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.
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.
