“It makes me a very proud old builder.”

AV Jennings, aged 95, in an advertisement for a display village in 1991

When Melbourne real estate agent Horrie Amos was short of homes to sell, his brother-in-law, and auctioneer, Bert Jennings, suggested they build houses, making a product to sell.

Which they promptly did to great effect, and the subsequent ideas developed between the two World Wars created the Australian ‘project home’. (You can skip the history and go straight to the lessons at the end).

Bert Jennings

Horrie and Bert went back years. In the early 1900s, when Bert was still a teenager, Horrie had encouraged him to invest his savings, garnered from work as a ‘dental mechanic’, into blocks of land. As WW1 broke out, Bert sold the land and bought a house, and in 1916 aged 19, he enlisted in the AIF, serving as staff sergeant in the ‘Dental Detail’ of the Australian Army Medical Corps, at home and in Britain.

After the war Bert joined the Graves Registration Detachment in France before discharge in Melbourne in 1920. He now owned a housed outright, the tenants having paid off the mortgage, a signpost to the wealth to be gained in houses, which encouraged him to eschew dentistry, and start a career in real estate as an auctioneer.

When house sales plummeted at the onset of the 30s Depression, Jennings put two ideas together: some people still had sufficient income to buy a home; and construction was cheaper given depressed wages and lower costs. He figured it was possible to build a quality home more cheaply than in the previous decade and in 1932 he mortgaged his home to build a house at 78 Booran Road in Glenhuntly, which quickly sold.

However, the banks were not willing to make further loans to Jennings for ‘speculative building’ (enshrined in the vernacular as a ‘speccie’). Jennings’ initiative was to change the process: he sold a fixed price house plan to customers ‘on contract’ which enabled banks to be comfortable giving a mortgage to the customer, and the mortgage money was then paid to the builder for construction of the home.

Using a purchaser’s mortgage money to build a ‘standardised’ home became the basis of the business, as it is for most project home companies today. Later in 1932 Jennings, now widely known as ‘A.V.’ (for Albert Victor), forms A. V. Jennings’ Construction Co., using Ed Gurney, an architectural student, for plans and William ‘Billy’ Vine as the contractor / builder.

Edgar Merton Gurney

Ed Gurney was born in 1911, and post WW1 his family hit hard times and he left school to work in the architectural office of James Wood and Harry Burt. He left them to work with a steel fabricator, KM Steel, which greatly improved his knowledge of construction. He was only 21 when he started work with Jennings, studying part-time at Working Men’s College (now RMIT) to gain architectural qualifications. Highly creative and interested in new designs, his work over 22 years was crucial to Jennings’ success.

Working with Jennings, Gurney set about designing an ever-greater range of houses, along the way creating the basic templates for mass-produced houses that last to this day. Arguably he designed more houses, (or at least the plans), than any other architect in Australia’s history. And he designed ways in which each plan could be ‘customised’ to a customer’s wishes, without losing the main plan ideas and arrangements.

A. V. Jennings’ Construction Co

Jennings could now deliver ‘standard but customised’ houses on a customer’s land, but there were few blocks available for customers to buy, and moreover individual homes on separate blocks of land lacked the efficiencies Jennings desired for mass production. So, the company embarked on the second means of delivering homes: developing subdivisions of land for customers to buy, having chosen a house from the ‘builder’s range’.

Jennings bought land parcels that could yield multiple house lots in the expanding outer suburbs of Melbourne and developed them as ‘estates’. In 1933 Hillcrest, the first subdivision in Caulfield South, had twelve blocks. A house and land package sold for £195, with houses of about 110 square metres or 12 ‘squares’ (an old English term derived from a standard 10’ x10’room, giving 100 sqft or a ‘square’).

The estates enabled efficiencies of construction, having all trades on one site, with excess materials transferred from one house to another. Jennings bargained with local councils, offsetting the costs of providing sewerage and water by building his own paved roads. The usual arrangement of waiting for council could mean sites had dirt roads for many years.

The success of Hillcrest led to more estates, often with a ‘Beau’ prefix: Beauville in Murrumbeena, Beaumont in Heidelberg (94 houses), and Beauview in Ivanhoe (121 houses). Jennings often added improvements such a tennis court or playground as communal facilities but in Beauville purchasers criticised the distance to shops and facilities. Responding to his customers, Jennings purchased land opposite the estate and built five shops with houses over. All the estates were designed by Ed Gurney, who lived his work, building a house for his family in each estate.

In 1937, after just 5 years of operation, Jennings encountered difficulties securing materials and labour to build full-brick houses and began experiments with brick veneer on timber frames, developed twenty years earlier in Britain. But this was also fraught with difficulties without frame-makers, plasterers, or finishers, so Jennings returned to making full brick homes.

During WW2 home construction slowed, and then was banned, so Jennings switched to industrialised buildings, including an ammunitions factory, shops, military camps, and hospitals. In the post-war expansion Governments were keen to provide housing for returned servicemen and their families, the growing middle class, and immigrants.

Jennings went back to building individual houses and estates. Donald S Garden, Bert’s biographer in Australian Dictionary of Biography, sets out his hard work ethic and strong Christian outbringing, and claims, “Jennings’s enterprise was inspired partly by his belief in the capacity of a modern and well-equipped family home to create happy and good citizens”.

A. V. Jennings Industries (Australia) Ltd

Work for the Victorian Housing Commission started with 40 houses in Aberfeldi in Melbourne and by 1948 Jennings had constructed its 1,000^th home. In 1950 A. V. Jennings Industries (Australia) Ltd was listed as a public company (AV was chair) and expanded their operations to Sydney, Canberra, and Hobart. In that one year they constructed almost 2,500 houses, individually and in estates, all designed by Ed Gurney, who left Jennings in 1954.

In the early 1950s Jennings had a contract to build 1,850 homes in Canberra in 2 years. With severe labour shortages, Jennings advertised for carpenters in Germany. 2,500 replied and 150 were chosen and provided with short-term visas. Their work was exceptional, they became known as ‘Jennings’ Germans’ and were offered permanent residency. Seven of them still live in Canberra.

At the same time, shortages of materials made full-brick-and-tile houses difficult. Remembering the experiments with brick veneer, Jennings purchased a timber mill, and a gypsum and mineral sands business to have security of materials supply. By 1960, when Jennings was Australia’s largest home builder, almost all houses were brick veneer, except where for the Government required full brick.

Jennings had two separate operations: one for individual purchasers on their own land; the other developing house and land packages in subdivided estates. The construction efficiencies on an estate meant that those houses were some percentage points cheaper than the individual house built on a separate site. Jennings then introduced ‘Display Homes’ in the estates, and a weekend visit became an essential family activity.

In the 60s and 70s, Jennings were challenged by design features in houses by ‘boutique’ builders such as Habitat and Merchant Builders in Melbourne and Civic and Pettit + Sevitt in Sydney. Jennings’ had a reputation for good value, but somewhat ordinary designs, so they opened Castlemaine, the first of its separately named divisions to lend an air of greater sophistication to their designs.

By the early 1980s Jennings had 75 house designs in its range, and each one had an architect’s hand in the design. The range included single and double storey, double and triple-fronted, one or two living areas, three to six bedrooms, single or multiple bathrooms one or two carports or garages, and so on. Style, materiality, and finishes and styling could change but the fundamental planning of the houses didn’t. Jennings also pioneered adapting designs to a particular site or a particular purchaser’s requirements. The range had size, taste, and price for the diversity of purchasers in an increasingly affluent market.

In addition to constructing individual houses and developing estates, Jennings diversified into other building types (as they had the factories during WW2), including Wrest Point Casino in Hobart, mining towns in WA, a stand for the St. Kilda football club at Moorabbin, and various buildings for church, state, and commercial developers.

In 2010 Jennings sold the rights to a construction division to Sekisui, Japan’s largest individual home builder. Wanting to enter our lucrative housing market, Sekisui chose to do it through Australia’s most well-known and successful building firm. A.V. Jennings, at 90 years old and a twin to the ABC, no longer builds one-off homes, preferring to develop multiple homes and estates.

Project home ideas from Jennings.

There are numerous innovations for project homes that Bert and A.V. Jennings Companies developed:

Standardised plans: The early Jennings plans, designed by architect Ed Gurney, form the basis for almost every design today: plans that are efficient in layout and section, that can be built with well sequenced trades, without specialised details. Most houses by the major quality project home builders are designed by architects skilled in this arcane art.

A ‘plan range’: a series of plans that address a wide range of arrangements and sites, with a variety of styles and materiality. Designed by architects to be easily modified by a draftsman or salesperson within known limits, requiring creative decisions in the original layout and form.

Bank mortgages: Using the consumer’s mortgage, taken out on the ‘fixed price contract’, to give a guarantee to the builder, is now used by all project builders. However, the more recent requirements by banks for a similar arrangement in ‘pre-sales’ in apartments can have very perverse outcomes.

Housing Estates: Builders moved quickly to follow AV Jennings in the 1960s to buy up land for suburban estates (e.g. Hooker), a tradition that continues to today for all the large builder / developers (AV Jennings themselves are amongst the best).

Integrated developments and services: Enlightened Councils now require estate proposals to plan for shops, offices, supermarkets, and other facilities, to be built concurrently with of the housing estate.

Variety of ‘brands’: Different brands that address different parts of the market in prices and design. Dale Alcock Homes in Perth has more than twelve different house firms developed or bought.

Display homes: All the ‘big players’ have them, but Sydney’s Homeworld (five versions, now in five locations) has made it an art form and raised it to the status of a theme park with all the trappings for a family day out. Project Home as entertainment.

Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and are not held or endorsed by A+D, the AAA or UNSW. Tone does not read Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. Sanity is preserved by reading and replying only to comments addressed to toneontuesday@gmail.com

Tone Wheeler

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