Woollahra's grandest residence Rosemont sells for record $45m

Woollahra’s grandest residence, Rosemont, was quietly sold this week by Margot, Lady Burrell for $45 million, making it not only this year’s highest house sale but setting a new benchmark among Sydney’s trophy homes for a house with no view.

This is the historic mansion built in 1857 by merchant banker and politician Alexander Campbell and for more than a century stood as a centrepiece of Sydney’s high society thanks to a slew of titled owners until almost 40 years ago when it was purchased by the more private Lady Burrell and her late husband, Sir Raymond Burrell.

The Agency’s Ben Collier declined to reveal the buyer but confirmed the sale figure, which more than doubles the $22 million suburb-high set a month ago by television queen Kerri-Anne Kennerley.

The property of more than 3000 square metres is one of Woollahra’s largest private landholdings, whose former owners over its 164-year history have been among Sydney’s most prominent business and political figures; from businessman Sir Samuel Sydney Cohen to financier Sir John Joseph Garvan and in the 1920s Sir Charles and Lady Mackellar, parents of Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar.

In 1933, it was purchased by Lady Hannah Lloyd Jones, the third wife of retail giant David Jones chairman Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, who was renowned for her celebrated log of guests like former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies, a young Prince Philip, entertainers Noel Coward, Danny Kaye and Cecil Ritchard, and beauty industry icons Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein.

Lady Lloyd Jones sold it in 1981 to a developer John Rutherford, who won approval to convert it into six apartments but only briefly before interest rates of more than 20 per cent sent the property market into a spiral and Rosemont was auctioned in a mortgagee sale.

The Burrells paid $1.8 million, taking possession in 1983 and commissioning architect Espie Dods to redesign outside of the 10-bedroom house (five of which are in the servants’ wing).

Thanks to the Dods redesign, the original facade and well-documented turning circle was turned into a rear north-facing garden designed by Gai Stanton with a tennis court and swimming pool and a new entry formalised on what was once the service yard off Rosemont Avenue.

The Victorian cast-iron fountain that once stood at the centre of the turning circle was relocated to the public space on the corner of Oxford and Queen streets opposite Centennial Park, where it stands today.

It was listed on the State Heritage Register in 1999, having already been placed on the Register of National Estate in 1991.

In a historic neighbourhood in which the average house block is 206 square metres, the heritage-listed property is regarded as close to acreage. Its rescue from redevelopment 40 years ago leaves a legacy to the grandeur of a bygone era.

There is only one larger privately held estate in Woollahra, the colonial Georgian residence Hawthornden, owned by Transfield director and philanthropist Luca Belgiorno-Nettis and his wife, Anita.

Kerryn Phelps swaps Potts Point digs

Professor Kerryn Phelps and her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps have done an off-market deal to sell their Potts Point home in the Ikon building for $9 million.

The bullish result puts the couple’s apartment among the most expensive in the former Chevron Hotel development, topped by the $16 million suburb high set by audio king and RODE Microphones owner Peter Freedman in the penthouse and print baron Michael Hannan’s $11 million penthouse sale in February.

PPD’s Debbie Donnelley was keeping schtum on the deal, despite the result being more than double the $3.4 million the high-profile media medico and Sydney City councillor paid for it a decade ago.

Despite the couple spending more time at their Bundeena weekender, the Sydney City Council councillor and former independent federal member is not leaving the Wentworth electorate.

Records show the couple purchased a three-bedroom apartment on level two of nearby Rockwall Gardens before it went to auction for $4.61 million.

Bangalow’s dinner and a show

Former breakfast radio host Pete Timbs was already looking to sell his restaurant in the Byron Bay hinterland when COVID-19 up-ended everything, but almost two years later, he’s offering buyers of the business the option of also buying his family home, given a $1.8 million guide.

Twenty years after Timbs was launched on the reality TV landscape in the original series of Big Brother, he says he and his wife Camille are looking to move north to Tweed Heads, closer to the school attended by their daughters Matilda, 14, and Arabella, 12.

“Just picking up my daughters from netball practice was a two-hour round trip,” Timbs said.

The commute initially prompted the couple to put their restaurant business, The Italian Diner, up for grabs for $480,000 amid plans to eventually start another hospitality business, but buyers have been deterred not by the opportunity on offer so much as the difficulty finding somewhere to live in Bangalow.

“That’s what prompted us to consider selling our home as well as part of the deal,” he said.

The couple’s three-bedroom “artist’s retreat” was purchased in 2016 for $780,000 just 800 metres from the restaurant but would be offered as an option to the buyers of the business rather than as a standalone house sale.

“We’d like to keep the house if we can, but if it helps someone else take up the lifestyle we’ve had here to buy the house as well, then that makes sense,” he said.

Bronte’s next big sale

Simon Baker and Rebecca Rigg are no longer Bronte’s most high-profile home owners, but their recent $17 million house sale price will be a fondly recorded parting gift to local high-end home values.

After all, if a house that last traded six years ago for $6.5 million on just 380 square metres can sell for that much, every home owner has to reassess what they’re worth.

Simon Moore, the head of private equity firm Colinton Capital Partners, should appreciate the timing. Within a week of the Baker-Rigg sale, he listed his beachside house on a larger 485 square metres with an $18 million guide.

The Bronte Marine Drive house is arguably the closest anyone can live to the lifesaving flags, and the five-bedroom residence has been renovated since he purchased it five years ago for $8.05 million.

The Agency’s Ben Collier, who sold the Baker and Rigg house, has been handed the listing.

Moore and his partner Lucinda Cowdroy are heading to Vaucluse, where in July they paid about $35 million for the architect Howard Tanner-designed mansion of Hong Kong arts patron Yang Yang.

Meanwhile, barristers Kate Morgan and Richard McHugh have paid $12 million in Tamarama for a former duplex that is set to be their own home across the road from the oceanfront.

At the time of exchange, social media posts pinned the deal on buyer’s agent Tina Clark and McGrath’s Simon Exelton, the latter on behalf of ear, nose and throat specialist surgeon Greg Lvoff.

McHugh, the silk who dabbles in fiction, and Morgan have already off-loaded their Bronte home of almost 20 years for $8.1 million through Trow Jones’s Mark Jones.

International lawyer trades up

In Mosman, the Clifton Gardens home of prominent international lawyer Michelle Fox, who heads the Australian office of litigation powerhouse Quinn Emanuel, is up for sale for more than $15 million.

What was formerly a 1920s bungalow on almost 900 square metres was purchased by Fox in 2012 for $3.47 million and rebuilt recently to a design by architect Don McQualter into a European-style residence overlooking the harbour, with a curved staircase centrepiece, separate guest suite and study, internal lift, 1100-bottle cellar and tasting room, gymnasium and a dog’s room – whatever that is.

Martin Schiller of Savills and Adam Vernon of Vernon Partners have listed it following Fox’s recent purchase across the road for $10.135 million from Ting Wei, wife of Little Harvard Kindy co-founder Peter Lin.

Millennial millionaire buys (again)

Millennial property investor William Wenhao Wu and his partner Junyu Ren have snapped up a house in Double Bay for $7.25 million.

Wu and his property developer mother, Jing Wang, have been on one of the most phenomenal property binges across the east’s harbourside suburbs in the past year, spending more than $110 million on investment properties, not counting the mother’s and son’s own homes in Bellevue Hill and Vaucluse.

Wu’s Double Bay house was previously owned by Randwick-bound lawyers Jessica Roth and Daniel Mendoza-Jones, who had a $7 million guide through Ray White Double Bay’s Elliott Placks and Ashley Bierman before it sold.