Building
Cloncorrick
John Horbury Hunt's 1884 villa on the corner of Darling Point Road.
Cloncorrick is the work of John Horbury Hunt — the Canadian-born architect who, more than any other figure of his generation, shaped the late-Victorian residential architecture of Sydney. Built in 1884 for a Supreme Court judge, the villa stands at the corner of Darling Point Road and Annandale Street, on the high inland side of the peninsula.
Sir George Bowen Simpson — a barrister, later a Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales — commissioned the house in 1884 and named it for Cloncorrick Castle in County Leitrim, Ireland, the property of his grandfather. He chose for the design the architect John Horbury Hunt, then in the most productive period of his career and the leading domestic architect in the colony.
Hunt at his Gothic moment
Hunt's reputation today rests largely on his later Shingle Style work — the houses he produced in the 1890s for the Hordern family at Wahroonga, the great country residences at Booloominbah and Trevenna in Armidale, and St Peter's Cathedral in the same city. Cloncorrick belongs to the earlier Gothic phase of his practice. The villa is composed in the Victorian Free Gothic mode that Hunt had developed under the influence of his mentor, the colonial architect Edmund Blacket, but with the asymmetric massing, broken silhouette and sharply articulated brick detailing that became the recognisable signature of his own hand.
The principal façade rises in a sequence of gables and pointed arches; the chimneys are tall and tightly grouped; the brickwork is laid with the unusual precision that Hunt demanded of his builders. The plan inside follows the ordinary late-Victorian arrangement of public rooms along the principal elevation and service rooms behind, but the architectural ambition is consistently above the standard of the period.
The corner site, and the road
Cloncorrick sits on a corner site that was, when it was built, one of the higher and more prominent positions on the peninsula. The villa addresses Darling Point Road, the spine of the suburb, and falls away to Annandale Street and Loftus Street behind. The garden is enclosed by the Hunt-period brick wall — itself a piece of his architecture — and the house is read from the public street as a controlled, understated composition rather than a display piece.
Cloncorrick is on the Register of the National Estate. It remains a private residence today and is not open to the public. Among the surviving Sydney houses of John Horbury Hunt, it is one of the most accessible to public view — not as a building you enter, but as a building you can read from the street and recognise as the work of a particular and unmistakable hand.