Marlton House (Extant), 8-12 Marlton Crescent

The first land sales in this area were c1850, and a large block facing Wellington Street was owned by Edward Fowler when he built a six room house called Marlton in c1855. In 1864 surgeon Dr. Henry Madden commissioned Lloyd Taylor to carry out ‘additions and improvements’, creating a 16 room mansion. The next year he put it up for auction, when it was described as ‘a mansion containing 10 bedrooms, dining room, drawing room, breakfast room, kitchen, scullery, coach house and stabling’. It served briefly as a boys school, or possibly never opened, and by 1867 Andrew Murray, a squatter from the western district of Victoria, was the owner and occupier, until it sold again in 1872.

In 1882 the grounds were subdivided, forming Marlton Crescent and ‘30 ‘magnificent villa sites’, leaving the house on a still large block, which was then sold. From 1884 it served again as a school, with St Kilda Grammar relocating from elsewhere in St Kilda, and remaining here until 1892 under Edward L. Backhouse.  

In 1895 it became the home of the St Michael’s Girls Grammar, newly established by the Anglican Community of the Sisters of the Church. The first boarders were admitted in 1905, and the main building greatly extended to the east in 1906. In the 20s and 30s, the school expanded into adjacent houses in Marlton Crescent, including Eastongrey / Ockley, a large house on a large lot to the east. From the 1940s and into the 1970s it further expanded by replacing half a dozen houses in Redan Street and Cintra Ave, and in 1975 became co-educational. In the 1980s the school expanded further, into the 1860s mansion Rodenbosch in Chapel Steet, and the former Baptist Church in Crimea Street, and in 1990 added the 1877 St Georges Presbyterian Church in Chapel Street as well.