Anyone with a penchant for stellar mid-century architecture knows Canberra is filled with gems.
But there are even more gems to be had if you go back just a couple of decades, to a time when Canberra's official development had ground to a halt. The world was in the grip of the Great Depression, and almost all construction was off the cards.
Nevertheless, there were still people living here, and they needed homes. Some even had the means to engage an architect to create something wonderful.
Number 3 Wilmot Crescent in Forrest is one of these - an understated and subtly stunning cream-brick cube behind a hedge in one of the city's earliest suburbs. Designed by husband-and-wife duo Malcolm Moir and Heather Sutherland in 1936, it's a perfect example of the modernist tastes of the nearly-post-Depression era, when architects were moving away from traditional styles and looking to the future.
Most of the houses built in this decade were either California bungalows, or Spanish mission-style homes with terracotta tiles, with shingled gables, arched verandahs and shutters.
But the houses built by Moir and Sutherland were on a different kind of mission. The one on Wilmot Crescent was the first they designed together, and they would go on to create several more, including a series of five houses on Evans Crescent in Griffith.
Canberra architect Shannon Battisson, who specialises in mid-century modern homes, worked on the most recent internal renovation of Wilmot Crescent, and says it's filled with distinctive details.
"It's a beautiful yellow-toned brick, which of course we don't think of as Canberra brick, we think of the Canberra red as the iconic Canberra brick, but this was the original one, and made from local clay," she says.
"It's a functionalist style, but there are all these really beautiful art deco elements to them. This house has a gorgeous little Juliette balcony, just off the half the landing of the stairs ... which is useless for anything, but it's just beautiful and delightful."
It was, she says, the birth of modernism right here on our doorstep, and thankfully, it has been owned ever since by only a few people, including an architect and member of the ACT Heritage Council, who were sympathetic to its heritage.
The cream brick was also used to build the original Civic Hotel in 1935, a building that was demolished in the mid-1980s.
Thankfully, many 1930s-era homes remain intact, which is all the more remarkable given the decade was a time of scarcity.
"It's actually, I think, phenomenal that we have these really beautifully crafted homes crafted out of just the materials that they could get at the time," Battisson says.
In a cruel twist, Sutherland was killed instantly en route to a house she was designing on Denman Street in Yarralumla, when she was hit by a Yarralumla Brickworks truck on Adelaide Avenue. That was in the mid-1950s, but both Moir and Sutherland already had a considerable architectural legacy.
And it began here, in the slow, quiet 1930s, when Canberra was, to the untrained eye, frozen and waiting for things to happen.
It was the perfect time and place for a house like 3 Wilmot Crescent to come into being - a message from the past that, even now, retrofitted to meet modern architectural and environmental standards, speaks to a hopeful future.
