Toni Collette set to cop $900,000 loss as Bronte cottage renovation plans shelved

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Academy Award-nominated actor Toni Collette, the star of the TV series United States of Tara, and her musician husband, David Galafassi, are selling their hillside house at Bronte because the renovation rebuild costings defied property logic.

Their 1885 weatherboard cottage on a 750-square-metre block in Bronte Road cost $4.4 million in mid-2009. They’ve since obtaining rebuilding approval, but have opted not to proceed given the rebuild construction tender quotes are understood to have tallied about $4 million.  The official application with Waverley Council suggested its minimal revamp cost would be $2.5 million.

Set privately above the high side of the street, the four-bedroom house is one of the last remnants of the original Bronte Estate. Given the current top-end market conditions aren’t resplendent with sunshine, its McGrath Estate Agents listing agent Bethwyn Richards has given public estimates she expects the property to sell for about $3.5 million and that Collette and Galafassi are prepared to cop a $900,000 loss.

It’s one of three Bronte Road houses currently listed through McGrath. There are unconfirmed rumours the couple have bought elsewhere in Sydney.

The Bronte house was bought a month before the sale of their Bellevue Hill home for $6.35 million to Adelicia Dawson-Damer and her husband, Nick Harding through McGrath agents Ben Collier and James Dack. The bullish $6.34 million bucked the prestige property market's woes during 2009. The 1928 Spanish Mission-style cul-de-sac house, El Mio, cost $5 million in 2004 when sold by Patricia Power, who had expanded the house since she bought it in late 1998 from one-time Brambles director Emmett Hobbs and his wife, actor Sarah Pierce, for $2.655 million.

Before heading back to Los Angeles, Collette and Galafassi, parents of six-month-old son Arlo and three-year-old daughter Sage, recently stayed in Bronte but rented the redundant house of media tycoon Lachlan Murdoch and his wife, model Sarah, which is currently for sale through Christies International.