Douglas Snelling (1916-85) was born in England and grew up in New Zealand (with a possible few toddler years in Equador). He taught himself commercial art and window display techniques in the early 1930s, then spent six months in Hollywood (1937-38) as a freelance cartoon illustrator of actors on movie sets. On return to NZ, he became a nationally celebrated Hollywood commentator on radio and in entertainment magazines, then a publicity manager for Warner Bros in Wellington, 1939. In 1940, he toured the Indonesian archipelago by ship, then became stranded in Sydney for World War II after trans-Pacific passenger travel was shut down and he could not fulfil an intention to return to California. In Sydney he worked for Otis Waygood, then Kriesler radio-electronics, where he was involved in designing a new style of surround-sound radio. Near the end of the war, he was commissioned to paint murals and redesign interiors for the Roosevelt restaurant and US Navy Enlisted Mens Club at Potts Point. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, he designed two nationally retailed ranges of furniture called the Snelling Line (chairs and tables) and the Snelling Module (storage), as well as many commercial interiors in the American ‘Googie’ style. In 1947-48, he spent another six months in California, including a few months working for Beverley Hills architect Douglas Honnold and a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West camp in Arizona. On return to Sydney, he continued designing commercial interiors and began private study towards the NSW Board of Architects’ registration exams; successful in 1952. From 1949, he began designing houses, city office buildings and a suburban factory, often influenced by Richard Neutra’s interpretations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic-unity concepts. Snelling’s key buildings included the Hay-Richmond house, St Ives (1951); the Kelly house 1 (1955), MORE HOUSES He retired to Hawaii in 1977, travelled regularly to the US and Europe as a collector-trader of Khmer antiquities and died on a visit back to Sydney (where he hoped to again live). His one work of architecture after 1975 was 1979 additions to his own house, designed by Honolulu architect Vladimir Ossipoff.
Sources
—Original Snelling plans lodged with the NSW State Library by Peter MacCallum and Christopher Snelling.
—Jackson, Davina. 2001–05 Research from Snelling family archives, press articles and interviews with family, friends and colleagues, for an RMIT PhD thesis due 2006.
—University of Technology, Sydney B.Arch theses on Snelling by Gary Pemberton, Andrew Kovacs and James Trevillion.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
