This unique precinct was conceived as a model housing estate. Businessman George Hoskins dreamed of building his own housing estate to accommodate his business executives close to him. The estate was built on twenty acres and the homes were designed to a standard that would attract ‘respectable’ businessmen and professionals, residents who would be part of a harmonious social community having all the facilities desirable for a self-contained suburban lifestyle. The curved roadway around a central recreational area is the main feature of the layout. Hoskins may have received his inspiration for this idea from The Parade in Enfield which was established in 1886.

The houses were leased, rather than sold, enabling Hoskins to control all aspects of the community. Only one house was sold before Hoskins’ death in 1926. Each house was sold thereafter with a share in the Appian Way Recreation Club, which owns the recreation reserve in the centre of the street. A proposal to build high-rise flats in the recreation reserve was defeated in the 1970s. The Appian Way is widely regarded as the finest street of Federation houses in Australia.

George John Hoskins (1847-1926) migrated to Australia about 1854 as a child with his parents and siblings and later began a small engineering business – Hoskins Brothers with his brother Thomas W. Hoskins (who later went to Melbourne), later G & C. Hoskins Ltd – in 1875, going into partnership with brother Charles in 1876, and began to specialize in the manufacture of steam boilers, pipes and waterworks requirements, expanding rapidly and opening factories at Rhodes and in Wattle Street, Sydney.

George and his brother Charles Hoskins had both moved to Burwood in 1893, George building St Cloud (Burwood Road, listed on the SHR) in 1892/93 and Charles building Illyria (now part of Santa Sabina school).

In 1903 George J. Hoskins began to develop the Hoskins Estate. The land on which the Hoskins Estate was developed was originally part of a 400-hectare grant made to William Faithfull in 1810.

Hoskins formulated a plan for subdivision of the land as a residential estate, and submitted this to Burwood Council, and a legal agreement was finally signed in August 1903 between Hoskins and the Council whereby the Council would construct the roadworks for the estate, including tree planting and road drainage; the new road in the estate – The Appian Way – would be dedicated to the Council.

By 1905 Hoskins had already built and leased several houses on the Estate.

Hoskins designed the form and appearance of the estate, creating a desirable suburban enclave with its own private recreation area with a quaint weatherboard pavilion to attract wealthy residents, including two of Hoskins’ sons. The estate was designed with the dominant feature of the curving street form of the Appian Way, street trees, generous lot sizes (quarter acre to three-quarter acre), wide verges and superior roadworks of The Appian Way. The street layout of The Appian Way does not respond to topography, and there was no attempt to maximize the number of lots. The recreation reserve was deliberately not placed centrally, but towards the eastern end of The Appian Way. The Hoskins Estate lots were defined by wider street verges and the brush box street plantings. George Hoskins’ initial letter to Burwood Council regarding the design of the Estate described it as “picturesque”.

The Hoskins Estate was originally subdivided into 39 allotments but only 36 houses were originally erected, some of the houses retaining adjacent lots for use as tennis courts or gardens. The estate was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1903 as a “proposed model estate designed by Mr. G.J. Hoskins” (Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 22 June 1903, p. 10 article “Progress in the Western Suburbs”).

The majority of the original houses on the Hoskins Estate (all except one) were designed by local builder William Richards (1854-1944), who lived at nearby Brooklyn in Burwood Road.

In general, the original Hoskins Estate houses are fine representative examples of Federation Queen Anne and Federation Arts & Crafts styles, however with classical touches such as the classical urns flanking the entrance to Del Osa and the Corinthian verandah columns at St. Ellero, which may be indicators of George Hoskins love for Italian architecture.

A 1906 advertisement for the letting of the house Avantine on the Appian Way described it as “one of those desirable unique Cottage Residences on the Appian Way facing the tennis grounds” (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 1906 page 19).