Building
Babworth House
The Federation Arts and Crafts estate of Sir Samuel Hordern, 1912.
Babworth House is the principal Edwardian survival on the Darling Point peninsula — a forty-room Federation Arts and Crafts estate built in 1912 for Sir Samuel Hordern, the third generation of the great Sydney retail family. It is the largest house ever raised on the peninsula by a single family in the early twentieth century.
The Hordern family had built, by the early twentieth century, the largest department-store business in the southern hemisphere — Anthony Hordern & Sons, the Brickfield Hill colossus that stood opposite Sydney's Town Hall and employed thousands. Sir Samuel Hordern, who took the chairmanship of the firm in 1909, was the third generation of the dynasty and was about to embark on the long Edwardian moment of the family's wealth. He chose the Darling Point peninsula, then the suburb of choice for the Sydney commercial elite, for his principal residence.
The architects, and the house
Hordern commissioned the firm of Morrow & De Putron for the design. Their drawings, which survive in the State Library of New South Wales, set out a forty-room Federation Arts and Crafts house arranged around a great central hall, with reception rooms along the harbour elevation, a billiard room and library on the inland side, and an extensive service wing to one end. The materials are characteristic of the Edwardian moment: a base of trachyte and sandstone, a body of tuck-pointed brickwork, terracotta tile roofing, leaded glass at every principal opening. The principal rooms retain their original timber panelling and marble fireplaces.
Babworth House sits on the inland fall of the peninsula, behind walled gardens, with the long view back toward the western harbour. It was, at completion, the largest single residence built on Darling Point in the Edwardian period, and it is among the largest Federation houses surviving anywhere in metropolitan Sydney. A sister estate, Hopewood House, was raised in 1914 by the same architects on a nearby site for Samuel's brother Lebbeus Hordern.
From private estate to apartments
The Hordern family occupied Babworth House for approximately forty years. Following Sir Samuel's death in 1956 the estate was offered at auction and the property entered a long second life — for a period it was used as a school, and at various times as institutional accommodation — before being substantially restored in the late twentieth century and subdivided into a small number of private apartments, an arrangement that continues today.
Babworth House was added to the NSW State Heritage Register in 1999. The building's exterior, principal interiors and grounds remain substantially as Morrow & De Putron designed them, and the property is read from the public street as one of the most intact Federation estates remaining in the Sydney east.