Architect
John Verge
The English-born architect of colonial Sydney's great Regency houses, 1828–1837.
John Verge arrived in Sydney late in 1828, intending to be a farmer. Within two years he was the leading domestic architect in the colony, and within nine he had retired to his Williams River estate, leaving behind the small body of work — Lindesay among them — that defines late-Regency colonial Sydney.
John Verge was born in Hampshire in 1782 and worked for some twenty years as a builder and architect in London, where he had built up a respectable speculative-housing practice in Belgravia. In late 1828, at forty-six, he emigrated to New South Wales — bringing his son, sheep, agricultural equipment, and the intention of taking up land. He arrived in Sydney on 27 December 1828 and was granted, almost immediately, the substantial property of Lyndhurst Vale on the Williams River, north of Newcastle.
The architectural career was meant to be temporary — a means of raising capital while the farm was being established. In practice, between approximately 1830 and 1837 he produced the most significant body of domestic architecture made in Australia in the colonial period.
The work
The defining commission is Camden Park, designed in 1831–32 for the wool magnate John Macarthur and built between 1832 and 1835. It is Verge's masterpiece and the largest and most ambitious country house of late-Regency Australia: a long single-storey façade in pale rendered brickwork, with a Greek Doric portico at the centre and the principal rooms arranged on a strict Palladian plan. Camden Park survives, in the Macarthur family's continuous custody, as one of the great Australian country houses.
In Sydney itself the work concentrates on the inner harbour. Elizabeth Bay House was designed in 1833 for the Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay and built between 1835 and 1837 on a sloping site above what was then the city's eastern edge. The oval saloon and cantilevered staircase at Elizabeth Bay House are among the most accomplished pieces of Regency interior architecture in Australia. Tusculum at Potts Point, of about the same period, demonstrates Verge's adaptation of the same vocabulary to a smaller urban site.
Lindesay, on Darling Point
Lindesay at Darling Point — built between 1834 and 1836 for the Colonial Treasurer Campbell Drummond Riddell — is the work that sets Verge apart from the Greek-Revival mode he otherwise preferred. At Lindesay he produced a picturesque Gothick villa: steeply pitched gables, drip-moulded windows, a crenellated parapet, the whole composition borrowed from the late-Regency English country cottage. It is the earliest domestic Gothick essay in Australia, and the prototype of the Darling Point villa as a building type.
The attribution of Lindesay to Verge is the working consensus rather than a strictly documented fact: the building accounts, where they survive, identify the contractor more clearly than the architect. But the composition, the detailing and the period are unmistakably his, and the attribution has been carried forward by every subsequent scholar of the colonial Sydney period.
Retirement and death
Verge retired from architectural practice in 1837 to his Williams River estate, and from 1838 took up a second land grant at Austral Eden on the Macleay River. He spent the last twenty-three years of his life as a farmer. He died at Austral Eden on 9 July 1861, aged seventy-nine.