Cairnsfoot, Heritage-listed Victorian villa in Turrella, Australia.
Cairnsfoot is a two-story Victorian Italianate building located at Loftus Street in Turrella, distinguished by its gabled roof covered in slate tiles. The property retains its original outbuildings and gardens planted with Norfolk Island pines and evergreen magnolias dating from when it was first built.
The land was first granted to Ruben Hannam on 31 August 1833. Edward Manicome Farleigh, born in County Mayo in 1838, started as a tannery worker and built the E.M. Farleigh leather firm at Mascot; early in 1884 he bought five acres at Loftus and Willington Streets and erected the two-storey Italianate mansion. After his death in 1909 the western half of the estate was sold and became Edward Street. The building later served as Loftus Street Special School and was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
The name Turrella comes from an Aboriginal word for "a reedy place" or "water weeds", a reference to Wolli Creek, once called Woolly Creek, where thick water weeds grew. The suburb and the house carry that name today.
The building can be viewed from the street in a well-established residential neighborhood with good accessibility. The surrounding area offers ample street parking and is easy to explore on foot.
A c. 1905 photograph shows the garden layout unchanged across the seventy years the Farleigh family lived there, with beds of annuals. Neighbour Alan Evans photographed the grounds between 1943 and 1947, recording pollarded camphor laurels along the Loftus Street fence and a grove of century plants on a rocky plinth in the north-eastern corner.
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