Together at last

As the head of the Australian Forestry School, Charles was entitled to a residence in Canberra but the negotiations over what was considered suitable invoked the ire of the Architect’s Department of the Federal Capital Commission. Charles stubbornly refused to accept the standard designs of houses for civil servants, noting that the directors of the other national institutions in Canberra, the Institute of Anatomy and the Commonwealth Solar Observatory, were separately designed by the Department and superior in size and style. In the end, Charles got his way and Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865 – 1933) was commissioned under ‘a special arrangement’ to design a house on a site adjacent to the School. Known as ‘Westridge House’, its architectural style reflected Desbrowe-Annear’s interpretation of Tudor Revival and the Arts and Crafts movement and departed from the distinctive Federal Capital style.