Glenhurst Gardens

The site was originally occupied by Glenhurst, an Italianate harbourside villa built in 1878 for the solicitor George Evans, on one of the twenty original villa allotments laid out across the peninsula in the 1830s. In 1912 the land was acquired by the builder William Stuart, in whose family it remained until the post-war redevelopment. By the late 1950s the Victorian house had reached the end of its life, and the grounds were ripe for the kind of redevelopment that was then reshaping the whole of the inner-eastern harbour: demolition of the old villa, retention of the gardens, and the insertion of a substantial new apartment building carefully arranged around the surviving mature plantings.

The new building was designed by the architect Stössel, with the first residents moving in during 1959. At completion it was reported in the Sydney press as the largest home unit block under construction in Australia. Eleven storeys of apartments are set back from the street behind the mature garden, with a long driveway sweeping down the slope toward the water. The plan is unusual for its period: every unit faces the same way, toward the harbour, and is reached from a long single-loaded ambulatory rather than the ordinary central corridor — a deliberate move to give every apartment the view, the light and the cross-ventilation that the site allowed.

A transition from villa to strata

Glenhurst Gardens belongs to a short list of peninsula buildings that mark the transition from the nineteenth-century villa landscape to the modern apartment landscape without losing the garden setting that had made the area valuable in the first place. Where later developments on the waterfront took the hill, terraced it and built to the boundaries, Glenhurst Gardens held the original tree canopy, kept the front setback generous, and put its density quietly into the interior of the block. Residents of the period recall the site as substantially its own garden — a point of difference that has become rarer as the surrounding parcels have been more intensively redeveloped.

Who lives there

For more than sixty years Glenhurst Gardens has attracted a particular kind of Darling Point resident: downsizers from the great houses of the peninsula, and long-tenure owner-occupiers who arrived in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and never left. The estate's turnover is unusually low even by the standards of the postcode. Apartments reach the public market infrequently; the majority of trades happen quietly, often between existing residents and their extended networks. The building is understood locally as one of the peninsula's most stable residential communities, held by families who appreciate the scale of a 1958 plan and the garden setting that surrounds it.

The building today

The estate's architectural fabric is substantially original. The building retains its period façades and much of its internal planning; the gardens are maintained to a standard appropriate to their age and setting. For visitors the building is essentially invisible — the street-facing frontage is discreet, and the water frontage is seen only from the harbour. From the water, though, Glenhurst Gardens reads clearly as what it is: a considered piece of mid-century harbour building, slotted into the older tree canopy of the peninsula, and kept in substantially the condition of its first decade.

It is the building that best records what the peninsula did with its Victorian inheritance — subdivided, but not wasted.