109-year-old heritage home in Westcliff burns down

A heritage house in Westcliff, Johannesburg, designed by architects Sir Herbert Baker and Frank Fleming in 1911, burnt down on Wednesday night.

In an announcement on Facebook, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation said Duntreath was awarded a blue plaque last year. The blue plaque is awarded by the foundation to celebrate places of history and heritage in the city.

The Heritage Portal, a news and information platform for the SA heritage sector, said the building had outstanding cultural value and was given an A rating by the foundation. The A rating refers to outstanding heritage value.

The foundation said the owners managed to escape the inferno, but the loss would affect them deeply.

“They had lived there for more than 40 years,” the foundation said.

The foundation said Thomas Farquhar, a successful stockbroker originally from Scotland, commissioned the famous architects Baker and Fleming to design his home in 1911.

It said the house was on the Westcliff ridge, originally on five acres of land extending from Pallinghurst Road to the Old Government Road (Jan Smuts Avenue).

It said the house was built of locally quarried stone with the first floor clad in ship-lapped timber with a shingled roof. It was extended in 1927 by Fleming to almost double its original size for J Neilson, another wealthy stockbroker.