Buyers swoon over Canberra’s oldest apartment designed by Kenneth Oliphant

Tudor beams, an open fire and near-century-old character — it's no surprise buyers have been flocking to this cosy apartment in one of Canberra's most historic buildings.Slap bang in the middle of the capital, nudged between Lake Burley Griffin and Capital Hill, sits Canberra's oldest apartment building.Barton Court was designed by architect Kenneth Oliphant, widely regarded as the father of Canberra architecture. Picture: realestate.com.auBut Barton Court is no ordinary block of lookalike units. It's more like a grand country house — Tudor beams, tall chimneys, finely crafted brickwork and Georgian windows, set behind a wide grass lawn.Built in 1934, Barton Court was designed by Kenneth Oliphant, one of Canberra's early architects, in a Tudor-English rural style — a deliberate contrast to the plainer architecture found elsewhere in the city at the time.The Tudor-style complex was Canberra's first apartment building. Picture: realestate.com.auBack then, Canberra's population was nudging 8,000, and Parliament House — what we now call Old Parliament House — was still new, having opened just seven years earlier in 1927.It looked somewhat lonely, standing almost alone in bushland-turne...