“If this project is not an exemplary, outstanding response to a significant natural environment, then I do not know what is.”

One year ago came the terrific news for fans of surf adjacent real estate when an old brown-brick house called Lang Syne overlooking both the reef of Tamarama to the south and Mackenzies Bay to the north sold for $45 mill.

The bullish sale followed the thirteen mill paid for a crumbling four-apartment citadel in Tamarama, which once hosted world number 32 Kelly Slater.

(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.)

Anyway, the century-old Lang Syne was swiftly demolished and the noted architect Luigi Rosselli was employed to design a house worthy of its location on the beachfront and only a dozen or so clicks from the Sydney CBD.

Rosselli came up with a house that was designated the Where the Wild Things Are House, with its giant woolly humps resembling one of the romping monsters from the Maurice  Sendak picture book in a sort of momentary repose.

“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,” wrote the architect.

“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.”

Some were impressed, some were repelled by the design, plenty felt a little of both. 

Now, it can be revealed the local council has rejected Rosselli’s plans for the Where the Wild Things Are House.

Well, not exactly rejected.

Council wanted more info, the New York-based owner Dravid Droga didn’t provide it and council deemed it a refusal.

The matter is now before the Land and Environment Court where the Rosselli project is expected to sail through without impediment.

As the architect Zoltan Kovacs reported to the council about the Where the Wild Things House, “If this project is not an exemplary, outstanding response to a significant natural environment, then I do not know what is.”