Signalman's Cottage Battery Point - Restauration Australia Season 4 Episode 4

Host Anthony Burke meets retired couple David and Mandy who take on the transformation of a hugely significant historic cottage in Hobart, Tasmania.

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A couple of images of colonial sandstone and timber fretwork held promise for this episode about the former signalman's cottage at 2 Battery Square, Battery Point. Everything at Battery Point sells for a million or two, of five on the waterfront. This place doesn't seem to have been on the market for a while, so presumably the long term owners are doing an upgrade.

We even get shown some flaking render and serious timber damage that cries out for a careful repair.

It soon transpires that restoration is even a greater misnomer this time round, since the first thing they do is demolish a sizable part of the house to make way for a big modern architecturing extension. Sort of like the big glassed family room at the back of the terrace house, but because the cottage predates the subdivision its back is to the street, and the front verandahs, instead of commanding expansive views across the harbour, it looks onto the back fence of some bland '30s flats. As a consequence, conservation of the setting and significant views has long been unachievable. Inward-looking architecture prevails over respect for the public face of a historic building. 

Burke is gaslighting the cottage, proclaiming the "heritage restrictions are mountainous" and it has "a heft of heritage constraints". It's as if he is gunning for the owners to defeat these heritage zealots. Blimey, does he not understand what heritage is for - and that if not for the mountainous restrictions, the cottage would have been demolished long ago for another of the bland blocks of flats that surround it. The original cottage remains structurally intact only "as per the heritage requirements". Didn't the owners actually want to preserve their historic cottage, or would they have preferred to demolish the lot and build some shiny new thing from scratch. 

The architects didn't seem to see heritage as much as a negative as the show's host did. As Heritage Tasmania explained in their feature article on the building's "sensitive and generous addition":

They worked with the heritage authorities to understand what was of low or no significance that could be removed, and to develop a number of principles to guide the approach of the new work, Beyond removing intrusive elements introduced in the 1980s, the principles defined that the new work should be subservient, lower in height and sympathetic and interpretive in scale and form. As the main façade faced the waterfront, it was agreed that the street end should read as the backyard....Inspired by colonial drawings of the area, the new additions reference the outbuildings that historically occupied the site...and the addition of the chimney references the memory of historic kitchens out the back

Mandy is quite perturbed because she can't make the roof higher to get the tall ceilings she wants so desperately. and then they have trouble lowering the floor level because the old building has no foundations., but they put in a concrete beam and raft structure, that looks like it involved digging out a fair bit potentially removing 160 years of archaeology. 

the architects

the foundations

the archaeology?

It's only the fancy minimalist extension that gets the good PR. 'The Hobart Magazine' tells us that Fred Ward and Cath Hall from 1+2 Architecture had to work within heritage conservation requirements, which meant "thinking of innovative solutions that often weren’t considered with new-build projects...The challenge was to offer a contemporary approach with a design sensitive to the cottage’s layers of history...” The implication here is that the usual approach is to ignore sensitive design or even make it purposely insensitive.

It even won the Australian Institute of Architecture's peoples' choice awards because of "A clear yet complementary relationship between old and new has been sought. Playful, abstract reference is made to fragmented historic forms, materials, and memory of the archaic function of the site."

At least Delperro and Clement (the builders - only 'builder Bruce' gets a name check in the show) got some handy free advertising on Google Streetview.

But what happened to that nice bit of Edwardian looking timberwork on the back verandah?

It might be the the 1956 of 1980s addition (fortunately the Tasmanian Archives make the building approvals accessible).

If the building is 1850s as claimed, how come the machine-made bricks in stringer bond - looks like a 20th century cavity wall. Elsewhere we can read that "Remnant walls from the original cottage remain within the core of the house which has seen a series of modifications and renovations and extensions between the 1850s and 1906, in 1985 and most recently in 2020." So the brickwork might be 1906 - still fairly early for cavity brick wall. The four red brick chimneys are also 1906.

Burke tells us that the "pick facing" of the stonework is typically Georgian. I wouldn't have thought Georgian really captures the style or appearance of the house, and certainly is not especially associated with pick dressed stonework, that could be of any period. Heritage Tasmania clears up the dating sequence: 

...the original stone section of the building was built in 1853 to house the signalman. Over the years, the stone building has been heavily modified. In the 1870s, a new Georgian-style entry was added to the western side of the building; in 1906 a large brick extension was added to the east  and a Victorian-style verandah was introduced; and in the 1980s further additions were incorporated

We are not party to the details of the building's history, but it can be surmised from the above, and from the glimpses of various bits of fabric. The shingle roof is partly in place. This appears to be exposed above the former front entrance hall. 

The thick internal wall Burke points out is probably off this hall and marks the original east elevation, so the 1853 part probably comprises only the two western bedrooms.

At least some of the stonework is cleaned back and retained in the new bathroom. This would have been the south wall of the 1853 building.

There is not really much evidence of a 'Georgian style' entrance, although there is some early stonework that conservation stonemason Warwick Young has to deal with. render over the decaying stone has trapped moisture, so his job is to cut out the old and match new facing slabs. He at least appreciates the value of a well built stone house, and puts down the problems to the fact that "it just needs some maintenance". This is probably true of the timberwork too, although Bruce the builder just pulls out the Huon pine balustrade timbers and runs through with the circular saw to see what the timber is, then declares them unusable, although careful conservation work would almost certainly have been able to save almost all the tiber. He plans to but some stirrups under the rotted posts and disguise them with some capping, rather tan do a more conservation-minded splice would be more in keeping with the 'like for like' and 'do as much as necessary and as little as possible' philosophy of the Burra Charter.

Apparently '...meticulously searching through records, archives and plans of the building' results in a 'shed out the back' design for the extension. From Rex Cox at the Maritime Museum, and Brendan Lennard - Senior Cultural Heritage Officer with the City of Hobart, we learn about the semaphore signals, the gun batteries and the nearby magazine tunnels, which leads to a 4 1/2 tonne reinforced concrete chimney with inset grooves mimicking the semaphore mast, evidently saying 'bushrangers are here' - although this sounds like one of those chinese character tattoos that says 'wanton soup'

The signalman's cottage was part of a semaphore network  which passed messages between Hobart's Ports, and could send a message to across to Port Arthur in 15 minutes. 

the signalman's view