Hart House at Great Mackerel Beach fetches $3.3 million

Located just 10 metres from the ocean, the home was built by Nick and Louisa Hart after they paid $900,000 to buy entrepreneur Sam Ballas’s 630 square metre building block in 2014.

The Casey Brown design ­delivers the illusion from inside that the house is floating on the water, while the rear has views of the bush landscape.

Adjoining Ku-ring-gai Chase ­National Park, the building block had been bought by Ballas for $760,000 in 2001 from architect Lawrence Neild, who had paid $143,000 in 1986.

It was the same year when the ­retired corporate raider Sir Ron Brierley bought his longtime holiday home for $430,000.

The latest sale through LJ Hooker agent Peter Robinson matched the strip’s highest price 15 doors away in 2006 paid by Warwick White, the former managing director of Coca-Cola Amatil.

The highest in the interim was $2.7 million in 2009.

The futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson, with his fiance, Nicole Banning, the designer-founder of Ephemera, bought the last weekender property that fetched more than $1 million last year.

Of the 100 homes, there are just 32 located on the “dress circle”. With access only by boat, listings are typically low and sales are slow.

Local agent Kathryn Hall has the latest shoreline listing.

This article was first published in the Sunday Telegraph.