Fassifern (demolished) 46 Barkly Street

The house was on a square lot just south of the corner of Barkly and Alma Roads, but it is uncertain when it was created. Swiss born James Pfund, who worked for the Public Works Department, purchased the lot in 1871. He built a small house in the middle of the block, as shown in the 1873 Vardy map. In 1863 in Richmond he had married Elise Tschaggeny, who was from the same Swiss town of Thun. Madame Pfund was soon teaching at the school attached to the Congregational Church which faced Alma Road and backed onto their property. In 1878 they took the step of purchasing Oberwyl in Burnett Street, which they could see the back of from their front garden, to establish a girls school run by Madame Pfund. The school operated right up to 1931. 

An auction notice of the sale of the contents of their house in Barkly Street house in 1886 notes it was called Fassifern by then. By 1905 it as occupied and possibly owned by Mrs Elizabeth Hart, whose famly features in a photo taken in the front lawn that year. The arrangement of this house follows that shown in the 1896 MMBW plan, which shows by then the house had southern extensions facing the garden, or was a completely new construction. The location of the house does not exactly match that of 1873, but that plan might be more approximate than accurately surveyed. 

Mrs Hart ran a newsagency-bookstore very nearby at 182 High Street (now St Kilda Road), which had been started by 1880 by her husband, who had died in 1887. The family kept both the house and the newsagency for many years - after Elizabeth died in 1929 her son Frederick ran the store, while her daughter Ada stayed in the house until the early 1940s. 

The present faintly Spanish style flats on the corner of Barkly and Alma occupy the site of Fassifern along with the corner lot, and were probably built c1970.