By NOEL MURPHY
GEELONG’S housing heritage is under pressure as owners renovate period homes.
City Hall heritage advisor David Rowe said safeguarding the region’s architectural tradition has become a balancing act as architects, planners and builders negotiate heritage overlays and home-owner demands.
Dr Rowe said an increasingly common practice of preserving just a two-room street frontage in large housing revamps was “the absolute limit and not what we’re trying to achieve”.
“It’s tricky – sometimes people don’t want to keep anything,” he told the Independent.
“I don’t support facadism and even with some commercial buildings we try to retain some of the roof building as a three-dimensional entity.
“With the heritage overlay, I look at about 400 applications a year – it’s pretty full-on.”
Mr Rowe said heritage features helped significantly boost property values despite pressure to overcome restricitons on renovations.
“The heritage overlay that’s gone in there was promoted by the public. One-thousand properties are affected by overlays and only a handful pushed against it, which suggests the public wants certainty and the higher return.”
Dr Rowe said a building code without heritage coverage and planning laws allowing owners to leave properties unmaintained were hampering protection of historic homes.
“No internal controls to 99 per cent of houses and the issue is retain as much outside fabric as you can – windows, weatherboards and obviously you need to replace walls, you can’t expect people to live with drafts,” he said.
“You can’t have internal controls, most have been altered before anyway, but in most cases where heritage exists intact people bought the house because of that.”
