Former Lady (Susan) Renouf's pink palace home listed at Whale Beach

Styled akin to villas on the French Riveria or the Amalfi Coast, a 1,150 square metre oceanfront offering at Whale Beach is sure to attract keen interest. If not just because of its striking terracotta colour!

It has been listed with offers due by May 21 through LJ Hooker agents David Edwards and Amethyst McKee who are quoting $6.5 million plus.

This coastal residence (pictured above), now painted in almost an Uluru ochre, holds a significant place in Northern Beaches folklore.

With prized views down over the beach, out across the ocean, and north to Cape Three Points, this was Lady (Susan) Renouf's pink palace with full length terraces framed in bougainvillea.

Of course it is just along from where the late Dame Joan Sutherland spent her time when not in Switzerland or Potts Point. It had been in the 1970s that Dame Joan Sutherland bought her occasional retreat for just $167,000.

But it was Susan Renouf who brought Rayner Road its prominence from the late 1980s given her many guests at Villa Balena included Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York who came to stay accompanied by Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. The society hostess bought the property in 1989 for $1.9 million when it was already known for its cement-rendered pink exterior.

Title Tattle recalls her purchase followed the 1988 sale of her Point Piper matrimonial home, Toison d'Or (also called Paradis sur Mer) for $19.2 million after her estrangement from her husband, New Zealand businessman Sir Frank Renouf. She also sold her Mittagong retreat, Kennerton Green that year to Marilyn Zweck-Abbott.

"I always wanted a house by the beach," Lady Renouf once told me, recalling her holidays at Whale Beach during the 1960s.

But following her London mews purchase in 1991, Susan signalled her desire to sell the home with it ending up in 1993 selling to adman Greg Daniel and Louise McBride, then a tax partner with the law firm Clayton Utz.

They purchased it for $1.85 million in December 1993, selling for $7 million in 2006 to the Allan family, reportedly expats then living in London, who are now the vendors. It seems Donald Allen, a former director of Equigroup, and wife, Margaret are downsizing closer to the city.

It has taken four year but art dealer Roger McIlroy, the former head of Christie's in Australia, has finally sold his Palm Beach retreat, Jeeda.

It was initially listed with $5 million hopes, selling at an undisclosed price presumably at around its revised asking indication of $4.5 million. It had been listed through LJ Hooker Palm Beach agents David Edwards and Peter Robinson in conjunction with Christie's agent Ken Jacobs.

The 1,534 square metre Sunrise Road holding with sandstone cottage (pictured below) has been in the family since 1922, when wool broker Eldred Moser bought it for £1,025 from pioneer doctor Lucy Gullett, who had paid £100 to the Barrenjoey Company in 1917.

Gullett had just returned from World War I, where she served in a French Red Cross military hospital in Lyon.

Its 2010 listing followed an unsuccessful land tax challenge, which determined Melbourne-based McIlroy lived at Palm Beach only 10 percent of the time and it was therefore not his principal place of residence. 

His family happy snaps, clothes and personal possessions were there, with the Administrative Decisions Tribunal member Robin Handley ruling the evidence established that McIlroy's connection to the Palm Beach property was an enduring, long-term one, rooted in his family and personal history. But the NSW Office of State Revenue fought back hard and won a reversal. He and his sister, Jane Strang, had inherited it in 1972. 

McIlroy, who bought his first surfboard at the age of seven, was billed $161,930 for the period from 2002 until 2006. The 2009 land valuation was at $3.87 million, down on its $3.91 million valuation in 2008.

The former Shore boy McIlroy lived in Melbourne for decades while working for Christie's and was its managing director until the upmarket art auction house closed its doors in Australia in 2006.

McIlroy then went into business in Mayfair with one of the most influential figures in the London art world, the dealer Lady Angela Nevill. 

Lawyer Derek Heath and his wife Elizabeth have sold their five-bedroom Palm Beach home, which Christie's Ken Jacobs was seeking a $7.65 million asking price.

Designed by architect Simon Parsons in the mid-1990s, the still contemporary beachhouse (pictured below) sits on the dress circle hilltop strip on a 1,000 square metre block.

They bought the Sunrise Road block in 1994 for $830,000, and it became the couple's permanent home in 2007 after they sold their 1969 Peter Hirst-designed home in Pymble for $2.8 million. It was the modernist house designed by architect Peter Hirst of Harry Seidler & Associates at Pymble on Sydney's upper north shore.

It was built for the Blunt family set on a 2384-square-metre block with a heated swimming pool, level lawns and established gardens. The Pymble Avenue property was renovated in 2006 undertaken for the Heath's by Lesiuk Architects.