Cleveland House – Part 3

Cleveland House hides at the back of its block on 146–164 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills, and you read it best from Bedford Street — a stuccoed two-storey Georgian villa that once looked over ten acres of Cleveland Paddocks toward the harbour. It went up in 1823–24 for emancipist merchant Daniel Cooper and his wife Hannah Dodd, both former convicts who had done rather well. Francis Greenway, by then in private practice, advertised in the Sydney Gazette on 14 August 1823 for carpenters, masons and bricklayers “of a house now building for Mr. D. Cooper Merchant.” Attribution is the honest word: the house is believed to be Greenway’s, and it is one of the few private residences still standing that can carry that claim.

The State Heritage Register (no. 00065, gazetted 2 April 1999) calls it a rare surviving gentlemen’s residence of the 1820s. After Cooper’s death in 1853 the estate was cut to pieces as Surry Hills urbanised; railways and Redfern Terminus ate the paddocks; later lives included hospital, convent and aged care. Until 1991 it had been continuously inhabited. The verandah, cedar stair and basement are the bits to look for in this photo set — Part 3 is a picture dump, not a third house.

Here Are Some

of the Pictures Cleveland

house Over The Years