Walk down Kent Street towards Bathurst Street, between the apartment towers and office blocks, and you'll suddenly come to a low sandstone cottage with a verandah, sitting back in its own garden. It looks like it's been dropped in from a country town. That's the Judge's House at 531 Kent Street. Sydney Open calls it the oldest building in the city centre that was built as a private home.
The Judge's House at 531 Kent Street, with its verandah and garden. Photo: Collywolly, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
William Harper, surveyor
The house was built for William Harper, a surveyor. Sydney Open says he arrived at Port Jackson in 1821 with his wife and two children, and soon applied for land grants in the usual way, including one for a family home. The State Heritage Register describes Harper as "a surveyor and the likely designer of the house". Sydney Open says he "most likely" designed it too. The heritage listing also points out that these early grants to well-connected colonists often pushed the traditional owners off their land. Here those were the Gadigal people of the Eora.
Sources disagree on when it was built. The Dictionary of Sydney says it was built for Harper in 1827. Sydney Open's fact panel says 1822, though its own text only says "the 1820s". The heritage listing calls it an "1820s Colonial Georgian single storey bungalow" and doesn't commit to a year. I'd say the 1820s and leave it there until someone finds the building records.
It's a textbook Colonial Georgian house: freestanding, symmetrical and well proportioned. Sydney Open says it had six rooms and a hall, with a verandah around the front and sides and two extra "verandah rooms" closed in under the roof. A newspaper ad at the time called it "elegant and modern". It sat high above Darling Harbour, and back then it had views right across the water.
The front of the house, with the verandah rooms enclosed at each end. Photo: Collywolly, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The judge
The name comes from one tenant. Harper and his family only lived there for a few years. In 1828 the house was let to Judge James Dowling, later Sir James Dowling, the second Chief Justice of New South Wales. Sydney Open says he rented the cottage while his permanent home on Woolloomooloo Hill was being built. The Dictionary of Sydney gives his lease as 1828 to 1831, so it was about a three-year stay that gave the place its name.
The heritage listing says Dowling was also a member of the Legislative Council from 1836 to 1843, and that he presided over the first Myall Creek massacre trial in 1838. So the judge who gave the house its name wasn't just any judge. The trial he ran was one of the most important in the colony's history.
A hundred years feeding the hungry
The house's longest chapter came later. The Dictionary of Sydney says the trustees of the City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen leased it from 1868 and bought it outright in 1879. The heritage listing calls the refuge "a pioneer charitable organisation (later the Sydney City Mission)" and says it ran there from 1868 to 1972, more than a hundred years. The listing also makes the point that because a charity owned it for so long, the house survived while everything around it was knocked down and rebuilt. A City of Sydney community heritage walk says the house went from "housing the well-to-do" to giving relief to the city's poorest for over 100 years.
The side of the house and its verandah. Photo: Collywolly, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Restaurants and restorers
In the 1970s the Dictionary of Sydney says some outbuildings were pulled down, and the house was sold to commercial owners and turned into a restaurant. Sydney Open says Grosvenor International began restoring it in 1971 and sold it in 1984 to the David family, who did more restoration. In 1997 Capital Investment Group bought it for its head office and did further work, including a new timber shingle roof.
The heritage listing says a Suntory Japanese restaurant and garden were added in 1979, and that Tetsuya Wakuda renewed them in 2000. It sees that as a sign of how Sydney's tastes changed, with big fine-dining Asian restaurants becoming popular as the city embraced multiculturalism.
What's special about it
The Judges House is listed on the State Heritage Register as item 00060, at 529–531 Kent Street. The listing says it's "the earliest surviving, single storey freestanding house in the central area of Sydney". It's also rare as an 1820s Colonial Georgian bungalow that survives in nearly its original form, with a verandah on three sides ending in stone-walled rooms, all under one hipped roof with a flatter pitch over the verandah.
The listing also values its craftsmanship: the use of sandstone, the fine joinery, and the original plaster walls, run cornices and ceilings. It says the verandah roof shows "one of the earliest uses of corrugated iron in NSW". It notes that the house still has a garden around it that recalls its old Kent Street setting.
Detail of the sandstone walls and joinery. Photo: Collywolly, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The Judge's House in its garden among the Kent Street towers. Photo: Collywolly, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Today
Capital Investment Group still owns and looks after the house, according to Sydney Open. It isn't usually open to the public. It sometimes opens for Sydney Open, which is your best chance to see inside. Otherwise you can see it from Kent Street, and it's well worth the walk down from Town Hall.
Next time you're on Kent Street, stop at the fence. The verandah has been there since before Sydney had gas street lamps, and it was home to a Chief Justice before it became a soup kitchen for a hundred years.
Where this came from
- Dictionary of Sydney: Judge's House, Kent Street (building entry).
- NSW State Heritage Register: The Judges House (SHR 00060), statement of significance (updated 28 June 2021), Heritage NSW.
- Sydney Open (Museums of History NSW): The Judge's House.
- NSW Government: Judges House Sydney (City of Sydney community walking tour).