Geoffrey Harley Mewton


Geoffrey Harley Mewton was an Australian architect and leading proponent of modern architecture in Melbourne during the 1930s. He is best known for the Woy Woy flats at Elwood, Victoria, amongst the first flat blocks in Melbourne to show the influence of the European Modern movement.

Personal life

Geoffrey Mewton was the youngest child of William Arthur Mewton and Violet May Ratcliff Ford. His siblings were Beryl Harley Mewton and Roydon Harley Mewton. Born on 21 January 1905 in Brighton, Melbourne, he was educated at Wesley College, Melbourne. In 1938 he married Elma Ellen Gotz, and they lived in Sandringham in a house he designed for the next 20 years. They had one child, Noelle Margret Mewton. In March 1998, Mewton died while on a trip to London, England aged 93.

Architectural career

Mewton began his architectural career in 1923, beginning his articles at the Blackett, Foster & Craig office while studying at night at the Working Men's College. From 1926 to 1928 Mewton attended night classes at the Melbourne University Architectural Atelier. While still a student in May 1928, Mewton, in partnership with fellow student Roy Grounds, won 1st prize in an Royal Victorian Institute of Architects Exhibition for a house costing under £1000. He also won a scholarship later that year. After graduating, in mid 1928 Mewton and Grounds set off together on a 'worlds tour', first to London with another student Oscar Bayne, where they all shared 'digs'.
During his time in London, Mewton worked for Adams Holden & Pearson, later known for some of the best 1930s London Underground railway stations.
In 1929 after travelling to New York Mewton found work in the office of William Van Alen, at the time the completing the Chrysler Building, briefly the world's tallest building.
At the age of 25 on 20 October 1930 Mewton returned to London to sit his Royal Institute of British Architects examinations and then travelled throughout Europe for nearly two years.
On returning home to Melbourne, Australia on 13 September 1932, Mewton set up his own office. A year later Roy Grounds returned to Melbourne and the pair formed the office Mewton & Grounds. Their partnership was informal and each worked individually, collecting their own profits. Quickly the pair became acknowledged as amongst the chief protagonists of modernism in Melbourne.
Out of the many projects designed under this arrangement, only some have been definitely ascribed to one or the other, but it is thought that Mewton's work in this period was often the more starkly Modernist of the two, exhibiting the influence of the work of Dutch Architect William Dudok, combined with the minimalism of the Bauhaus, in a series of blocky brick or rendered houses and flats over the next 5 years by Mewton & Grounds. One of their first projects, attributed to Grounds, was radically modern for Melbourne - located in the hills of Upper Beaconsfield, Wildfell, built in 1933, was a long flat roofed rectilinear composition of white painted brick, with red and cream brick details and window frames painted 'burnt autumn', clearly influenced by Dudok. This was followed in 1934 by the Milky Way Cafe in Little Collins Street, a venture of the United Milk Producers Society to encourage milk consumption, with modern tubular steel furniture and flush recessed lighting panels.
The flat roofed rendered boxy walls of Mewton's Woy Woy flats, Elwood, 1936, are clearly influenced by the pure 'white box' Modernism of late 1920s Germany, and probably the first apartment building in Australia to do so. Other projects adopted a slightly softer approach using bricks, but still in uncompromising rectangular volumes, such as the white-brick Stooke House Brighton, the Evan Price House, Essendon, the Ingpen House, Geelong, and the blocky two-tone brick of the Bellaire Flats in St Kilda. Some of the other designs attributed to the partnership were, like Roy Grounds' Frankston area houses at the time, more rustic gable roofed designs inspired by the work of William Wurster, including the Fairbairn House, Toorak and the flats at the beach end of North Road, Brighton. Mewton's own house in Sandringham followed this mode, executed in red brick as a series of overlapping gable roofed sections, employing windows at the rear that could be folded back completely to create a house that opened to the garden. Robin Boyd described this house as "the perfect example of the Victorian type, house and garden are really planned as one."
Other designs show how even interwar architects known for their Modernist work could also design in more traditional styles. The flats in Ormond Road Elwood are modern yet domestic in character, with overall simplicity in cream brick, but also prominent gables and chimneys, and detailing in raised brickwork. The Maisonettes in St Georges Court, Toorak are another version of this approach, with modernist white rendered walls and porthole windows, combined with simple gable roofs, a prominent chimney and Georgian touches - an arched entry to one unit and a concave porch roof over the other - while the Riviera Court flats in Brighton apply the same simple gable roofed shapes, but with the brick detailing seen in the Elwood flats.
In about 1937 Grounds left for another overseas trip, leaving Mewton to practice alone, though the partnership was not formally dissolved until 1939, when Mewton began a partnership with Edward Billson that lasted to 1942.
During World War II, Mewton worked for the Department of Labour and National Service, working on mess halls and field hospitals.
After the war, Mewton worked briefly in 1945 for the firm A.C. Leith & Bartlett, producing a booklet of designs for the Housing Commission of Victoria. He was nominated that same year as judge for the Sun Post War Homes competition, and was an advocate for The Age 'Small Homes Service', established in 1947.
Later in 1945 Mewton joined the firm Godfrey & Spowers, along with Eric Hughes and John Lobb, together forming 'Godfrey, Spowers, Hughes, Mewton and Lobb'. Expanding in the late 1950s the firm began to undertake industrial and office buildings such as Allan’s Music Building, Collins St, National Mutual Centre Melbourne and Dallas Brooks Hall. Mewton continued to work for Godfrey, Spowers, Hughes, Mewton and Lobb as a partner until he retired from practice in 1980.

Key Works

Mewton & Grounds
Attributed to Mewton :
Attributed to both :
Geoffrey Mewton
Billson & Mewton
Geoffrey Mewton