Collette Dinnigan flips her glamorous Watsons Bay home

Collette Dinnigan’s year of living in Italy has brought on some unexpected changes to her lifestyle preferences that leaves her landmark Sydney home all but redundant.

Learning Italian and getting to know the streets of Rome in relative anonymity with her husband Bradley Cocks, her daughter Estella and son Hunter has also left Dinnigan time and space to get to know the benefits of a sharing a smaller family home with the “bedrooms all on one level”.

“That just feels right,” said Dinnigan from Rome earlier this week.

And so, 18 months after she bought the former Masonic Temple in Watsons Bay off James Packer’s sidekick Matthew “Ched” Csidei for $6.25 million, she’s put it up for sale.

The listing comes soon after Dinnigan has lavished “too much” on a renovation of the property, honing her interior design skills of recent years in collaboration with her brother Seamus Dinnigan. Gone are Ched’s more masculine and eclectic interiors and in its place is just what you’d expect of the world-class designer.

A walk-through just 18 months after it last traded by Title Deeds revealed a far more feminine, beachy and light-filled residence in which Dinnigan has added a bedroom, replaced three bathrooms, shortened the pool to allow more garden, craned in palm trees, reworked the entry, widened the driveway, and added plenty more storage space.

“If we hadn’t come to Italy we wouldn’t ever sell it. I loved the house when I first saw it. It’s very European and I felt my style and aesthetic would fit there. And we love the area. It’s like Palm Beach but close to Sydney,” said Dinnigan.

“But it’s a house that needs to be lived in and it just feels too big for us now.”

Buyers should expect to pay $8 million or more through McGrath’s Ben Collier and Will Manning.

Dinnigan is planning to return to Sydney for Christmas and stay into early next year to settle Estella, who she shares with television presenter Richard Wilkins, into boarding school at the Southern Highlands.

Next year Dinnigan plans to split her time between Italy – where she hopes to buy an old farmhouse to restore – and her holiday home in Milton, on the South Coast, and maybe buy a Sydney bolthole down the track.

“I’ve always bought first and then sold, but I want to do it differently this time,” said Dinnigan, likely in reference to her Watsons Bay purchase last year, which came a month before she sold her Paddington home for $6.5 million.

“I like the idea of buying a Sydney bolthole, but I want to sell this one first and once Hunter starts school we’ll need to make more serious plans. Maybe we’ll buy a place at the Southern Highlands. Who knows.”