The house's design by Australian standards is extremely avant-garde and smart for its date of 1883–8. The artistic house made popular in England with teaching of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was not built in Australia much before the 1890s, except perhaps in cases where fashionable clients had their houses designed in England, e.g. Alton (1882) in Victoria by J. P. Seddon, and Caerleon in N.S.W. (1887) by Maurice B. Adams.
