Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Our Home No. 2 Floor 10 The Astor, Macquarie Street, Sydney – To Mum with love from Fred and Geo., c. 1938

Our Home No. 2 Floor 10 The Astor, Macquarie Street, Sydney – To Mum with love from Fred and Geo., c. 1938

c. 1938
PXA 1474
Album containing 15 hand-coloured photographs of the Art Deco interiors

The Astor, which opened on 25 October 1923, was a Chicago style ‘state of the art’ skyscraper of 13 floors with 52 flats and 22 offices. George and Frederick bought into the Astor in 1938.

The Astor Flats are still located at 123 Macquarie Street, Sydney.


Frederick Charles James (1902–1987) and George Hughes Anderson (1893–1944) were Australian agents for Max Factor during the 1930s and 1940s. They travelled around Australia demonstrating make-up, having opened a Max Factor shop in Her Majesty's Arcade, Sydney in 1929.


In 1914 John O'Brien built the exclusive 13 storey Astor Apartments designed with a basement restaurant linked by service lifts to each apartment, enabling dinner deliveries to residents. The roof garden included a glasshouse, fernery and dance floor.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power and pleasure.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849



When it opened, The Astor was the largest reinforced concrete building in Australia, weighing about 12 000 tons, 4500 cubic yards of concrete and 400 tons of steel having been used in its construction.