.hms.heritage.nsw.gov.au/App/Item/ViewItem?itemId=5045157
• Museums of History NSW — Tusculum story: https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/tusculum/
• Dictionary of Sydney — Tusculum: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/building/tusculum
• Dictionary of Sydney — Potts Point: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/place/potts_point
• ADB — Alexander Brodie Spark: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spark-alexander-brodie-2684
• ADB — William Grant Broughton: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/broughton-william-grant-1832
• ADB — John Verge: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/verge-john-2757
• Australian Institute of Architects — NSW Chapter (Tusculum HQ): https://www.architecture.com.au/nsw-chapter
• SLNSW — Cazneaux / *Domestic Architecture in Australia* album: https://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details/archive/110051389
• SLNSW — MacNally, *Tusculum*, 1932: https://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details/archive/110318466
• *The Villas of Potts Point* (SLNSW 2002 exhibition excerpt): https://pottspointpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Villas-of-Potts-Point.pdf
• Clive Lucas & Partners, *Tusculum… conservation analysis and draft conservation policy*, 1985
• Terry Kass, *History of “Tusculum”, 1–3 Manning Street, Potts Point*, Heritage Council of NSW report, 1983
• Casey & Lowe, Tusculum forecourt carpark archaeological monitoring / site inspection, 2010 (cited SHR)
• G. P. Shaw, *Patriarch and patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788–1853*, Melbourne University Press, 1978 (Broughton letters via MHNSW)
• Graham Abbott & Geoffrey Little, *The respectable Sydney merchant A. B. Spark of Tempe*, Sydney University Press, 1976
• State Library of NSW, *Villas of Darlinghurst* exhibition catalogue, 2002
• *Sydney Morning Herald* sale notice, 6 September 1848 (via MHNSW / Trove)
• Existing scrapbook post (images & clippings): https://historicsydneymansionsmanorshouses.blogspot.com/2017/08/tusculum-potts-point.html

Related on this blog

• Rockwall – Potts Point (Verge neighbour)
• Elizabeth Bay House – Elizabeth Bay (Verge for Alexander McLeay)
• Orwell House – Orwell Street – Potts Point
• John Verge – Colonial Architect
• Bonus neighbour: Tempe House – Tempe (Spark’s favoured Verge villa)

*(Expand the thin 2017 stub in place, or republish under the fuller title and keep the old URL as the canonical post.)*

Keep existing photos; add SLNSW/Trove images with captions and credits from Image gallery guidance.