Feniton is a heritage-listed villa at 388 Bowen Terrace, New Farm, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Robin Dods and built from 1906 to 1907. It is also known as Almaden. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 27 July 2018.
History
The highset timber residence located at 388 Bowen Terrace, New Farm, originally called Feniton and later Almaden, was built on just over half an acre (approximately 2036m2) of land in 1906-7 for the Trude family. Designed by the renowned architect Robert Smith (Robin) Dods, the residence was subsequently occupied from 1916 to 1927 by Edward Granville Theodore, Premier of Queensland from 1919 to 1925. The property was reduced by one third in 1938, and in 2018 Feniton remains a private residence. Feniton is a surviving example of Dods' first quality timber houses from the middle period of Hall & Dods' practice 1901–09. With its generous setback and views to and from Bowen Terrace, the house is important for its Federation aesthetic, successfully combining Arts and Crafts and Classical elements, and also has a special association with EG Theodore, a person of importance in Queensland's history.
The New Farm area was traditionally the land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. After the Moreton Bay penal settlement was established on the Brisbane River in 1825, in the late 1820s food was grown on the river flats between today's Merthyr Road and the southeast end of the New Farm peninsula.
Following free settlement of Brisbane in 1842, the New Farm peninsula was surveyed and sold in the 1840s for cultivation and livestock, as well as residences for Queensland's pastoralists, merchants and politicians. In the late 1850s, subdivision of allotments overlooking the Shafston Reach of the Brisbane River, at the northwest end of Bowen Terrace, resulted in the construction of villas for Brisbane's business leaders during the 1860s, and more of Brisbane's wealthy inhabitants moved to New Farm in the 1870s. The subdivision of New Farm intensified during the 1880s, and transport improvements also encouraged closer residential settlement. Horse-drawn trams ran along Brunswick Street to just past Langshaw Street by 1895, and the electrification of this line occurred in 1897. By 1914 the electric tram line ran down Brunswick Street, turned right onto Barker Street, then left onto Moray Street, and headed southeast until turning left onto Merthyr Rd and running northeast.
Despite subdivision into smaller allotments, the area of New Farm between Brunswick Street and the Shafston Reach maintained grand homes on properties covering multiple subdivisions. Described in 1906 as the province of "the attractive homes and trim gardens of many of Brisbane's most distinguished citizens, who enjoy all the advantages of country air and surroundings within a twopenny tram ride of the city proper", Bowen Terrace and Moray Street included affluent residents drawn from the judiciary, politics, civil service, the church and business. To the north-east of Brunswick Street, working classes occupied homes within walking distance of their places of employment: the factories and shops of Fortitude Valley, the Colonial Sugar Refinery at New Farm, the Bulimba Brewery, and the large wool stores and wharves being established at Teneriffe. Feniton was one such residence.
The site of Feniton was once part of Eastern Suburban Allotment 15, a block of extending from Brunswick Street southwest to the Brisbane River, which was subdivided in 1874 as part of the Langshaw Estate - advertised as occupying "the very finest position about the city or suburbs for gentlemen's Villa Residences". After passing through the hands of various owners from 1875, three subdivisions of the estate, totalling 3 roods and 34 perches (3895m2), were by October 1881 consolidated under the ownership of Henry James Oxley, a well-known Brisbane accountant.
By July 1880 Oxley had built his home Mossleigh at the north corner of Bowen Terrace and Langshaw Street, with the remainder of his property, to the northwest, used as his garden. After Oxley's mortgagee obtained the property in 1905, just over half an acre - 2 roods and half a perch (2036m2) - of Mossleigh's garden was sold to John Elworthy Trude in 1906.