The house and the original grounds of about 1/3 hectare (over ¾ acre) was originally placed in trust for Anna Maria McEvoy by her family on her marriage to William Greenlaw in 1862.

About 1882 the Greenlaw family began a major extension and refurbishment of the existing single storey house whose name had changed from Studley Villa to Villa Alba in 1870. These renovations resulted in the two-storey Italianate mansion we see today. The house was elaborately hand decorated by Paterson Brothers, who eschewed the cheaper and more popular wallpapers, and introduced trompe l’oeil murals on a grand scale. To complement the decoration the house brimmed with the latest Aesthetic and Artistic furnishings and luxurious bric-a-brac from around the world.

William Greenlaw, the General Manager of the Bank of Australasia from 1877 to 1892, was hit in the crash of the 1890’s and declared insolvent in 1893. As Villa Alba was not in his name, the family’s occupation of the property was not initially affected by their reduced circumstances. On her husband’s death in 1895 Mrs. Greenlaw sold the contents of the house in a two-day sale and leased it out until her death in 1918, when the house passed to Samuel Fripp, in whose hands it remained until 1950 when it was purchased by the Royal Women’s Hospital. It was initially used as a home for nurses and many of the major interiors were over-painted in order to “brighten the place up”. By the mid-1950’s the Henry Pride Wing of the Women’s post-natal hospital for mothers and babies was gradually covering the site which had increased in size since 1862.

In 1983 Kew Council, with the support of Mt. Royal Hospital- the then owners of Villa Alba- established the Villa Alba Preservation Committee, a community based body charged with managing and restoring the house.

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