May 10, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
For an urban form of housing, Brisbane’s Queenslander houses are strikingly close to nature.
Rustic but often elegant buildings constructed between the late 19th century and the Second World War, Queenslanders at their most refined are like breezy wooden tents, garden pavilions for full-time living. At their most utilitarian, these lightweight homes are simply provisional deployments of as little as possible. Raised above the ground on wooden columns (or “stumps”), their unadorned pitched tin or iron roofs overhang thin timber frames to create verandas that themselves function as day-to-day living spaces.
The Queenslander has uniquely defined the (sub)urbanism of Brisbane, Queensland’s largest — and Australia’s third-largest — city. They are, indeed, singularly Australian, the airy looseness of their structure having evolved, says James Cook University’s Stephen Naylor “through the initial recognition of the indigenous people of the region, as they sought shade and opportunities for breezes to assist in the creation of comfortable shelter.” With their single floors and overlap between inside and out, Queenslanders are key to making “Brisbane feel like a big country town,” according to Aaron Peters, architect and founder of the architecture firm Vokes and Peters.
“It’s pretty odd,” he says, “to live in a city of 3 million people and live in what effectively feels like a big timber tent.”
This spacious, sprawling character is not accidental. In 1885, Brisbane set lot sizes to a minimum of 1,300 square feet, an attempt to forestall the dense Victorian slums seen in Sydney and Melbourne. One of the Queenslanders’ most defining features — their elevation atop wooden columns — is also partly driven by the quirks of Brisbane’s terrain. Brisbane, which sits on a low-lying coastal swamp, is the most-flooded city in Australia.
Additionally, the Queenslander’s design blurs the distinction between inside and outside space in a way that, before air conditioning, fit the subtropical climate as well. As a result, the experience of living in a house like this can feel as if there is only a thin veil between the house and the natural world. “They have about them the improvised air of tree houses” Brisbane author David Malouf says in his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street:
“Airy, open, often with no doors between the rooms, they are on such easy terms with breezes, with the thick foliage they break into at window level, with the lives of possums and flying foxes, that living in them, barefoot for the most part, is like living in a reorganised forest. The creak of the timber as the day’s heat seeps away, the gradual adjustment in all its parts, like a giant instrument being tuned. Air circulates from room to room through a maze of interconnecting spaces; every breath can be heard, every creak of a bed post or spring.”
This character and layout stem originally from 19th century adaptations of the basic form of Britain’s Georgian-era cottages, says David Neustein, a Sydney architect whose past work has incorporated versions of the Queenslander’s veranda. Neustein sees the veranda as a “space of negotiation between the big outside and the small inside” as well as a space of many purposes: the extension of living space, sleeping quarters in hot months, productive utilitarian spaces for laundry and more.
The home type spread across the state of Queensland partly because it was cheap and adaptable in a place and time that badly needed both qualities. Thanks to a gold rush, Queensland’s population rose from 30,000 inhabitants in 1861 up to half a million by 1901, creating an overwhelming need for housing. The possibility of making a fortune in the mines meant there was little incentive for local entrepreneurs to stake their future on building houses for miners, and labor was hard to come by. The most efficient, least labor-intensive ways to build homes predominated.
A Lightweight Solution
In Queensland, that meant metal roofs, thin walls and timber frames. The houses consisted of rows of simple vertical posts with horizontal stud frames nailed to their exterior, finished with wooden slats produced by the sawmills that started to crop up in Queensland from the 1850s. This unique exterior stud framing, developed in England to build farm sheds, saved materials by using only the one layer of opaque covering needed for Queensland’s mild climate. Later in the 19th century, roof materials shifted to galvanized iron as municipal codes banned flammable roofs. By the 1870s, it was common to elevate Queensland houses on stumps, and by the 1880s, verandas were nearly universal.
Then, in the 20th century’s first decades, prefabricated homes hit the Australian market — just as they had in America. Brisbane sawmill companies, such as James Campbell and Sons, churned out simple and efficient kit homes and delivered them by rail or sea. Queenslander kits would arrive with instructions and comprehensive sets of parts: gutters, doors, windows, nails, screws, door knobs, and even paint and brushes. These mail-order catalogs spread the Queenslander far and wide, but also meant the end of regional distinctions.
This formula turned out to be perfect for Brisbane — and Queensland in general given its historic boom-and-bust mining economy that rewarded nimble investment in infrastructure. Because of its wooden frame and walls, the Queenslander was easily sawed into for expansion or relocation as the frontier expanded. The foundation of stumps also avoided any grading to the site, a benefit in both the hilly south and the tropical and muddy north.
“You could see the terrain of the hills going up and down and passing under these buildings,” says Peters, the architect. “It all feels very temporary.”
By the early 20th century, there were also upmarket variations available, and it became more common to enclose exposed studs with another layer of timber paneling. This could come adorned with nearly any style of the day: California Bungalow, Queen Anne, Arts and Crafts. Decorative features, like screens and balustrades, gained more complexity, as did the gabled roof lines.
As the style matured, architect Robin Dods became renowned for taking the Queenslander seriously, and applying higher quality craftsmanship, design details and materials to what had been largely a vernacular housing type. While he practiced in Brisbane from 1896 to 1916, he took the informally evolved features of Queensland houses and organized them into a consistent and refined architectural language. And he designed more ways to broaden the spectrum of indoor and outdoor spaces on verandas. This meant louverand screen systems, wood shutters and plantings for privacy.
The 1930s were the Queenslanders final decade of popularity. Following the Allied victory in World War II, the newly globalized economy extinguished many of the material and labor constraints that made the lightweight, easy-to-assemble Queenslander necessary. More plainly decorated modern homes became popular, and middle classes relocated from the Queenslanders of Brisbane’s inner suburbs to the city’s suburban fringe.
Relics of an Unwanted Past
It wasn’t until a preservation boom in the 1970s and 1980, partially instigated by the national government’s research, that the Queenslander began to seem old enough to be historic, rather than just passé. This rediscovery helped to save them, but in the postwar period, Queenslanders have also been subject to awkward adaptations by owners trying to get these old houses to meet current-day expectations, both aesthetic and functional. Completely enclosing verandas and putting brick over the external timber walls — common in the late 20th century — are renovations that particularly violate the spirit of these houses.
Other common ways Queenslanders are renovated now include enclosing the veranda outside of bedrooms to create a “sleepout,” expanding the house to the rear (often doubling or tripling the size), and lifting the house up further to build underneath, which is a way to quickly erase these home’s flood resistance.
These changes were made partly because most people no longer found Queenslanders comfortable. “There’s not a lot of people that are prepared to live with them and their idiosyncrasies,” says Andrew Ladlay, a Queensland architect that focuses on historical preservation. “They don’t necessarily work well with modern living.” Despite their verandas, the houses can be stuffy. The veranda itself is more a social than a climate adaptation, usually at the front regardless of which direction the house faces and how much solar heat gain this provokes.
“People talk about how they’re these amazing responses to climate” says Peters. They’re not, he says. In his experience (he lives in a Queenslander) they can be hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and have no room for insulation. “The thickness in the floor between you and the outside is 19, maybe 21 millimeters. That’s it,” says Peters. “It beggars belief that they’ve persisted, but so they have.”
Still, the Queenslander has stuck around, even if the expansion of indoor space over the back veranda has made many more private, insular buildings. Their popularity has rebounded, and nowadays, they are so desired that their presence in a street is a harbinger of gentrification. Their visual charm aside, the Queenslander’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle — especially their verandas — brings with it notions of playful Aussie conviviality. It’s an easy friendliness recognizable to parents of young children enthralled with the Australian cartoon Bluey, about a family of blue heeler dogs and their children’s antics.
Set in a fictional Queenslander — which now has its own real-life counterpart in a redecorated Brisbane Airbnb listing) — the house’s outdoors are accessible from seemingly every room in the house. One episode titled “Veranda Santa” shows the family taking turns as the titular St. Nick, leaving from one bedroom door and sneaking back into the bedroom via the veranda, this time with a Santa hat and gifts. It’s Malouf’s “maze of interconnecting spaces” played for Buster Keaton-style laughs.
The space underneath the house also has many purposes beyond keeping floodwaters and termites at bay, both serious (workshops, livestock quarters, laundry, garage) and less so. “I’m not the only architect that grew up playing in the dirt under the house,” says Don Watson, one of Australia’s most preeminent architects, who grew up in a Queenslander house in Brisbane. “We built whole cities under the house with rivers and creeks and buildings. That was a whole training ground.”
Watson never forgot about Queenslanders, and began studying themin the mid-1970s, with the Australian Cultural Heritage Commission. Watson, in fact, is part of a generation of architects inspired by the Queenslander vernacular.
Vokes and Peters residential work also shows its influence; extending openness to nature into a more formalized, curated experience, and emphasizing subtle and hidden details. Their clever subversions of the Queenslander canon include the Wilston Garden Room, where the traditionally marginalized kitchen’s relationship to the garden is the primary feature, and the Auchenflower House, where timber battens that often cover up the stump columns down below instead reach up two stories to become a focal point.
Despite the possums shrieking and scraping on the tin roof, pests crawling up from the stumps, the dim interiors behind the eaves, and the creaking floorboards and thin walls forcing strained whispers, Peters remains committed to the Queenslander as a way of life.
“It’s a kind of discomfort I think is endearing,” he says. “We’re always aware of what’s going on in the street around us. I really love the idea of being able to occupy this liminal space between suburbia and a form of urbanity.”