Building
Bishopscourt
Greenoaks — the residence of eight Anglican Archbishops, 1911–2015.
Bishopscourt — known for its first half-century as Greenoaks — is the most substantial Gothic Revival residence to survive on the Darling Point peninsula. For one hundred and four years, from 1911 to 2015, it was the official residence of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney; eight successive Archbishops lived in the house. It was sold into private hands in late 2015.
The site began modestly. In 1841 the ironmonger Thomas Woolley built a small cottage on the hillside above the harbour, which he called Percyville. Five years later the property was acquired by Thomas Sutcliffe Mort — pastoralist, industrialist, founder of the first refrigerated meat trade between Australia and Britain, and one of the defining commercial figures of mid-nineteenth-century Sydney. Mort engaged the architect J. F. Hilly to enlarge and remake the house, which was completed between 1846 and 1849 and renamed Greenoaks.
Three architects across a century
Greenoaks evolved through three distinct architectural campaigns, each characteristic of its moment in Sydney building. Hilly's work of the late 1840s established the Gothic Revival composition that defines the house today: the steep gables, the pointed arched openings, the long parapeted elevations of golden sandstone. In 1859 the colonial architect Edmund Blacket — better remembered now for his ecclesiastical work at the University of Sydney and at St Andrew's Cathedral — was engaged to add the carriageway, the stables and the kitchens. The third architectural chapter came in 1935, when Leslie Wilkinson, the foundation Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney and the most influential Australian residential architect of his generation, added the western two-storey wing.
The result is a single coherent house assembled from a century of architectural decisions, each by a leading architect of the period it belongs to. Bishopscourt has been described as the finest Gothic Revival residence in New South Wales.
The Archbishops, 1911–2015
In 1910 the Anglican Diocese of Sydney acquired the property from the Langtree family, and in 1911 the first Archbishop took up residence under its new name, Bishopscourt. For the next one hundred and four years it was the home of the head of the largest Anglican Diocese in the country: a working residence, a place of formal entertainment, and from the 1930s onward an occasional venue for synodal and ecumenical gatherings. Eight successive Archbishops lived at the house across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
In December 2015 the Diocese sold the property and Bishopscourt returned to private hands. The estate continues to be held by a single owner, and the house and grounds — substantially as Hilly, Blacket and Wilkinson left them — are intact behind the long sandstone wall on Greenoaks Avenue.
Why the house matters
Bishopscourt is a record, in stone, of three of the most significant architectural careers in colonial and early-modern Sydney, applied across a century to one site. It is also the last great house on the peninsula to have spent the bulk of its life in institutional rather than private custody — a long tenure that has, paradoxically, kept the estate more intact than many of its private peers, which were vulnerable to the twentieth-century cycles of subdivision and remaking.