Young houses, candidly labelled, in a spring that arrives when the rest of this directory is putting the shutters up.
The seasons are inverted and the houses are built around it. I was in Sydney in October and in Melbourne in September — spring twice, by accident rather than planning — and in both the garden was doing work the interior could not. Book what they call spring, not what you call summer.
These are young houses by the standards of this directory, and refreshingly unembarrassed about it. The labels tell you what a room cost, who was owed for it, and whose land it stood on. I found that bracing. A house that admits its own arithmetic is easier to trust than one that doesn't.
One of the three I have not been inside. Vaucluse House is a headland away from Elizabeth Bay and I chose the wrong afternoon for it; it stays on the list, and I am not going to write about it as though I had gone in.