Grand St Kilda house Oberwyl for sale, offering insight to Melbourne's history

You know you’re in the prestige end of the property market when you get to attend an auction by invitation only.

To qualify to take a crack at Oberwyl, one of St Kilda’s oldest – and by dint of association to important people in the development of the arts and education – one of Melbourne’s most richly provenanced houses, you should make it known you can toss multiple millions into the pot.

Jock Langley of Abercromby’s, who is overseeing the sales campaign of the elegant old mansion with the Regency features, six bedrooms and many “flexible reception rooms”, including a ballroom, hints that to be competitive in the bidding, you’d be thinking in the range of $4.5 million.

“It’s charming”, he says. “And the history here is quite extraordinary.”

When the symmetrically-gracious Greco-Regency mansion with the shuttered French doors, columned front porch and backyard stable block was built on the highest hill in St Kilda in 1856, it was constructed with such thick walls and such a quality of fit-out that it sent Portuguese merchant John de Silva immediately broke. He was never able to furnish it.

But from “De Silva’s folly”, the view – to Albert Park Lake, then surrounded by virgin bush, to the Dandenongs, and possibly over the gum trees to glimpses of Port Phillip beyond Elwood Swamp – would have been unimpeded by many buildings save for a pub at the junction of the dirt track that became St Kilda Road, the few little farm houses in Windsor and some smoking chimneys in distant Prahran.  

The house would have been lonely up there on the high point. It was not until the railway line was built across Middle Park’s swamplands and day-tripping Melburnians, weary of the dust, chaos and people crush of a gold rich township, discovered an easy way to commute to St Kilda that the house really began to hit its stride – albeit in button-up boots, from the 1860s.

By 1870, the 17 room house was being used as a girl’s school and from then on, until the 1930s, its wide and tessellated corridors clattered with the busyness of schoolgirls and mistresses going about the business of bringing up well-versed young girls.

In 1879, Madame Pfund, a Swiss-born woman of some refinement renamed the house after her hometown. A patron of the Heidelberg School painters, Elise Pfund was immortalised as one of Tom Roberts’ most memorable sitters.  

By the 1880s, French painter Berthe Mouchette and her sister were running the property as Oberwyl Ladies College. And there they also established the Alliance Francaise – still operating now but from the much bigger mansion, Eildon, down the hill.

Oberwyl was operated by various other sister-teacher combinations and by the Edwardian era, was one of the largest private girl’s schools in the state. Out of it was said to have grown both Clyde Grammar and St Michael’s Grammar.

It is also said that pupils have included the still life painter Margaret Preston, and the novelist Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Reverting to a private house in the mid-1930s, one family, the Gartons, owned the property until it was sold and restored about 20 years ago by the current owners. Langley says they “are finding the idea of selling a real wrench”.

When removing plaster board in the entrance hallway, they found a series of painted images of the female muses of the arts that have been left as revealed.

“It’s just one of those houses where you walk into the rooms that have been so beautifully built and so beautifully proportioned and find a wonderful house that hasn’t been wrecked,” Langley says.

Oberwyl will be privately auctioned on Thursday March 10. To register interest, phone Abercrombys on 9864 5300.