Fashion designer Collette Dinnigan scores $2.5m flipping Watsons Bay home

Fashion designer Collette Dinnigan has secured a bullish sale price on her Watsons Bay home in what is likely to be one of Sydney’s fastest prestige home sales.

News of the lightning-fast sale broke on Saturday afternoon when would-be buyers and sticky beaks turned up for the property’s first open inspection.  

The recently renovated former Masonic Temple hit the market on Wednesday amid expectations within the standard 10 per cent range of $8 million to $8.8 million.

There was no price disclosure to attendees at the open inspection from McGrath’s Ben Collier or his co-agent Will Manning, but it is expected to have sold for more than the upper end of the price guide given its sale so early in the campaign.

• See more photos of the property here.

Dinnigan’s sale plans follow her move last year to Italy with husband Bradley Cocks, their son Hunter and daughter Estella, who she shares with television presenter Richard Wilkins. Speaking to Domain from her home in Rome earlier this week, Dinnigan said: “If we hadn’t come to Italy we wouldn’t ever sell it.

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

Even after a substantial renovation on the property, the result offers a financial windfall for Dinnigan who purchased it only 18 months ago for $6.25 million from James Packer’s sidekick Matthew Csidei.

That’s a capital gain on the property of more than $2.5 million.

The 1920s-era property had already been extensively renovated during Csidei’s ownership by architect Blainey North.

Csidei purchased the property in 2005 for $2.7 million.

Dinnigan honed her interior design skills on the property alongside her brother Seamus Dinnigan, replacing three bathrooms, adding recycled timber floors upstairs, widening the driveway and shortening the swimming pool to allow more garden space.

Sydney’s prestige market has been recording strong and fast results all year given unusually low stock levels and a pent-up demand among buyers.

Dinnigan said she plans to split her time between Italy and Australia in future, spending more time at her holiday home in Milton, on the South Coast, and buying a smaller Sydney base once she has sold her Watsons Bay home.

On Tuesday Dinnigan’s most pressing concern when she spoke to Domain was not the upcoming sale of her Watsons Bay home but where she would find a suitable, smaller Sydney base once she sold given limited stock levels.