Best 26 Real Estate Agents In Toorak Gardens [2025]

Toorak Gardens Suburb Overview

Toorak Gardens is a leafy, mainly residential inner eastern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, located 2 km east of the Adelaide city centre. It is characterised by tree-lined streets and detached single story villas and bungalows built in the 1920s and 1930s on allotments of around 0.25 acres.

The Toorak Gardens area was part of the then larger and now adjacent suburb of Rose Park. Between 1912 and 1917 it was named “Toorak” and subsequently “Toorak Gardens”. Originally farmland owned by the Fergusson and Prescott families in the 19th century, it was subdivided and gained popularity in 1920s.

First Creek, part of the Torrens catchment, runs through the north-east corner of the suburb. Toorak Gardens is in the local government area of the City of Burnside, and is bounded to the north by Kensington Road, to the east by Portrush Road, to the south by Greenhill Road and to the west by Prescott Terrace and Warwick Avenue.

It contains the Burnside War Memorial Hospital;converted from a grand mansion in 1949, it remains Burnside’s only local community hospital.

Possibilities for derivation of the name Toorak are Torrak, an aboriginal word meaning tea-tree springs, toora an Aboriginal word for coot or malleefowl and other aboriginal words of similar pronunciation meaning reedy swamp and black crow. Today’s suburb of Toorak Gardens is composed of parts of the Adelaide sections of 275 and 274. Section 274 was bounded by Swaine Avenue, Portrush Road, Greenhill Road and Fullarton Road. Section 275 was bounded by Kensington Road, Portrush Road, Swaine Avenue and Prescott Terrace. The suburb of Toorak was first developed in 1912, largely on land that had previously been the eastern half of the Prescott Farm. Before its development into a village, it had been farmland up until that point with little settlement apart from the Prescott’s home and worksheds as well as two large and extravagant houses.

Julia Hallett owned a spectacular mansion on Portrush Road while Benjamin Burford had a grand mansion on Kensington Road that he named Attunga. When the suburb was first planned, laid-out and named there were many objections, primarily because of the association with the elite Melbourne suburb of Toorak. The real-estate agents assigned to the suburb received many complaints due to this association, including one signed ‘No Snobbery’. Extensive building restrictions were placed on development in the early suburb. After the first houses had been built, the Adelaide Mail reported on 18 May 1912

Toorak received considerable attention from real-estate businesses, the press and the community at large. The Adelaide papers paid particular notice to the suburb’s developments, announcing council work on the suburb’s paths and gardens. In 1912 when trees were planted on Grant and Alexandra avenues, in 1914 when flower strips were developed on the kerbs, in 1916 when a reserve was created on Giles Street;they were all quickly reported. The Toorak Bowling club was also developed in this era, it stands to this day.

Section 274 was bought by a Scottish family, the Fergussons. It was purchased along with property at Knoxville and named by the family. They had come from the village of Monreith in Wigtown County, Scotland and gave that name to their new farm. The Monreith farm was steadily developed by the family, but with the death of Alexander Fergusson in 1869, the property passed into the hands of his widow, Agnes. She sold off parts of the farm in 1883 for

Benjamin Burford’s Attunga property contained the largest and most extravagant mansion built in the suburb, and with his passing it was bought in 1905 by an investor from Broken Hill, Otto Georg Ludwig von Rieben. Although living at the property for 37 years, maintaining it, and paying particular attention to the gardens, von Rieben eventually settled on a property at Mount Lofty in the Adelaide Hills. Attunga however, almost forty years after he gained it, was offered to the Burnside Council free of charge in 1944 for use as a hospital, on the condition that the house and grounds be maintained. A Council committee had previously suggested building a community hospital in August 1943, as part of its Post-War Reconstruction and Development Plan;it was to cost no more than

Toorak Gardens has an area of 1.11 km

Prior to European settlement, the area was heavily forested. Blue Gum and River Gum trees grew on the floodplains around First and Second creeks. Grey box woodlands, known to early settlers as the ‘black forest’, grew around and south of Greenhill Road. Native Australia flora and fauna inhabited the plains.

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