Southwood

Southwood is a villa built before 1820 by architect and landscape gardener R. Varden. The building features stucco over brick with a hipped slate roof and three tall gault brick stacks with cornices. A wrought-iron verandah adorns the garden facade.

The front elevation has two storeys and three first-floor windows. Notable stucco detailing includes four pilasters with sunk panels that extend to full height, ground-floor windows set within tooled round-arched recesses, and a cornice with wide eaves. The windows are 6/6 sashes, taller on the ground floor, with plain reveals and sills. The arched entrance features four-panel, part-glazed double doors with side-lights and a fanlight that has decorative radial glazing bars, all within a porch supported by coupled Ionic columns and an entablature.

The garden elevation also has two storeys, with a configuration of two, three, one, three, and two first-floor windows, including two full-height bows in the three-window bays. Most windows are 6/6 sashes, with the bows having curved sections, except for the left bow which has a central ground-floor 6-pane French window with an overlight; all windows have plain reveals and sills. The roof is topped with two octagonal glazed cupolas.

Inside, the villa retains original joinery and plasterwork, including a fine Adam-style mantel with detached columns on the ground floor, and a dogleg staircase to the hall with embellished iron balusters. The doors feature tooled architraves.

The ground-floor verandah to the bows has lead-enriched rails and trellis uprights, along with a Greek key frieze. Historically, the villa was known as Lake House in the 19th century and is depicted as such on Merrett's Map of 1834. It is recognized for its graceful design in the Regency style.