Cower MURPHY Associates

The prolific inter-war architectural partnership of Cowper, Murphy & Appleford traced its origins back to the sole practice of Christopher Cowper (1868-1954), who rose to prominence during the 1890s and early 1900s. The firm amended its name in 1921 after two of Cowper's staff were elevated to partnership: Gordon Murphy (1889-1967) and Reginald Appleford (1888-1975). After Cowper's retired, the firm continued under its two younger partners, who soon fostered expertise in cinema design. Appleford left in August 1941, with a newspaper notice subsequently announcing that the firm "under the style of Cowper, Murphy & Appleford, has been dissolved by mutual consent". Murphy continued the practice under the new name of Cowper, Murphy & Associates, operating from the same office at 431 Bourke Street. Appleford entered the Public Works Department, where he remained until at least 1946. Around that time, he was invited by former partner Gordon Murphy to assist in a major project to rebuild the Regent Theatre following severe fire damage. This re-connection seems to have encouraged Appleford to return to private practice under his own name, taking up a seperate office at 431 Bourke Street, whence Cowper, Murphy & Associates still operated.

The post-war practices of Reg Appleford and Gordon Murphy each focused on work that had defined their respective pre-war outputs. Appleford, who had been articled to eminent church architect W P Connolly and assisted him in the completion of St Patrick's Cathedral in the 1930s, continued to concentrate on Roman Catholic projects. Murphy, meanwhile, sustained his speciality in cinemas, including design of new facilities as well as the alteration, upgrading and rebuilding of existing ones. This work not only spread across the Melbourne metropolitan area and regional Victoria, but also interstate, with a branch office of Cowper, Murphy & Associates opened in Sydney by 1945. The Melbourne office also completed a few smaller-scaled residential commissions. Some of these houses were designed by Gordon Murphy's son John (1920-2004), who worked in the office while studying architecture in the late 1940s. Around that same time, John and his future wife (and fellow architecture undergraduate) Phyllis Slater (1924-2025) remodelled the elder Murphy's house in Malvern East, coverting it into two self-contained flats. While Gordon Murphy expressed a desire for his son to take over the firm, John opted instead to establish his own practice in partnership with Phyllis, which commenced after their marriage in 1950.

In the early 1950s, as office space in central Melbourne became more expensive, a number of well-established city architectural firms relocated to the periphery of the CBD, such as East Melbourne, Jolimont and St Kilda Road. In 1952, Cowper, Murphy & Associates moved to East Melbourne, initially occupying a small single-storey terrace house at 5 Albert Street before moving to a larger two-storey terrace house at 45 Grey Street by 1958. Over this decade, the firm's output diversified and their profile rose sharply. A 1953 scheme for a seven-storey city office building for the Federated Pharmaceutical Society attracted considerable press coverage, reportedly being the first major privately-owned building erected in the CBD since WW2, and one of the first of the slick curtain-walled office blocks that would transform the city's streetscapes in the 1950s. Completion of the building also prompted a follow-up commission for the new Victorian College of Pharmacy in Royal Parade, Parkville, effectively a miniature university campus. Sadly, one of Murphy's key staff members, Kenneth Varley (1926-1959) died tragically as the college neared completion. Around that same time, the office was joined by Ronald Monsbourgh (1932-2008), who would rise to the position of associate.

With the opening of the College of Pharmacy in 1960, few new commissions came into Murphy’s office. As his grandson Nick has noted, the twinning of the Forum Theatre in Flinders Street (to create two smaller theatres) represented the firm’s final foray into theatre work. Gordon Murphy retired soon after, with his name removed from the ARBV register during 1964. Ron Monsbourgh carried on the practice from the same premises at 45 Grey Street, albeit rebranded as R G Monsbourgh & Associates. Not long after Murphy's death in 1967, Monsbourgh accepted a follow-up commission from what had been one of the firm's most important post-war clients: a major addition to the College of Pharmacy. Murphy's legacy otherwise resonated as Monsbourgh continued the focus on cinema work, rising to become one of country’s leading specialists in the field in the 1970s and ‘80s.