At some point during the nineteenth century, in Australia and elsewhere, householders threw out the old rule books that prescribed balance, symmetry and system for their houses. Out went rigid geometries, along with established hierarchies of forms and decorations and many other restrictive, outdated, unnatural notions. Under the influence of a great mass of Romantic writers, poets and other spruikers in many parts of the world, notably England, France and what is now Germany, people reorientated their thoughts to nature, feelings and emotions, and the rich unsophisticated past of their own countries, not distant places in time and space like ancient Italy and Greece. With more people having more wealth and independence than ever before and being able to buy what their wanted, they naturally opted for new, typically suburban, houses that had the qualities they thought worthwhile, not what their old lords and masters or the educated classes prescribed. They chose to build houses that were in tune with the new romantic sentiment, a sentiment that had spread from poets and philosophers to all the arts, including architecture.
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