Faded beauties: The fate of Sydney’s crumbling mansions hangs in balance

Once our grandest homes, built for this town’s wealthiest and most influential, today they wear an ignominious title: Sydney’s great crumbling mansions.

Caught up in estate court battles, planning bureaucracy, neighbourhood disputes, astronomical maintenance bills, ill-conceived development proposals, owner malaise and that most Sydney of all maladies – property prices – some of the city’s historically significant homes of yesteryear have fallen into decay, putting their survival at serious risk.

Crumbling beauty: Elaine in its current state at Point Piper.

None more so than the once majestic Elaine, the old Fairfax media family home in Point Piper currently owned by tech billionaire Scott Farquhar and banker Kim Jackson, who in 2020 suddenly withdrew elaborate $37 million plans to comprehensively rebuild the property – after their former neighbours and Atlassian co-founders, the now separated Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes, objected.

In 2017, the Farquhars paid $71 million for Elaine, which is not heritage listed though its immediate neighbours Blackburn Gardens, St Brigid’s and Fairwater are. Today, it is a forlorn site on Sydney Harbour, partially demolished, its once gracious gardens unkempt.

“It is in a very sad state, practically falling into the harbour,” said retired heritage architect Clive Lucas, “and while the house itself is not of any real heritage significance architecturally, it is certainly a historic house given it was owned by the Fairfaxes, and is very much a local landmark.

“In some cases, we have heritage laws that are supposed to prevent this from happening, but I fear they are pretty toothless tigers in reality.”

From local governments to Heritage NSW, the tools available to make owners maintain heritage-listed properties are often employed as a last-resort measure. Unlisted but equally historic properties have less protection from neglect.

A spokeswoman for the Farquhars said they had no plans to sell, despite no longer planning to make it their family home. At the end of 2022, the Farquhars spent $130 million a few streets up the hill from Elaine on “baronial castle” Uig Lodge.

The abandoned Mosman mansion, Morella, before it was sold in 2016 for $6.6 million.

Elaine’s future is uncertain. A 2015 application by the Fairfax family to subdivide the block for additional housing remains in play. Woollahra Council confirmed a “commencement certificate” is registered against the council-approved 2015 DA that would radically alter the parkland-like site.

Across the harbour, the state of Mosman’s fabled art deco masterpiece Morella is even more precarious. Neighbours report police are still regularly called to the dangerous site, which has become a magnet for graffitists and social media explorers of “abandoned” buildings.

The house is listed as a heritage item in Mosman’s Local Environment Plan, though it was never added to the NSW Heritage Council register.

In 2016, young Chinese buyer Edward Wei bought the property for $6.6 million. It has been embroiled in controversy, failed development applications and Land and Environment Court battles ever since.

Wei was given the green light a year ago to effectively demolish much of the home and rebuild it, but critics say it will not be a true restoration.

Studley Park House in Narellan as it currently stands.

Leo Parer, co-founder of Stanford X-Ray, bought the site in 1936 for £500. He and wife Helena commissioned Eric Nicholls of Burley Griffin to design the existing house, completed in 1939.

In the 1940s, the mansion hosted the cream of Sydney society, and in 1943 featured in Australian Home Beautiful magazine. Son Anthony Parer lived in the property with his carer, Chew Ho Hong, dying without a will in 2015. Ho Hong made a successful claim as Parer’s defacto and sold Morella.

Few would be as familiar as the wealthy Morans with the challenge of taking on large, ornate and historic homes. The family has restored Darling Point’s Swifts mansion, Redleaf in Wahroonga and Blandford in Leura.

Millionaire businessman Peter Moran is hopeful his development application for a new hotel and apartment complex at his historic Narellan property Studley Park House, in the centre of Camden Golf Club, will get the green light after several previous failed proposals.

Inside Studley Park House at Narellan.

However, local heritage groups are fighting his latest plans, saying they endanger threatened plant species and are not in keeping with the house, which was built in 1888 and in the 1930s became the retreat for Twentieth Century Fox Corporation executive Archibald Adolphus “Arthur” Gregory during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

“There has to be a way for these old houses to become sustainable into the future, and that means finding a use for them that can give them a new lease on life,” Moran said.

When Moran bought Studley Park House in 2007, it was in disrepair. He says it is deteriorating further the longer planning processes take. Previous plans to turn it into a Rolls-Royce museum were unsuccessful, and regular ghost tours of the grand, turreted house ended more than a decade ago.

Peter Moran and his mother Greta at Juniper Hall on the day they bought the historic Paddington property in 2012.

“We’ve been able to stop the water getting in, that is what causes most of the damage,” he said. “Our family is passionate about these old places, but there has to be a practical way for them to be saved.”

The family’s Moran Arts Foundation owns Paddington’s 200-year-old Juniper Hall, with plans to redevelop the site with the addition of an art gallery. Moran said negotiations were progressing with planning authorities over the project, while an archaeological dig has begun.

For almost a decade, The Glebe Society fretted over the future of Bidura, the handsome two-storey villa designed by prominent colonial architect Edmund Blacket and completed in 1858, replete with timber shutters and iron lacework.

“Demolition by neglect, it is a real issue across the city,” said the society’s planning convener, Ian Stephenson.

Bidura in Glebe has sat idle for nearly a decade.

As with Studley Park House, Bidura is a state heritage-listed property and protected from demolition. Controversial and protracted plans for new apartments and demolition of the 1980s brutalist concrete former Children’s Court complex built at the rear, resulted in Bidura sitting idle for nearly a decade behind its decrepit paling fence on Glebe Point Road.

Developer Vision Land finally won approval last year, a condition of which is for restoration of Bidura to begin by May. Stephenson said he “can only imagine what state the inside” is in, adding that slipped roof slates appear to have let in water, damaging the soffits of the eaves.

In Edgecliff, the fate of Sydney barrister Guy Reynolds’ Quambi Place investment remains contentious among neighbours and there are concerns about squatters.

Reynolds was assaulted recently at one of the run-down houses. Jesse Ford was earlier this month convicted at Waverley Local Court on charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and trespassing. Reynolds did not respond to queries about the incident or his plans for the property.

Quambi Place in Edgecliff awaits a long-promised restoration.

No.1 Quambi Place is billed, somewhat ambitiously, as an “exact replica” of the original government house in Parramatta. Behind the portico and columns, the property is a duplex.

Reynolds has owned the top floor since the 1990s and secured the bottom half in late 2019. In 2021 he told the Herald his plans to restore the property had been delayed by the pandemic.

It was once owned by Lady Davis, of the Davis Gelatine empire that rivalled Aeroplane Jelly. She would be hard-pressed to recognise her former home today – with its peeling paint, cracked walls and ramshackle garden, No.1 is a sad reflection of its former self.

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