Musk Farm sale draws big crowd to Stuart Rattle garden estate auction
Musk Farm sold at its overcast onsite weekend auction for $1.59 million through the Pat Rice & Hawkins agency.
The late interior designer Stuart Rattle and cattle farmer Michael O'Neill, partners for 16 years, paid $93,000 in 1998 with a $76,000 mortgage, for what was to become their expanded renovated Musk Farm, Daylesford masterpiece.
Selling agent Matt Childs had anticipated the cottage on 1.2 hectares would fetch $1 million plus, with it announced on the market at $1.14 million.
There were six bidders who pushed the final sale price well above expectation after the $850,000 opening bid by the eventual buyer. Property Observer gathers the East Melbourne buyers will have Musk Farm as their weekender.
The auction attracted 350 plus attendees to the Victorian central highlands offering. The underbidder, standing with glasses (pictured below), congratulated the buyer in the sienna orange jumper.
A clearance rate of 73% was recorded this weekend compared to 71% last weekend, from the bumper 1,057 auctions reported to the REIV. More than 10,000 homes have been sold at auction so far this year.
The Rattle estate included an adjoining 30 hectare cattle farm lot in the acclaimed Daylesford district expected to fetch $550,000 plus, sold for $660,000 to other buyers. Subject to council approval, the holding could get a residence since it qualified above the 20 hectare minimum block size.
The former school property started as a derelict garden overun with blackberries.
But taking their inspiration from the English Arts and Crafts movement of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, the couple set about its restoration starting with the planting of hydrangeas outside the 1880s old school house.
It comes with chinese tea house and a garden with 16 distinct garden rooms, joined by interconnecting walkways, and separated by large clipped hedges, English Box (Buxus sempervirens) and viburnum (Viburnum spp) and Ligustrum vulgare (Privet).
The garden, especially the pond, was not to its usual amazing high open day standard, looking slightly unkempt given the constraint on funds since the events of last December.
Attendees could partake in scones, iced yo-yos and Lavazza coffee with Peter Rowland catering.
Mossgreen auctioned the contents having set a pre-sale estimate of $299,000, but strong interest from around 600 registered bidders secured a sales tally of $711,000. A portrait of James, Duke of York, sold for $26,840, including buyers' premium. The family will donate a statue called The Thorn Boy from the gardens to the Wombat Botanical Gardens as a memorial for Stuart Rattle.
