Tewksbury House

There is no grand villa in the directories under Tewksbury House. The photograph on this post is the Tewkesbury Avenue entrance to Iona — the late-Victorian Darlinghurst mansion at 2 Darley Street, with its second frontage at the end of the short avenue. The black palisade gates hang on rusticated masonry piers with ball finials; each leaf carries a circular Garter badge. They look older than they are. Heritage recording puts new entrance gates and pillars on the northern boundary at around 1992.

Tewkesbury Avenue is the name that caused the mix-up. Local history traces it to William Pearson Tewksbury (“Tewks,” without the middle e), the man who brought Yellow Cabs to Australia; from the 1920s his company warehouses sat on this block, reached by a private driveway that staff treated as Tewksbury’s avenue. Spell the street Tewkesbury, the man Tewksbury, and the house Iona. If you want the house rather than the gates, walk around to Darley Street: two-storey Victorian villa, remnant garden, Moreton Bay fig leaning over the Tewkesbury fence.