Michael McMullen built and designed numerous landmarks in Adelaide’s built environment during the boom that turned a frontier town into an elegant city; an exemplar of the builder who ‘picked [architecture] up as he went along’ (Page: 49).
McMullen was born in Cork city in 1828, the son of Patrick McMullen, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife Honorah Donovan. McMullen qualified as a carpenter and probably worked with his older brother Barry who was becoming one of Cork’s most successful building contractors. In 1850, he married Mary Ann O’Sullivan, daughter and sister of building tradesmen, and had two children. He had worked as a carpenter for nearly ten years when he and his family left Ireland in 1854 as assisted emigrants. For the next three decades McMullen operated as a builder, builder-designer and architect in public, commercial, private, and ecclesiastical sectors.
His career opened as the fully-fledged master builder of three of Adelaide’s largest construction enterprises: the ‘sanctuary and choir, Lady Chapel, and sacristies’ of St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral, 1859-60, working under consulting architect George Kingston (Chronicle 9 October 1859: 2); the [Old] Exhibition Building (1859), designed by Colonial Architect, Edward Hamilton; and Neales’ Building (1861), a major city shopping and office complex on the southern corner of King William and Hindley Streets. No architect was named, and McMullen may have had a hand in its design.
His next four projects marked a shift to design and set patterns of styles, clients and locales that lasted throughout his architectural career. The first was ecclesiastical, St Rose of Lima’s Church at Kapunda (1862), and was followed by the Church of the Annunciation at Hectorville (1863), both for the Catholic Church. Between them, his McMullen Building in Angas Street (1862) housed his own evolving businesses, and Emerald Villa (1863) in Angas Street was a ‘superior’ single-storey house for Dr John Gunson (Register 24 January 1863: 2) (leased as Mrs Ferneley’s ‘Eugenie Cottage … Establishment for the Education of Young Ladies’, 1863-67 (Register 18 January 1864: 1)).
A legal battle with the Catholic Church over the Kapunda contract taught McMullen some valuable lessons about the distinct responsibilities of designers and builders. The conflict cost him work as both designer and builder, as Wright & Woods handled extensions to the churches at Kapunda in 1865 and Hectorville in 1867 and other contractors got to build them. The Church continued to give him building jobs, however, the Cathedral Gas-lighting (1863) before his litigation ended and Fencing and Gates (1874) over a decade later, and he built extensions to St Ann’s Church at Marion (1864) for £170, completing the original Gothic design (apparently by Edmund Wright). He also won the contract to build the St Francis Xavier’s Hall (1866) to the ‘early English Gothic’ plans of Wright & Woods (Register 25 April 1866: 2). He made a return to ecclesiastical architecture when the Jesuit Fathers, being independent of the diocesan authorities, commissioned him to supervise the building of St Aloysius’ Church (1864-81) at Sevenhill.
Meanwhile, McMullen’s reputation won him other building contracts for far larger, more costly projects. His bid of £1553 for St Francis Xavier’s Hall was less than half the £4423 he successfully tendered to build the Italianate United Presbyterian Church in Flinders Street (1865) to the design of George Abbott. Larger still, his 1866 bid of £5,430 won McMullen another government contract to erect the Adelaide Hospital’s East Wing (1867) for the Colonial Architect.
Residential work also picked up during the 1860s. He designed and built a number of projects financed by Dr Gunson. On six half-acres in Angas Street they added new and improved houses of increasing scale. Another client commissioned two eight-roomed houses on a corner of Hanson (now Pulteney) and Angas Streets (1869). Highest point in this program was McMullen’s design of extensive alterations that turned Dr Gunson’s investment in Emerald Villa into his residence as Erina House (1868).
Church projects filled out his construction calendar at the end of the 1860s. He built extensions to St Francis Xavier’s Hall (1867) to plans by Wright, Woods & Hamilton. Subsequent Catholic projects were for independent groups. For the Dominican Fathers he built the nave of St Laurence the Martyr’s Church at North Adelaide (1868), to Edward Woods’ design, and constructed the Jesuits’ St Ignatius’ Church at Norwood (1870) designed by William de Normanville. Said to ‘look not unlike’ (Register 3 July 1873: 6) the design of the latter was McMullen’s next design, for St Michael’s Church at Clare (1873). It reached only the foundation stone stage that year, the rest of the work carried out in 1882.
McMullen also worked on detailed church projects in the late 1860s. To G. & E. Hamilton’s design, he built Father Lencioni’s Tomb (1864) at West Terrace Cemetery. His hand may be detected in the 1884 design of Dr Gunson’s tombstone. Between these, in 1868, after Wright & Woods’ ‘sundry works’ were completed at the Catholic Church at Virginia (Register 8 June 1868: 1), McMullen installed the ‘beautiful’ altar that had been imported in pre-fabricated parts of Italian and Irish marbles and alabaster (Chronicle 5 September 1868: 7).
Church work dwindled in the later 1870s, apart from a role in completing St Aloysius’ Church. He designed for the Sisters of St Joseph (of which his sister was a leader) ‘very plain’ additions to their Kensington Convent (Advertiser 29 January 1876: 13) and also to the Catholic Refuge the Sisters conducted at Norwood, both in 1876. Their ‘cottage convent’ at Mitcham (1881) was another of his designs for them (Register 28 July 1881: 2). And he designed minor additions at St Francis Xavier’s Hall in 1875, 1878 and 1880.
Instead, McMullen took on major commercial projects. He designed and built Hann’s Hotel (1868) on the corner of King William and Grenfell Streets. The Hann complex, including two shops facing King William Street, was acquired by Robert Cottrell who renamed the hotel the Imperial. McMullen designed its extension along Grenfell Street frontage to include Cottrell’s Coach Factory in a rear courtyard reached by an arched way from Grenfell Street and a ‘show shop for carriages’ facing the street (Register 25 November 1916: 5).
In the following years McMullen’s city design projects included a number of commercial and residential projects, including shops and other business premises in Rundle and King William Streets and further afield in Carrington, Wakefield and Grote Streets. He designed a schoolroom in Pirie Street for 200 children, and another in Russell Street, probably for the Sisters of St Joseph. He also designed additions to the York Hotel stables and ‘stables, store etc.’ in Coromandel Place (Advertiser 22 February 1879: 2).
His suburban work also expanded. In 1874 McMullen designed for Dr Gunson a suburban ‘Villa Residence’ at Marryatville, The Acacias (1875) (Advertiser 29 January 1876: 12). McMullen probably designed a further Gunson House (c1882) on the Parade at Kensington Gardens. At Norwood he did two detached cottages for James Tighe (1875), a villa for John Clark in William-street (1875), and two more cottages (1879), possibly for Dr Gunson. Michael and Mary Ann also owned separate allotments in Norwood, developing them throughout the 1870s with a range of buildings, including the family house, Nora Villa, in Edward Street. At the same time, McMullen developed a practice in country hotels, at Stone Hut (1875), Pekina (1878) and Border Town (1882) and, in the Adelaide Hills, high-profile structures in the Hills, the Crafers Hotel (1879) and the Aldgate Pump (1880).
McMullen’s biggest projects were for Richard Vaughan, the master-mind of the East End Market complex. The contract to extend the East-End Market Hotel (1876) was a small start at £770. Vaughan’s Botanic Hotel (1877) was McMullen’s largest building and most costly at £14,000. Adjoining it on East Terrace, he designed two shops with dwellings attached at £400 each (1877). On North Terrace McMullen designed the seven dwellings of Botanic Villas (1877) at £1250 each.
Next came Vaughan’s Mansion at Hackney (1878), ‘a fine house’ of 21 rooms costing about £4000 by year’s end (Register 1 January 1879: 1). A heated dispute with E. T. Smith over his ‘Royal Hotel’ on the opposite corner, found McMullen reworking his plans as ‘a ladies’ college or hospital’ (Register 29 March 1879: 4) and, briefly, as the Royal Park Hotel. He also did four substantial villas on Hackney road east of the Mansion. Plans prepared by McMullen for a ‘Theatre, Arcade, and Hotel’ at the East-End Market (Chronicle 9 November 1878: 11) came to nothing in 1878-79 although his design for an English, Scottish & Australian Bank in the Market was built during 1879. His final work for Vaughan, and in hotels, was for the plans, specifications and superintendence for an unidentified ‘Family Hotel’ at Kensington. McMullen sued Vaughan in early 1883 for his fees, but lost over £62 in the process (Register 24 February 1883: 7). They did not work together again.
The sheer volume of McMullen’s work during the 1870s suggests that he must have had assistance. He probably trained his eldest son James and George as both became builders and architects. James worked as the Education Department’s ‘travelling Clerk of Works’ (1877-78) (Register 14 August 1877: 6) before entering partnership with his father as McMullen & Son for successive design-and-build projects, the completion of St Michael’s Church, Clare (1882) and the erection of St Paul’s Church, Mt Gambier (1883-85), residing in both places as clerk of works. George is first recorded as supervising the contract for the Clare church in 1883.
These churches were among Michael McMullen’s final projects in the colony. During 1884 he lost his best clients, Vaughan and Gunson dying in April and May respectively as the economic situation declined. He advertised for tenders for extensions to Patrick Whelan’s drapery shop in Rundle Street in December 1884 but the outcome is not known. In early 1885 he sold up and moved to Melbourne. He does not appear to have worked there, and died in February 1887 aged 56. James and George went with him worked as builders and architects in Melbourne during the 1890s and afterwards in Perth.
McMullen’s success as a builder underlay his reputation as an architect and his design work was generally well-regarded. Criticism of both occurred throughout his career, however. He met their challenges with a tenacious, even combative approach, with several projects ending in litigation. Disputes with tradesmen pepper his career as a builder, too, yet his ideas about relations between capital and labour were liberal to the point of socialistic.
McMullen’s sense of being an architect goes unrecorded and he may have been torn between the building ‘trade’ and the architectural ‘profession’. He was a member of the South Australian Contractors’ & Builders’ Association, which had been critical of architects, but left the colony long before the Institute of Architects formed in October 1886. His son James may have been echoing his father’s attitude when a newspaper suggested that the opinion of a ‘professional architect’ was needed to sort out a problem with McMullen & Co. work on St Paul’s at Mt Gambier. James quibbled that there was no difference between a ‘professional architect’ and an ‘architect pure and simple’: he was ‘always under the impression that architecture was a profession’ (Border Watch 7 March 1885: 2).
McMullen enjoyed a public profile as a prominent Catholic layman during the 1860s and although several major clients were Catholics, just as many were not. He rarely obtained work from boards or committees of which he was a member. His construction work on Catholic projects was always due to competitive tendering and his design work for the Church was small compared to other clients. McMullen’s work with the Catholic Church and Dr Gunson helped to stamp the precinct on the south-eastern side of Victoria Square bounded by Wakefield, Angas and Hanson (now Pulteney) Streets with the prevailing ‘Italian’ style.
Most of McMullen’s design work, including one of his churches, was in that mode. Taking after George Strickland’s Regency and Edmund Wright’s Tuscan manner, McMullen buildings are plain, simple and elegant, exemplars of the influence that master designers can have on an individual and an era. Case in point, McMullen built Wright & Woods’ design for A. J. Baker’s ‘East View’ on East Terrace (1866), adapted its proportions and decorative features at Erina House (1870) and virtually copied it at The Acacias (1875). Their features recur with gusto at the Botanic Hotel (1876) and Terrace (1877) and at the Royal Park Hotel (1878). In the same spirit, only a few of his buildings had verandahs, and then only plain iron-and-wood awnings.
Michael McMullen was neither South Australia’s best architect, nor is he its best-remembered. He was, however, prolific in his dissemination of ‘Adelaide’ architecture throughout the city and colony.
Peter Moore
Moore, Peter, 'McMullen, Michael', Architecture Museum, University of South Australia, 2017, Architects of South Australia: [http://www.architectsdatabase.unisa.edu.au/arch_full.asp?Arch_ID=148] | 
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