This historic apartment for sale in Kurraba Point started its life in Potts Point

They say the most important thing in real estate is location – the one factor that can never be changed.

But that hasn’t taken into account one fairytale mansion, fittingly named Once Upon a Time, that was dismantled brick-by-brick in the 1930s, floated two kilometres across the harbour from its waterside site in Sydney’s Potts Point, and reassembled in an equally stunning spot on the other side.

“That makes it even more special,” says one of the current owners, Penny Spence, a two-time winner of the Logie for TV’s most popular female personality. She was a Nine Network weather presenter who later became a producer and the head of the station’s children’s programs.

“The moment I saw it, I knew I wanted to live there,” she says. “It’s just so fabulous sitting on the water like that, and to have such a story behind it.”

The building is now divided into three spacious apartments, and Spence’s four-bedroom ground-floor home, with its sandstone courtyard reaching out over the water, is set to go to auction on August 21.

She bought it 42 years ago, a year after the Epping home she’d once shared with her ex-husband, Nine music personality Geoff Harvey, burnt down from a suspected electrical fault. Homeless with her two daughters, she roamed around Sydney with three rubber mattresses before finally finding, and falling in love, with the Kurraba Point property.

Spence, now 82, has decided to put it on the market to downsize to a smaller home. “I’m very sad to leave,” she says. “But I just have to acknowledge that my years here have been wonderful, and I either stay here and hope to be carried out in a barge, or I move to a smaller environment near one of my daughters.

“That should be a new beginning, rather than a new ending.”

When the three-storey building was still part of the Wyldefel Gardens complex on Wylde Street, Potts Point, it was threatened with demolition when Navy chiefs announced they wanted the land on which it stood to expand neighbouring Garden Island for the wartime effort. 

Instead, its owner, businessman William Crowle, decided to take it apart himself and then ship it over the water to its new site on the lower north shore. There, he painstakingly rebuilt the block, converting the boatshed at the bottom into a ground-floor apartment. The whole thing was later strata titled.

Crowle lived for a while in the top-floor apartment with his second wife Lorna until his death in 1948. She continued living there, and Spence remembers her lowering a handwritten note on string from the third level to the ground to welcome Spence and her children. 

The 300-square-metre modernised apartment now has floor-to-ceiling living room windows to take in the whole harbour panorama, and French doors to the courtyard. All four bedrooms have stunning views and built-in wardrobes, and there are two bathrooms and storage for canoes and kayaks. It has a price guide of $3.3 million.

Ray White The Woollahra Group agent Stacey Leonie says the home is one of the most amazing she has ever received to sell. “It has such an extraordinary story and I’ve never been involved with such a unique historic property before,” she says. 

“Penny has made it even more unique as well. Every room is a different colour, and there are really interesting artworks all around the walls, while the apartment itself is right on Sydney harbour. There’s nothing between you and the water.”

Leonie says the home’s romantic story seems to have really captured people’s imagination, with lots of people, including awestruck architects, coming through.

SOLD - $3,300,000

3/115A Kurraba Road, Kurraba Point NSW 2089

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