Before The Block, Maggie Tabberer was the television renovation style setter
Before The Block – now in its 10th season over 12 years – there was the television renovation style setter Maggie Tabberer.
Tabberer and her then partner Richard Zachariah were the perfect hosts for the ABC's The Home Show.
While neither where professional designers, they were in the process of renovating their sixth home in six years, so they spoke with expertise.
The towering duo made four series in the early 1990s.
Of course, who could forget the show's renovation stars: the legendary Montells, with their little house in Balmain. They sold for $400,000 in 1996, with the Sutton Street terrace reselling for $900,000 in 2012.
Maggie hasn't been overly active on the sales front, though last year her all white three bedroom, two bathroom Randwick home sold for $2.4 million (pictured above).
Marketed as an inspired freestanding sundrenched private oasis inventively built around a central courtyard – featuring a magnificent frangipani tree and a heated pool – it was her home for the prior eight years.
It was 2006 when Maggie, the fashion and style guru, sold her Rushcutters Bay garden apartment in the McLachlan Avenue block developed in the mid-1990s by James Packer and Theo Onisforou.
It too was up for sale last year when the 1 and 2/61 McLachlan Avenue apartment, the size of a house, was offered by Ben David, creative director of the vibrant linen design company Kas who bought the property in 2009 for $2.8 million (pictured below).
It was an urban sanctuary in the then still industrial zone of Rushcutters Bay.
The Tabberer touch is still there with the enormous wooden carved doors decorating the dining room.
The two level apartment had been sold by Maggie Tabberer in 2006 for $1.7 million to rag trader David Mellick.
More than $3.5 million was sought at its November auction with Jason Boon, of Richardson & Wrench Elizabeth Bay, and Di Grundy, of BresicWhitney, now offering the Belle featured apartment with $3 million plus price indications.
Ben bought it from Roger Melik, a name behind the Roger David group.
Before that, Title Tattle recalls Tabberer had an Edgecliff abode – labelled the White House after its mid-1980s makeover.
It was 1960 when Maggie moved to Sydney with her daughters from Adelaide. She began appearing on television in 1964, as a "beauty" on panel talk show Beauty and the Beast.
