Within the state significant Rocks and Millers Point areas, 130 Cumberland Street site is an important survivor from the late nineteenth century which still retains its tenanted residential use and still clearly demonstrates its historic planning particularly with its service areas.
130 Cumberland Street exhibits all the key characteristics of a late nineteenth century modest inner city residential terrace. Within the building, the original hierarchy is still clearly expressed with the ground floor formal rooms, first and second floor bedrooms and rear service rooms and the building retains a critical mass of its major fabric and fittings such as its structure, timber stair walls, decorative joinery and fireplace.
The fittings and decoration, which date from the 1990s reconstruction work, and the deliberate retention of the building's external weathered patina, heighten the experience of the building's age. The positioning of the terrace on an abrupt sandstone and beton brut plinth formed out the lowering of Cumberland Street has raised the building and its wide bare north wall up as an local landmark in Cumberland Street.
