Tamarama “Where the Wild Things Are” house set to become Australia’s first $100 million oceanfront build!

“The family were seeking a home where they could come together from their scattered locations across the world and get back to the source: a place to be reunited, replenished, and cocooned."

Only one year ago, Sydney surfers were stunned when a crumbling four-apartment citadel in Tamarama, which once hosted world number 32 Kelly Slater, sold for almost six times what it was worth ten years previous.

Nineteen Dellview St, Tamarama, 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.

That sale for thirteen mill was impressive but it wasn’t even in the ballpark of the old brown-brick house called Lang Syne overlooking both the reef of Tamarama to the south and Mackenzies Bay to the north that sold around the same time for $45 mill. 

That joint was swiftly demolished and, now, readying to grow in its place is a house by the noted architect Luigi Rosselli, Tamarama and its surrounds is crawling with Rosselli’s trademark curved lines, that’ll take three-to-four years to build, cost around ten and make the whole package worth around one hundred mill. 

Do the sums, forty-five for the dirt, ten for the house, maybe a few mill for miscellaneous expenses and that’s one helluva return.

“The topline brief David and Marisa provided was a simple one: design a family home worthy of such a special and breathtaking location,” writes Rosselli. “Something beautiful, and organic, that exists in harmony with its natural surroundings and its occupants. A generational home that gives more than it takes.

“The family were seeking a home where they could come together from their scattered locations across the world and get back to the source: a place to be reunited, replenished, and cocooned.

“In the design approach for this new Australian ‘icon’, the goal is to retain the organic beauty of the site, with its wind-carved rocks, through an organic plan with a counterpoint play of eroded horizontal slabs and cocoon shaped vertical breaks, the latter to be constructed with the bricks, slate roof tiles, and sandstone retained from the demolition of the existing home on the site.”

Not everyone around here is thrilled as you might imagine. There was something of that lingering Australian egalitarianism in an ordinary family home being perched on the country’s most valuable beachfront land. I always found it a marvel that you could peer over the rock wall and into the front garden of a modest home where four children used to play. 

A neighbour has subsequently described the plans as an “eyesore” and “horrific. Blight on the landscape. What the actual fuck?”

I think it’s possible to be both delighted and repelled by the new design.

The elegance of a Luigi Rosselli home cannot be underestimated and what a thrill it’ll be to watch this hulking Where the Wild Things Are monster in repose take shape on the headland.

Less of a joy will be its new role as a shuttered occasional plaything of the wildly rich, the crown of the clifftop obscured by a mansion enjoyed by very few.