Corio Villa Wedding Photos
A cast-iron house bolted together in 1856, bluebell columns on the verandah, and Corio Bay below.
Corio Villa is a single-storey prefabricated cast iron house on Eastern Beach Road, Geelong, at the corner of Fitzroy Street, looking over Corio Bay. Its iron was cast in Edinburgh in 1855 to designs by the Glasgow architects Bell & Miller, shipped out in boxes and bolted together on site in 1856 after the original purchaser died before it arrived. Bluebell columns, lion-head keystones and fretwork bargeboards survive, and the Victorian Heritage Register calls it the only known surviving house of its kind in Australia.
The villa has stayed a private home through four owners since Alfred Douglass, a wool merchant, bought it, and the family who held it for most of the twentieth century hired the house and garden out for weddings and functions. Veri photographed a wedding shoot here, working the iron verandah and the lawn above the bay, with the Geelong waterfront and its pier part of the same afternoon.
Photographing a wedding at Corio Villa
The verandah is the picture: iron lace, deep shade, and the bay behind. I shoot it from the lawn in soft light so the fretwork reads, then move in for the doors and windows, which are mahogany and photograph warmly. For a separate waterfront backdrop, Eastern Beach, the Baywalk Bollards and the carousel are close. The gallery above is a Geelong wedding shoot that used the villa and the pier.