Gong Designs

I've only just noticed an architectural quirk of the buildings near my new home city - Wollongong. There must have been a huge housing boom after the war to fit all those families coming back to work in the largest steel works in Australia. I'm not sure if it was one architect / designer or the generic style of a single builder but there's a definite sameness to the swathe of development in and around the heart of the city.

Predominantly an unadorned box shape built of weatherboard, the front has the only tricky bits. They normally have a brick porch with one or two steps leading onto the door with the red clay roof line bifurcated to enable a smaller roof over the porch. The porch is mainly open with 2 columns of brick leading up to oversized squat shaped ceramic column tops usually painted the same colour as the house itself. On either side of the porch are small bulged windows for the bedrooms.

I can only assume that the small column tops (always fitting poorly over the brick) were either a stock purchase by the builder who didn't want to change his other plans (time must have been of the essence) or else it's a deliberately weird design. Either way, I've never seen this style anywhere else in the world.

More investigation required.