Kermadec, 1906 Federation house built for Billy Hughes, listed with record hopes
Kermadec, the 1906 Federation-era house built as the Lane Cove home to William (Billy) Hughes, Australia’s seventh prime minister, has been listed for sale through Simon Harrison and James Bennett of Belle Property Lane Cove.
The double-storey Federation mansion is now four bedrooms with powder room and one bathroom. It comes with a pool and tennis court on its 2,787-square-metre landholding.
Title Tattle recalls the Lane Cove home last traded in 1999 for $1.95 million, a then record for the suburb. Slightly earlier $1,375,000 was secured when it sat on a 4,600-square-metre Richardson Street block.
It's now been listed with renewed record hopes when offers are due by December 12.
Belle Property are looking for offers "from the high $3s."The former SMH heritage reporter Geraldine O'Brien noted once that William Morris Hughes was a barrister and a Federal MP in 1905 when he bought two hilltop blocks of land in a suburb then dotted with dairy farms.
Until its late 1990s restoration and extension of the house, the number of bedrooms was minimal, although Hughes and his wife had six children.
The original house only three bedrooms.
Richard Dinham from SJPH Design Partnership oversaw the 1997 renovations.
Hughes, who wasn't a rich man, didn't lavish money on the house, so the original detail was typically Edwardian with some anomalies such as the ceiling over the staircase being low, which later residents suggested was because he was a little man.
When Hughes was back in Lane Cove from parliamentary sessions in Melbourne, he would speak from the house balcony to address his constituents.
Hugher, who was borned in 1862 and died in 1952, was Prime Minister from 1915 to 1923 and over the course of his 51-year federal parliamentary career (and an additional seven years prior to that in a colonial parliament), Hughes changed parties five times from 1901 to 1952.
The house's name, Kermadec was actually given to it by trader Graham Kerr, who'd bought it in 1920 and named it for the Pacific islands.