Run-down Tamarama apartment block that housed a who’s who of surf luminaries, including Kelly Slater, sells for whopping $13 million! “This result throws the rule book to the wind!”

"A true once-in-a-generation opportunity to secure a development site in Sydney's most glamorous coastal playground."

A crumbling four-apartment citadel in the Sydney beachside suburb Tamarama, which once hosted world number 24 Kelly Slater, has sold for almost six times what it was worth ten years ago.

Nineteen Dellview St, with its panoramic views of the impossibly blue Pacific Ocean and squatting on almost five thousand feet of land, was, for a time in the early two-thousands, let’s say 2006-2012, the hub around which the city’s surf media revolved.

In a top floor nest was the venerated photographer Greg Nagel, whose Peter Beard-esque collages from Tahiti now sell for upwards of one hundred thousand dollars and which adorn the walls of the lovely and beautiful (I have a memory of an aged woman taking me upstairs, ostensibly to show me her “Nagel” but which, in hindsight, was an invitation for either drug use or erotic touching ), while in another lived the brains behind the surf website Stab Sam Macintosh and upon whose leather couch Kelly Slater, then a world beater, once surfed upon.

Back in 2013, you could’ve bought in at $750,0000, Oz shekels, which, if you’ve held onto it until a couple of weeks back, would’ve given you a windfall of roughly $3.2 mill.

The building, delightful and light filled had sixty feet of street frontage thus allowing a giant terrace where noisy parties were enjoyed by a conga line of models and surf stars.

“The setting is unbeatable,” reads the promo brochure, “and the views breathtaking making this boutique beachside apartment block a true once-in-a-generation opportunity to secure a development site in Sydney’s most glamorous coastal playground. Offered in one line, the classic 1930s block of four semi-like apartments is one of a few tightly held properties opposite Mackenzies Point with views across the ocean and eastern coastline that will never be built out. Perched above the Bondi to Coogee coast walk, the classic seaside block holds a commanding elevated corner position with a 19m frontage to one of Tamarama’s best streets.”

Predictably, the joint’s going to be destroyed whereupon a cubist-style mansion will rise above the ruins, a plaything for its new multi-millionaire master.