The changing world around one of Australia’s first ‘art deco’ apartments

When the doors of New Farm’s Coronet Flats opened to the public in 1933, it was a structure unlike anything seen in Brisbane before.

The three-storey brick building dreamed up by architect Max Strickland was the largest of its kind at the time. 

“Brisbane’s most modern flats”, according to local newspapers, featured ceiling motifs inspired by Australian flora, koalas carved by hand into the fireplaces, stained glass windows. 

It was art deco, before the phrase had really made its way down under. 

None of this was enough to impress a 16-year-old Tamsin O’Connor, freshly arrived from the UK and staring up at the imposing brick facade.

“I was disappointed,” she tells the ABC, seated in the lounge room of the apartment on the building’s top floor.

Her home, decorated with bright art prints, books, and the antique furniture inherited from her aunt, is one of nine in the building.

“It was a brick building, and my parents were expats, they were Australian-born but they moved to the UK because of my father’s work,” she says. 

“One of the ways in which everybody kept in touch was with a steady stream of Australiana being sent our way.” 

Coronet Flats did not live up to paintings of the Australian outback, Dreamtime stories, and Banjo Patterson poems. 

“My idea of the perfect Australian residence was a beautiful, sprawling Queenslander in the bush, so this urban brick building that resembled Europe was a huge disappointment,” Ms O’Connor says. 

The O’Connor family took on Coronet Flats, now known as Coronet Court, when Mr Strickland decided he no longer liked being a landlord, just a few years after construction was completed.  

In the decades since, Australia’s apartment-living lifestyle has undergone a transformation. 

Apartments ‘rearing their ugly heads’ in Australian cities 

By the 1930s, New Farm had gone from a “pastoral idyll” to a subdivided suburb, according to Ms O’Connor. 

Capital cities nationwide were already struggling to manage rapid population growth – allowing for a new and controversial way of life to start muscling in.

Only three years before Coronet Flats opened its doors, newspapers warned of apartments “rear[ing] their ugly heads”. 

“Home-lovers are delighted at the prospect of the prevention of the indiscriminate building of hideous flats,” the Brisbane Courier declared in 1929.  

For New Farm, this growth meant going from “mostly large houses” to a “massive subdivision” of estates following World War I.  

“It must have been a splendid place to live for these very monied men [in the late 19^th century], straight from the city down the tram line,” Ms O’Connor says.  

The suburb has undergone big changes over the past century, New Farm Historical Society’s Gerard Benjamin says. 

“There used to be a [timber mill] … and they had these handbooks with kit houses, 20 varieties of Queenslander,” he says. 

“They would supply everything that you need for the house, as well as the manual and the tools. You didn’t need an architect or a builder. 

“There would have been many houses around New Farm like that, virtually kit-built Queenslanders.” 

The higher parts of the suburb, with their better views, cool breezes and “more genteel” residents, got the bigger houses. 

It was no surprise then that, from the very start, Coronet Flats was dubbed “arresting”, “imposing”, “striking” and “unsurpassed”. 

By the time it opened its doors, four of the nine available units had already been leased out, according to newspapers at the time. 

“Brisbane was not ready for this building,” Ms O’Connor says.

“There were things in the press that were quite critical of apartments, and there was a fear that we’d become a city like Sydney. 

“This building must have scared the bejesus out of the surrounding sea of Queenslanders, federation houses.

“This must have looked like a bit of a nightmare to people, the shock of the modern.

“If you lived in an apartment, you were a renter.” 

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Max Strickland, with his new art deco creation, was probably trying to attract “the more well-heeled”, Ms O’Connor adds. 

“But Brisbane wasn’t ready, and the well-heeled lived in nice houses in Ascot,” she says. 

‘A huge boom in apartment living’ 

In 1933 there were 75,152 occupied “tenements and flats” nationwide on Census night.

The average weekly rent was 17 shillings and sixpence — about $114 a week in modern currency. 

Australia saw a divide “along class lines”, historian Dr Charles Pickett says.

“Wealthy people … locked to apartments because of what was called the servant problem,” he says. 

“Women had got more employment opportunities and weren’t willing to be domestic servants, so a huge number of people abandoned their big homes and moved into big apartments.

“Whereas there was a real moral panic about working people living in apartments.

“It was quite a strange debate in the 20s and 30s.” 

This didn’t change, according to Dr Pickett, until the 1950s. 

“There was a huge boom in apartment living, which happened obviously because we had the baby boom,” he says. 

“You had a level of affluence that had never occurred before, and it meant that kids could leave the family home … and live independently much earlier than they could previously.

“After the [Pacific War] apartments were very much a young person’s escape.” 

As of the 2021 census, the number of apartments had risen to 1,692,565 nationwide.

The transition from houses to apartments is long-running, according to Dr Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

“The trend historically was that free-standing houses were where families lived,” he tells the ABC. 

“But it’s certainly shifting now and what we’re seeing is a real movement towards apartments for family living. 

“There’s a bit of chicken and egg in this though, because what that requires is that developers have apartments [with] appropriate space for families. 

“And developers won’t do that until there’s demand for it.” 

From ‘transient’ professionals to a heritage agreement rescue 

The O’Connor family first took over Coronet Court in 1939, with Ms O’Connor noting the types of people living in the building have varied over the years. 

In the early years, residents were mainly “transient” professionals. 

“In the 40s we had some American officers, and … occasionally American officers would come over for Anzac Day or to revisit their wartime experience,” she says. 

“These Americans fetched up and spoke to somebody in the building [and said] they had lived here, and they had a picture of it in an architectural magazine in America. 

“They were clutching this picture, they were so excited.”

It was not until she returned to the building while doing a post-grad several years later that she finally had her light-bulb moment. 

“I finally got it,” she says. 

“I had no notion of the commitment I was making.” 

By the time Ms O’Connor and her sister inherited the building from their aunt, it had become a struggle to maintain.

There were the questionable paint jobs, the scuff marks and dents, 

Tenants in the 1990s had left “Mission Brown” staining on the woodwork, which is still steadily being removed.

The timber verandahs and major parts of the main building needed to be restored, all the plumbing needed to be replaced, and the wiring needed to be upgraded. 

Then there were the repeat calls from developers eager to buy the property and the real estate agent, who pointed to every detail, every carving, every fixture.

“He was pointing around, going, ‘you have to accept that the day after you sell there will be a skip outside and all of this will be gone’,” says Ms O’Connor.

“Well, that stuck in my head, and I thought: ‘Not on my watch, mate.’

“The other thing was that I woke up in the middle of the night and just thought, ‘the lights!’

“This building is famous for its lights, which are based on a Frank Lloyd Wright idea of integrated lighting … all handmade for this building, [they were] cast in plaster and made to look like metal.”

Ms O’Connor’s fears took on a specific shape.

“I imagined a particular type of buyer, a woman of about 40 with decorating aspirations,” she says.

“And that she’d have bought a little chandelier on her trip to Paris and planned to hang it. Then she’d give [the original light] to her grandmother, who lived in a California bungalow somewhere.

“That would be the end of it.”

In order to save the building and enshrine it in Brisbane history, Ms O’Connor made the decision to strata-title the apartments, crafting a unique heritage agreement that comes attached to each sale. 

A careful process of restoration — as well as upgrading to include air conditioning and other modern amenities — took years to complete. 

Ultimately selling off individual flats was the best strategy to keep Coronet out of the hands of developers. 

“I’m very conscious of the privilege of it, but it carries great responsibility,” Ms O’Connor says.

“Had I known what we might be in for, I might have made a different judgement. 

Comparing apartments and houses isn’t ‘apples to apples’, experts say 

Medium and high-density housing — building up, not out — is being pushed by experts as the potential solution to Australia’s housing crisis.

“Apartment living is the norm in most of the developed world,” Dr Fotheringham says.

“Actually, we’re a bit of an outlier in being so dependent on free-standing houses.