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The immense five-bedroom home is being sold by barrister Elisa Holmes SC and her family, who bought the property in 2020. "I was heavily pregnant with my second son when we first saw the house, and I fell in love with this big terrace and its incredible high ceilings from the minute I walked in," Ms Holmes said. "Just before we bought it, the home had been extensively renovated, it had actually been a well-known art gallery, and the owner did a full top-to-bottom renovation, right down to under house drainage and enclosing balconies to add bathrooms. "The location is fantastic, we're five minutes from Rushcutters Bay Park, with the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia right on our doorstep, and Potts Point just as close on the other side. "It's a lot of house for a terrace, and there's still more scope, there's a very large storeroom that could easily become another bedroom or a study. Every level has its own outdoor space, and the two separate entrances make it ideal for multi-generational living or a live-in nanny. "We love to entertain, and the outdoor kitchen and built-in pizza oven gets a great workout with our family of four. We love the location. I can walk to work from here and we're not planning to move far away, just to Woollahra." Originally from Adelaide, Ms Holmes who spent eight years practising in London, was appointed Senior Counsel in 2024 at Eleven Wentworth. She is a leading commercial and equity practice, a prominent figure in financial services, corporations and class action litigation, and is regarded as one of Australia's leading sports lawyers, sitting as an arbitrator on the National Sports Tribunal. The property is being taken to auction by Thomas Popple and Ashley Bierman of Ray White Double Bay, alongside co-agent Harriet France of Sotheby's International Realty. |
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Lawrence Hargrave was born in England on 29 January 1850, the son of John Fletcher Hargrave, an English barrister who became a NSW Supreme Court judge. Lawrence arrived in Sydney in 1866 intending to study law, but instead joined a circumnavigation of Australia at just 16, abandoning academia for a life of exploration. After an apprenticeship with the Australian Steam Navigation Company, Hargrave built his first vessel, the outrigger "Shark," in 1869, and famously caused a sensation on Rushcutters Bay in 1870 by "walking on water" using flap-soled boat shoes of his own design. His explorer's career included a shipwreck off New Guinea in 1872, an engineering role on an 1875 expedition to the Gulf of Papua, and a 400-mile journey up the Fly River in 1876 — expeditions that established him as a resourceful, in-demand explorer. In 1878, Hargrave returned to Sydney, married Margaret Preston Johnson, and settled into family life, eventually raising six children. He joined the Royal Society of New South Wales and worked as an assistant astronomical observer at Sydney Observatory until 1883, building adding machines to aid his research. His scientific curiosity turned increasingly to propulsion and flight. In 1882 he developed his "Trochoided plane" theory, drawing on the movement of fish and snakes to explain how wings might work. Inspired by bird flight, he built numerous experimental models and shared his findings freely with the Royal Society, refusing on principle to patent any invention. A family land windfall in the Illawarra in the early 1880s allowed Hargrave to resign from the Observatory in 1884. He used the funds to build three terrace houses in Rushcutters Bay, working from a workshop beneath one of them to pursue aeronautical research full-time, laying groundwork that would later prove crucial to the development of powered flight. |
