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Mount St. & Bellevue Terrace, Perth

Mount St. starts innocuously at the top of St. Georges Terrace, and ends in a beautiful part of the city fringe at the top of the steep street, opening like the most gorgeous bloom. The adjacent entrance to Kings Park provides cool, verdant and expansive views to Perth city and Swan River.

On the cuff of Cliff St, Mount St and Bellevue Terrace stands Sunny Meed, a slice of honey dripped from the sky; an example of breathtaking symmetry, standing stately at the top of the steep rise of Mount Street, in the quieter, cul-de-sac accessed by the freeway footbridge that splits city and park. Upon reaching the peak of Mount St., the eye catches the sleek lines of Sunny Meed and is drawn up and up and up.

In an essay, ‘Modern Flats', which accompanied a 1996 University of WA exhibition of architectural projects of Krantz and Sheldon, Peter Brew writes, "Flats and their architects remain outside official histories like homosexuals, the Communist Party and apartheid. Flats pose a difficulty for our invariably nationalistic historians because they do not affirm the egalitarian myth of the nuclear family with Hills Hoists and mortgage."

Sunny Meed is certainly worthy of investigation.

Built in 1961 by architectural firm Krantz and Sheldon, whose development of the minimum dwelling left an emphatic impression on Perth's post-WWII built landscape, Sunny Meed (and its more-famous neighbour, Mt. Eliza Apartments, known to many as the ‘thermos flask building', built 3 years later) represents the ‘modernity' that Harold Krantz and Robert Sheldon impressed upon Perth for a thirty-year period: in an associated interview for the same exhibition, Harold Krantz said, "you use the materials available in the simplest way without ornament, using proportion and colour, to give you your decorative effect as much as possible." This is why these buildings do not become old fashioned as some, Krantz said.

The timelessness Krantz speaks of is evident in Sunny Meed, an as minimalist building as you're likely to get anywhere in Perth. Mount Street features several Sheldon & Krantz buildings, as does other parts of Perth, where ‘pockets' exist in South Perth, East Perth and around the university, in Crawley. Harold Krantz explained that he did not want city blocks to build on. "You cannot get enough area and you cannot get gardens and parking to meet requirements. So you have to go outside the city block. I wanted to be as near to the central city block, within the square mile of the city bounded by the river and railway." David Krantz (Harold's son, who joined the practice in 1960) sheds light on his father's modus operandi: "he always taught me that the biggest capital gains, the biggest growth in value was in the fringe of the city. You will find that those clusters you are talking about are in the immediate north, south-east and west - the closest you could get."

Yet it is Sunny Meed that stands out, something of the jewel in the crown, seeming to fit in seamlessly with the botanical riches that spring from its doorstep, as Bellevue Terrace runs along the shady green isthmus of Kings Park. Sunny Meed is best observed on a clear day, as the deliberate white lines seem razor-sharp against the wide blue sky. Sunny Meed is a symmetrical masterpiece with ten apartments, each taking up a whole floor. The tenth floor has a rooftop area, with laundry and sundeck in a glassed-in, slate-floored enclosure. Each floor is serviced by a boxy, very ‘60s elevator, opening to a sparse entrance hall. Sunny Meed was built in the later stages of the architectural practice (established in 1946, Sheldon & Krantz practiced until 1972, although Robert Sheldon died in 1968).

Needless to say, the views (especially in the higher apartments) are breathtaking.

In 2002, an ‘art-heist thriller' play, Last of the Urban Guerrillas, was mounted for the ARTrage Festival. The play, about a Kings Park art-heist gone terribly wrong, was set in the penthouse apartment at Sunny Meed. The certain timelessness of the building and its setting attracted the writer to set the play there.

Recent public debate hinted that part of the solution to Perth's socio-cultural malaise was to appoint the Swan River foreshore Perth's ‘heart'. Extending this analogy further, with Sunny Meed sentinel to the fit-freaks' Jacob's Ladder and grueling Mount Street trysts, this part of Perth should surely be known as the city's main ventricle, and is certainly worth a gut-busting climb up the Mount Street hill (with something tiger, tiger takeaway!) to one of the landmark's of Perth's apartment landscape, Sunny Meed.

Interview quotes from exhibition catalogue, "Krantz and Sheldon: architectural projects" Cullity Gallery, University of WA 4 - 22 March 1996
Published by the School of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of WA