Perrott Lyon Mathieson

The firm was founded by Leslie M. Perrott as a solo practice in 1914, who started designing houses in then-standard Edwardian style, but employing an early form of reinforced concrete, his first projects being in St Kilda[1] and Essendon.

[2] His own house in Brighton, built in 1925 in the Old English style, was also made of concrete,[3] From the later 1920s, Perrott specialised in large residential hotels.

In 1934, he oversaw the design and construction of the upmarket Chevron Hotel in St Kilda Road in only sixteen weeks, seen as important for Melbourne's centenary celebrations of that year.

They were already working the firm's most controversial design, the Princes Gate Towers in Flinders Street, completed in 1967, and later known as the Gas & Fuel Buildings (demolished 1996).

[5] They also took on town planning projects as the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works gradually relinquished powers to local Councils.

By the mid-seventies, PLM was working on no fewer than four major Collins Street office towers, including the controversial Nauru House.

[5] Another major tower they designed at that time was the Brutalist style Spencer Street headquarters for the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works, completed in 1979, and clad in bluestone, which began to fall off and had to be replaced with aluminium panels.

In the early 1980s, PLM worked with Gerard de Prue on the Rialto Towers, then the largest project in the city, and the tallest in the country from 1986 to 1991.

In the 1990s, they continued their work on colleges, such as the new Benalla campus for the Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE, in collaboration with Carey Lyon, who had been a co-director of PLM.

In 1925, having spent time in the United States, he married San Franciscan Marion Buell in 1924,[12] and they settled in the new concrete house in Brighton.

The final years of the Gordon course merged with the Architectural Atelier, a night school at the University of Melbourne, and both Ron and Eric[16] graduated as architects.

After graduating in 1951, Leslie Jnr, known simply as Les Perrott, set about expanding the office to take part in the postwar boom.

After graduation in 1955 and working for a few years in the UK and Canada, David Simpson joined the firm in the early 1960s, and was soon given the responsibility for the Princes Gate project.