Inside a 1907 electrical substation converted into a four-bedroom family home in Rozelle

• Owners: Taronga Zoo executive director Simon Duffy and husband Walter Murphy, Westpac’s head of service excellence
• Address: 10 Hancock Street, Rozelle, NSW
• Type of property: A 1907 heritage substation converted into a four-bedroom home
• Price guide: $3.7 million

Taronga Zoo’s executive director Simon Duffy and husband Walter Murphy, head of service excellence in Westpac’s customer solutions division, are selling their beloved slice of Sydney’s transport history.

The couple fell for the Balmain tram substation at Rozelle in 2020 when out for a walk in their neighbourhood and tweaked the warehouse office space to create the family home they have shared with their sons, Corey, 18, and Val, 12.

“We just saw it and thought, ‘Life’s short, you’ve got to take an opportunity,’ so we bought it,” Duffy says with a laugh. “We were struck by its sense of history, its raw beauty.”

The vast building at 10 Hancock Street, which dates to 1907, served as the substation to power trams throughout the inner west until it was decommissioned in 1958 as buses took over Sydney’s streets.

Despite its conversion to living quarters, the rustic bones of the building remain. In fact, it is the last intact structure of its kind in NSW.

There’s the huge door that allowed turbines to be moved in and out, massive metal beams branded with lettering, and an almost-sculptural industrial crane that sits at the centre of the building, hung with pulleys and chains.

“One of the most striking elements of the home is the original horizontal crane,” Duffy says. “If you wanted, it could roll up and down the building and that’s what they would have used to move the circuits around. It’s beautiful; it’s really such a fascinating part of Sydney’s history.”

Duffy says visitors are blown away by the scale of the property, where mezzanine bedrooms allow for a vast, double-height living room.

“Even just looking at it from the front, you’re like, ‘Wow, what is that?!’ ” he says. “And then, people look down the side [of the building] and go, ‘It’s huge!’

“Then, everyone who walks in the front door looks up and goes, ‘Wow, wow, this space is fantastic.’ ”

The couple have carved the 470-square metre space into zones, in part with the help of furniture, including a 16-seat dining table they inherited from the property’s previous owners, which served as a centrepiece for Corey’s recent birthday celebrations.

“When we moved in, we mostly did minor things; things that made it feel like a home,” Duffy says. “We made the bathroom better, improved the kitchen, the layout.

“The building had really good bones; there was so much potential. It was just a matter of working out which parts of the house needed to be a little cosier and where we enjoyed the open space.”

Huge windows look out over the treetops, provide glimpses of the city, and flood the rooms with natural light, keeping the couple’s collection of indoor plants happy.

From the couple’s mezzanine bedroom, Duffy says he wakes to birdsong, thanks to the beautiful native garden next door which was planted by neighbours who own the converted stable that once housed the horse-drawn carts that serviced the tram line.

“I love our bedroom,” he says. “Somehow, it feels light and bright but also cosy.”

The boys’ rooms, and the guest bedroom, are less open and more private, but equally roomy. The kids also have access to a ground-floor retreat space, suited to playing video games and enjoying movie nights with friends.

Despite their love for the historic home, Duffy says that, with their eldest son bound for university, the huge space is too big for the three remaining family members, especially as they spend a growing number of weekends at their beach house on the South Coast.

Having lived in Rozelle and its surroundings for almost all of their 24 years together, Duffy and Murphy are keen to downsize nearby and continue their rituals of bay walks with their two dogs, Saturday mornings at the local organic growers’ market and “cheeky Margaritas” at one of the area’s many small bars.

“We have loved how central it is,” says Duffy. “We are right behind Rozelle village, so we’re literally 20 steps to the coffee shop we love, we’re very close to the French bakery where we buy our bread [and] there are a lot of grocers.

“That’s what we’re really going to miss, but that’s what we’re hoping to find with our next property.

“That, and our neighbours; we’ve got really great neighbours.”

SOLD - $3,900,000

10 Hancock Street, Rozelle NSW 2039

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