“This house has heard many famous voices and rose from an unloved boarding house to a home filled with love, art, and music.”

That’s what sisters Virgina and Kirsten say about growing up at 171 Albion Street, Surry Hills – remembering the sound of song. Their mother Maggie had a black grand piano in the front lounge room, while her husband also used the space as a music studio for tutoring up-and-coming classical singers and répétiteurs for many years.

 

A historic landmark dating back to the 1860s, it spent much of its earlier life as a boarding house, before being carefully restored and reimagined as the grand family home we’re exploring today. Lovingly updated and held by this family for almost 40 years, few other inner-city homes compare to these old relics in terms of scale and grandeur.

It’s unique to hear someone looking back on moving into mid-‘80s Surry Hills, with an insight for what the area was becoming – dancing between its reputation as a gritty neighbourhood, to the hub of the rag trade business, to the melting pot of creativity that defines the pocket today.

 

“My mother was impressed with the diversity of the neighbourhood and the potential the house had, where most of the building remained in the same configuration as it had been built,” Virginia says.

“Prior to this, the house had been used as a boarding house for many years, with every room having individual numbers on the doors. When we arrived with our removalist, the complete sets of bedroom furniture in every one of the eight rented rooms had to be removed.”

“There’s still a number on one of the doors at the very top of the house as a reminder of the transformation through time.”

 

 

In each of the ground-floor bedrooms, the family found enormous faux marble bedroom suites, complete with gold starburst handles. Moving upwards in the house, the furniture became incrementally older, the Edwardian dressers and wardrobe found in the top two rooms still with the family today.

Maggie, Virgina and Kirsten became the prime early renovators of the property, removing Masonite sheets from the front of the marble fireplaces, and stripping back the heavy oil-based paint to reveal the elegant marble and the decorative fire grates. 

One of the remarkable details to be removed was the coin-operated gas meter in the kitchen, signalling the home’s days as a boarding house. Meanwhile, the front veranda was converted from a boxed-in, depression-era living space to its current open form, with carefully sourced cast iron lacework panels.

 

 

Amazingly, the original 1860s glass remains in the windows within the main house, while the French doors on the second floor are also intact, surrounding modern touches focusing more on additional noise-reducing doors and soundproof glass.

Once the sisters had moved out, the house was continually updated, becoming more dedicated to music. The large bookcase in the second lounge room was built to house the family’s vast library of music scores, ranging from great choral works to opera, lieder, musicals and art songs.

 

In between Crown and Bourke streets, it’s an ultra-central village home that offers a sense of harmony within a substantial Victorian form. With great care having gone into its preservation, it evokes the feeling that its next custodians could write an encore of their own.

View listing: 171 Albion Street, Surry Hills