Zampelis family regain a crown with purchase of Mt Martha castle Glynt Manor
The historic gothic 1914 Mount Martha mansion Glynt Manor, briefly known as Demetri’s Castle, has been sold to the prominent Zampelis restaurateur family.
But the Zampelis family, who’ve operated more than 70 hospitality venues in Victoria since the late 1980s, including Cafe Greco, The Long Room, Lotus, Silk Road and Waterfront at Crown, have decided to lease out the property.
The Zampelis family snapped up the property for $3,399,000 – which represented a $900,000 loss in three years by the Commonwealth Bank in a mortgagee sale.
It had been initially listed by the vendors, hair and make-up artists Demetri and Lila Sideropoulos, at $6.5 million in 2010.
The nine-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansion was bought by the Greek couple in 2008 for $4.3 million from Michael Puttock and Diana Carr.
They then thoroughly renovated it into a family home and bed-and-breakfast on the SBS documentary Demetri’s Castle, a name that’s been abandoned by the new owners.
It sits on about 8,000 square metres, with views of Port Phillip Bay and the Melbourne lights in the distance. It was designed by Harold Desbrowe Annear as a single-storey farmhouse for the Henty family, descendants of Victoria's first European settlers.
It bears a similarity to another of his designs, Delgany at Portsea. Its later owners included the Buxton family from 1917 to 1983 when the then 31-hectare property featured sweeping lawns, orchards and farmlands that ran right to the edge of the bay.
In 1969 the family subdivided the property but retained the manor and two hectares of beautiful English- and French-inspired gardens.
In 1983 the property was sold to new owners, who restored the grand old manor and ran it as a tourism resort, naming it "Glynt By The Sea". It was again run as a bed-and-breakfast from the mid-1990s by the adventure travel pioneer Bill King.
Mark Callan and William Gilchrist bought the property in 1997 and commissioned Yarraville architect Hugh Basset to undertake some interior redesigns while the home's former gardener, Bob Barker, who started work at Glynt in the late 1920s, returned to restore the gardens.
The duo sold the property in 2000 for $2.35 million.
Last year the Sideropouloses indicated they were selling so they could pursue opportunities overseas, saying they didn't get attached to things. Geoff Smith from LJ Hooker Frankston sold last November, some four weeks after its scheduled October auction, and now has it up for rent.
ASIC documents indicate Smith was taking instructions from administrators of the holding company Mt Martha Landmark Pty Ltd.
The Zampelis Group owns seven restaurants/bars/cafes in the Melbourne area serving over 15,000 customers a week. Earlier this month The Age reported that Crown Casino faces a multimillion-dollar damages payout after Victoria's appeals tribunal found it breached a verbal agreement with Nick Zampelis to renew leases for his former riverside eateries.
The decision by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal heard Zampelis claimed former Crown owner Lloyd Williams and his two sons, Nick and John, told him the lease for the two venues, Cafe Greco and Waterfront, would be extended by at least five years.
Despite denials by Lloyd Williams, his sons and Crown management, VCAT senior member Alan Vassie decided a ''collateral contract'' did exist and ordered for damages to be determined by an independent assessor. A Crown spokesman Gary O'Neill told Fairfax Media it would appeal the decision.