Seamless deals: How Collette Dinnigan went from first home buyer to savvy property insider

Collette Dinnigan has built a property empire in recent years buying and renovating luxury city boltholes and weekenders, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the acclaimed fashion designer almost doubled her money on her first home purchase bought as a 29-year-old for $315,000.

At the time the two-bedroom cottage on a lane behind the Clock Hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills was owned by graphic design pioneer Harry Williamson and his wife Terry, who had commissioned a redesign by their mate, the late acclaimed architect Bruce Rickard.

It was 1995 and the South African-born Dinnigan was viewed as a hot new talent on the Sydney fashion scene, having recently had her lingerie line spruiked by Barney’s department store in New York.  Williamson remembers the purchase to this day because, as he recalls, Dinnigan was sick on auction day but still showed off the tenacity with which she has become renowned by turning up to bid anyway.

Dinnigan later told The Sun-Herald in 2008: “I wish I had never sold it.” But she did, pocketing $620,000 in 2000 from the Gunthorp family, who despite not being told who owned the property recognised it as Dinnigan’s thanks to a  feature in a 1997 issue of New Zealand House and Garden magazine about the home she shared with her then husband, Eurogliders frontman Bernie Lynch.
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In 1998, the success of her ready-to-wear label had prompted her to buy her Paddington shop for $625,000 and a few months later a warehouse in Surry Hills for $1.225 million.

Her home real estate took a big step up in 2002 when she and then partner, showbiz reporter Richard Wilkins, bought a Paddington mansion from publisher Deke Miskin for $4.1 million, setting a suburb high.

But the post-global financial crisis property market wasn’t kind to the value of Dinnigan’s Paddington property. After listing it in 2009 for $10 million she sold it in 2011 for $7.3 million, just a few months before she wed Bradley Cocks.

The couple moved to a sandstone residence on nearby Paddington Street she bought in 2009 for $4.45 million from the Paspaley pearling family, and owned until 2015 when it was sold for $6.5 million.

Since then, Dinnigan has shut her fashion house and turned to property investment, buying and selling more than $50 million worth of real estate, including offloading that Surry Hills warehouse for $6 million in March and her former shopfront last year for $1.6 million.

One of her biggest property success stories was the former Masonic Temple in Watsons Bay she bought in 2015 for $6.25 million from James Packer’s former sidekick Matthew “Ched” Csidei.

Renovated with the help of her brother Seamus Dinnigan, she sold it 18 months later for $9 million. In 2016, she bought Springfield Farm in the Southern Highlands for $4.5 million and sold it two years later for $7.25 million.

Purchases of the past two years seem destined to join her stable of luxury holiday rentals, including a $7 million Darling Point residence, a $950,000 beach house at Rosedale on the South Coast, and two workers’ terraces in Paddington bought for $1.9 million and $2.22 million.

While Dinnigan and Cocks still own their centuries-old farmhouse in Italy, and half of the Milton acreage she bought in 2006, another Southern Highlands residence was added to the portfolio last year for $3.5 million.