Chris Smith's Prospect home, built in 1938, heritage listed as South Australian gem of modernist/art deco
Architect Chris Smith's art deco home at Prospect borrows from ancient Egyptian influences in its dining room. The bathroom (bottom right) features a maze of tiling styles.
Images by Brett Williamson, courtesy ABC News
A Prospect home, designed by architect Chris Smith, built in 1938 and state heritage-listed in 2010, became one South Australia’s best examples of modernist architecture or art deco.
Other works by Smith, who designed the Prospect art deco home for himself, included the former synagogue in Synagogue Place, off Rundle Street, Adelaide; the Capri Theatre at Goodwood and Port Adelaide Enfield Town Hall.
Prospect mayor David O’Loughlin and wife Alison were owners of the house in the early 21st Century. O’Loughlin was convener of the Adelaide chapter of the Art Deco & Modernism Society that raised concerns with a parliamentary inquiry about “relatively low level” of heritage protection for Adelaide’s 20th Century housing.
The Prospect house showed art deco’s borrowings from Aztec and ancient Egyptian art with colours and patterns were often aligned with bold gold, blue and blacks. With no corridors, it also threw off the formality of the Edwardian and Victorian eras.
Built-in furniture was prominent in Smith's design, with the main bedroom having a dressing table, benches and bedside tables installed. A walk-in wardrobe was also very new for its time.
The upstairs bathroom continued the home’s flair, with unique tiling covering almost every angle. Five colours are used in the terrazzo floors, with the cross, diagonal and rounded-ended features. The four wall tiles are castellated brown in the skirting, the swirling body tile and the five-coloured zigzag design topped by a bull-nosed tile.
Prominent in the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, art deco became popular due to its simplicity of construction — square blocks with decorative shapes added on. The streamlined era was bold and embraced the aerodynamic shapes of the emerging airplanes, ocean liners and trains of the time. The Prospect Road home captured two sub genres of art deco, with the rear garage an example of the jazz era.
