Warrawee

Warrawee is a suburb on the Upper North Shore of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, Australia.

Warraweeis a suburb on the Upper North Shore of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Warrawee is located 17 kilometres north-west of the Sydney Central Business District in the local government area of Ku-ring-gai Council. Warrawee is predominantly a small residential suburb with few commercial entities. Notably, its railway station provides no commercial activity which is uncommon in the Sydney train network.

This should not be confused with Wirawee, the fictional small country town in the Tomorrow series of books for young people by John Marsden and the film derived from the first book, Tomorrow when the war began.

Warrawee is believed to have come from an Aboriginal word meaning rest a while, stop here or to stand.The suburb is rich in architectural history, with a number of houses designed by prominent architects.

The earliest significant homes were Pibrac (1888), Cheddington (1890) and Wirepe (1893), all very fine houses.

In 1888, the public servant and patron of exploration Frederick Ecclestone du Faur built his house Pibrac in Pibrac Avenue. The house was designed by John Horbury Hunt, a Canadian architect who settled in Australia and favoured the Arts and Crafts style, as well as the North American Shingle style, which he introduced to Australia. Later alterations were carried out by B.J. Waterhouse. The house is composed predominantly of timber, with extensive use of timber shingles, on a sandstone base. It is considered a good example of Hunt's work and is listed on the Register of the National Estate.Cheddington, the oldest home in established Hastings Road, is also attributed to Horbury Hunt, of brick and slate, with characteristic shingling.

Wirepe, designed by M.B. Halligan for architect Walter Traill, used deep verandahs and high ceilings to elicit a homestead atmosphere, with fine corbelled chimneys and cedar shingles. The brickwork is of Colonial Bond design, and the house sits at the heart of the Ku-ring-gai heritage precinct on Hastings Road.

Upton Grey (now Kooyong) was built in 1894 to a John Sulman design; its English features are a local landmark. Across the century it has served as a government social services home, a CSIRO field station, and a boarding house for Knox Grammar School. It is now in private hands and retains features replicated at Sulman's important Ingleholme.

"Exley House" at Finlay Road Warrawee, was designed by Harry Seidler in 1957 for Cecil Exley – an engineer with the Sydney Water Board – and his wife.

The three bedrooms, two bathroom home is the only red-brick single storey dwelling that Harry Seidler ever designed and the only one still in its original condition.

As all North Shore suburbs with aboriginal names, Warrawee was the name of a railway station which became attached to the surrounding suburb. Warrawee had developed in the 1900s as an exclusive residential district with no shops, offices, post office, public school, churches or through roads. All the blocks were kept to between one and four acres and the form of houses tightly controlled. Joseph Beresford Grant used his money to guarantee the exclusiveness of the development, and also ensured that there were no shops around the area.