Renovation queen Cherie Barber buys $6m home of radio's Merrick Watts

Renovation queen Cherie Barber has bought a $6 million converted warehouse in Lilyfield from comedian and radio presenter Merrick Watts.

Barber’s purchase of the former lolly factory, known as the Oh Boy Candy Company, follows the sale of her Birchgrove waterfront home last May for $6.3 million to Julian Parisi, of the Parisi greengrocer family.

Watts bought the property in 2009 for $2.1 million and commissioned a redesign by acclaimed architect Virginia Kerridge that won two Royal Australian Institute of Architecture awards in 2013.

The five-bedroom home featuring timbers from dismantled ships from the old Balmain wharves has an internal garden and open-plan living areas with double-height ceilings, a nine-metre reclaimed ironbark island in the kitchen, five-metre high bookshelves in the library, a rooftop swimming pool and a suspended Domofocus rotating fireplace.

Alexander Phillips, of Phillips Pantzer Donnelley, declined to comment on the sale, but was asking $6 million before the 446-square-metre property sold.

The result is expected to smash the Lilyfield residential high of $4.415 million set three years ago for a house on 736 square metres on Rayner Road.

Barber, the founder of Renovating for Profit, is expected to add her own touches to the converted warehouse, much as she did the Birchgrove house before she sold for $6.3 million. She purchased the Birchgrove property on dress circle Louisa Road for $4.05 million in 2014.

Barber’s former inner-west house was in Leichhardt where she bought a double-fronted, run-down 1890s house for $950,000 in 2008 and undertook a major renovation into a five-bedroom house, selling it in 2015 for $3.06 million.