Showing posts with label Kellet House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kellet House. Show all posts

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Kellett House - Formerly Bona Vista - Darlinghurst - New South Wales







Kellett House - formerly Bona Vista Darlinghurst - New South Wales 




















The First NSW Premier Stuart Alexander Donaldson, moved into a 2 Storey Villa on a 3 Acre Lot, where The Hotel Mansions On Kellett Street and Bayswater Road sits Today. 


The Villa was originally called Bona Vista, and had been built for Samuel Augustus Perry  in 1831 and Donaldson renamed it Kellett House. 



Perry was granted the Allotment by Governor Ralph Darling. He arrived in Australia with his wife & six children ni 1829,
Perry came to Sydney to serve as the Deputy to the NSW Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell


His hair look like it needs a good bruch and cleanup, his sideburns are very 2005 and his unbuttoned military coat looks like something straight off the 2012 Runway. Maybe he was a man ahead of his time. 


Perry came to Sydney to serve as Deputy to NSW Surveryor General Thomas Mitchell, & he immediately clashed with him, as Thomas Mitchell was jealous of anyone who was going to suceed him. 

Perry was generally assigned mundane duties so Mitchell could accuse his underling of being idle & lazy. 


Perry didn't live at Bona Vista for long and in 1834 sold it at auction to Richard China Jones MP who renamed the Villa Darlinghurst House, after his wife's good friend Lady Elizabeth Darling, wife of the Governor. 
























, I came across this gem of an article from the 30 November 1937 edition of The Sydney Morning Herald, written by Joseph Reidle:




"Ghosts in Crinolines, When Kings Cross was dotted with stately homes.
"A great effort is required to imagine that King's Cross (sic) - the present throbbing centre of Sydney's night life - was once sparsely dotted with stately homes, where demure ladies drove leisurely through private avenues of trees in their carriages.
"Those were the days when land was owned by the acre. 
"To-day (sic), despite stout resistance to the demolisher's picks, century-old homes are being knocked down so that the task of converting King's Cross into a swarming, human ant-hill may proceed uninhibited.
"Roslyn Hall and Orwell House are already man-made ruins, and a similar fate awaits Kellett House, Springfield and Larbert Lodge. 
"But before modern mammoth structures completely annihilate even the memory of their long lives, these last survivors of a bygone age merit at least a brief obituary."

The article goes on to describe, in words and pictures, the ruin-like state of some of the original villas and, despite the fact that the Villas book states Kellett House was demolished in 1877, it appears from this article parts of the home were still around in the 1930s.


So, after Donaldson moved out of Kellett House in the mid-1800s, it was purchased by wealthy squatter W.F. Buchanan.
The original plot was subdivided from 1864 and Buchanan demolished part of Kellett House and built a terrace on the site, known as Bayswater Terrace - obviously how the road today was given its name.
The Hotel Mansions was built in the late 1800s and remodelled in 1918. 
The remains of Kellett House were sold in October 1937 and it was probably demolished soon after.
Today, the Hotel Mansions is about to be converted into designer apartments known as Manor, and the area continues to be a swarming, human ant-hill.



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Original Plan Showing Goderrich Lodge And Kellett House

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Kellett Estate 

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1879