Craigholme, the 1856 Darling Point Edmund Blacket trophy home listed
Craigholme, built in 1856 on the Darling Point ridge line, has been listed for sale by the Allianz Australia chairman John Curtis.
One of Darling Point's most beautiful homes, the Victorian Gothic residence was designed by colonial architect Edmund Blacket seemingly for the family of then NSW Surveyor General, Sir Thomas Mitchell.
Title Tattle gleans there has been a fastidious reinvention for modern indoor/outdoor living by the architect Howard Tanner with interiors by Michael Love.
It last traded in 1993 for $1,615,000 when bought by the Curtis family from the Punch family.
The professional company director John Curtis, the former St George bank chairman and then longtime Westpac deputy chairman, bought Craigholme from Sue Punch. The Yarranabbe Road property had been bought by her late husband, politician Leon Punch.
The downsizing John and Anna Curtis have been told more than $20 million is possible by Clint Ballard of Ballard Property and Michael Pallier of Sotheby's International.
The three-level family home with gardens, comes with swimming pool and separate self-contained apartment.
It has a grand drawing room with 4.5 metre high ceiling and French doors flowing to a sandstone garden courtyard as well as covered verandah with harbour views.
Known as Yaranabee Estate (spelt differently to today’s spelling of Yarranabbe Road), the land was purchased 1835 by Sir Thomas Mitchell, but he didn’t built a house there until the 1850s.
In 1827 Mitchell arrived in the colony with his wife Mary and is best known for his other homes, Craigend, a grand mansion set on more than nine acres of the ridge at Darlinghurst, then Carthona, an impressive Gothic Revival sandstone mansion on Darling Point’s northern foreshore in the 1840s.
Craigholme, the house set on about 2.75 acres, sold in 1856 for £450 to Henry Dangar, a surveyor and highly successful pastoralist who lived at Grantham, a vast and ornate sandstone mansion at Potts Point.
Samuel Hordern of the dynastic retailing family bought it next in 1898, when the property was known as Treveallyn. In 1918 Hordern’s executors sold it to Marion Orchard, the wife of merchant jeweler, Richard Beaumont Orchard.
Mrs Orchard held it for just 15 months before selling to Hugh Samuel Paterson, a builder of Darlinghurst, who disposed of it five months later in 1920 to Dr Pierro Francis Fiaschi who held it for 32 years.
In 1946, Dr Fiaschi reduced the land holding by selling the westerly half of the land fronting the lower New Beach Road portion.
Dr Fiaschi’s father, Dr Thomas Fiachi, lived at the house for some years when not supervising his vineyards in the Hawkesbury region. For three decades, Thomas Fiachi was an honorary surgeon at Sydney Hospital. A bronze statue of a boar (named “Il Porcellino”), set outside the hospital on Macquarie Street, remembers him. Given in 1968 by his daughter, Machesa Torrigiani, it is a replica of the original statue in Florence, Thomas Fiachi’s birthplace. In 1952, the administrator of Piero Fiaschi’s estate sold Craigholme to Walter Raymond Ewing and Emily Francis O’Leary.
In 1963 Craigholme sold to the Paynter family of the leading construction company, Paynter Dixon.
The Paynters restored the house and made major improvements including landscaping the gardens and building a swimming pool and a garage.
A year or so later in 1967, Craigholme was bought by Brigadier General John O’Brien who continued the preservation and restoration of the house, as well as extending the garage.
In 1973, Craigholme sold to Leon Punch, a New South Wales politician, the NSW Deputy premier (1975-1975), and Minister of the Crown in the cabinets of Sir Robert Askin, Tom Lewis and Sir Eric Willis. Punch was a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly for 26 years from 1959 until his retirement in 1985.