McDougall House, South Yarra, 1983

Built by the architect for his own use, the McDougall House is a modern day version of the nineteenth-century terrace house. Techniques of similar scale, and detail references to surrounding buildings, allow the house to fit easily within the existing street scape. The composition of the McDougall House facade is sophisticated and recalls the work of Robert Haddon, a Melbourne architect who practised early in the twentieth century and who was particularly skilled in the deft and novel composition of elements upon a surface. An elliptical window to the bathroom, a row of window-doors to the living room and a cut in the parapet for the down pipe and overflow are the carefully placed elements of this house's formal face. At the rear of the house a pointed bay encloses a breakfast room, and above its roof becomes a desk for the major bedroom of the house. The McDougall House signals a return to the explicit use of reference and quotation in a building, the memory of things past.