Description

Montsalvat is an artists' colony in Eltham. Established by Justus Jorgensen in 1934, the colony is set among gardens on five hectares of land, and is home to dozens of buildings, including houses, halls, studios, galleries and stables.

Brougham Street Cohousing is situated on a 7000-square-metre block near Diamond Creek. A resident-led community building, it features a heritage-listed mudbrick studio and shed built by Peter Garner who worked on Montsalvat as a builder.

What's On

This event will re-discover the parallels between the creation of Montsalvat’s artist community in the 1920s and the creation of Brougham Street Cohousing resident community in the 2020s.

Connecting the two proximate properties is nearly a century of grassroots building projects to create community-first places. There are also connections between Peter Garner, a mudbrick building specialist who helped build Montsalvat and who also built a studio and shed on the site of Brougham St, which is now the central focus of the communal buildings and gardens for the Brougham St Cohousing community. 

These tours, starting at Montsalvat, will hear Montsalvat director Raphael Kilpatrick explain the origin story of Montsalvat, its spirit of community-led development and its connections to architect Alistair Knox.

At Brougham Street Cohousing, there will be tours of the Peter Garner studio and shed. Members of the collective and Tim Riley, director of Property Collectives, will talk about how the members' values and principles informed the participatory co-design process for designing the cohousing project.