BAYVIEW APARTMENTS

Bayview apartments 41-49 Roslyn Gardens, Elizabeth Bay, has an interesting heritage. It was designed in 1968 by Hugo Stossel, who had also designed its buddy building adjacent, “Tor apartments”, in 1965.

Apartment 9 is for sale through Angleo Bouras and Thomas Arthurs

Real Estate For Sale – 9/41-49 Roslyn Gardens – Elizabeth Bay , NSW (rwebay.com.au)

Both blocks have similarities including light-coloured brickwork and panoramic windows in the European post-war idiom giving more light and a sense of air and space. Views of Elizabeth Bay from some apartments give the apartment block its name.

Hugo Stossel (1905-22) has had a lasting impact on the local area. He was a  Hungarian and one of a number of highly skilled and highly educated émigré architects who fled Europe in the late 1930s to escape Nazism. He trained in Rome and Vienna and travelled widely before arriving in Sydney, aged 34, the year before German troops invaded Poland and plunging the world into chaos. . His European projects were featured in USA magazines. He was initially employed by the NSW Department of Works. By 1947 he was registered in NSW as an architect.

By the 1950s, his projects were appearing regularly in the local press. Several of his residential designs appeared in the 1954 publication “Sixty Beach and Holiday Homes” alongside architects such as Harry Seidler, Sydney Ancher and Arthur Baldwinson. Stossel’s most ‘elegant’ project, the St. Ursula apartments, 5 Onslow Avenue, Elizabeth Bay, NSW, where he once lived and completed in 1951 was a reinforced concrete and steel curtain wall structure with floor to ceiling steel framed windows. Other important commissions for H. Stossel & Associates include projects in the eastern suburbs; factories; and the redevelopment of The Rocks and 41-49 Roslyn Gardens, Elizabeth Bay (Bayview). Projects in Ku-ring-gai included the Eisner house, Warrawee (now demolished), 97 Lucinda Avenue, Wahroonga (family home of Sir Gustav Nossal). He designed Broadwaters (1957) and Yarranabee Gardens (1958), both in Darling Point, the former NSW Police Headquarters at 3 College Street (1973) and the Airport Hilton Hotel, Mascot (1981). Stossel also submitted an unsuccessful entry for the Sydney Opera House competition. He also designed  his own residence, No. 72 Woodlands Road, East Lindfield (1951), Stossel Residence no. 2 at No. 63 The Bulwark, Castlecrag (1962) and Paul Kafka’s home (1948), Eton road, Lindfield.

Click here to see his other designs: https://first.mhnsw.au/images_linked/recno56295B.pdf

His ouvre is now more recently being understood for its significance as mid-century designs are becoming more understood and better appreciated in recent years. Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay have over 30 mid-century designed apartment blocks making it the most concentrated area for these designs in Australia.

by Andrew Woodhouse

Heritage Solutions