Leonard French windows at Vaucluse's Loch Maree: Title Tattle
Loch Maree, the latest Vaucluse harbourfront listing with ambitious $30 million expectations, comes with very special 1970s Leonard French stained-glass windows.
It offers colourful views across the tennis court towards Vaucluse Bay.
The window is a two-metre by eight-metre stained-glass feature window behind the main staircase.
It was undertaken by Leonard French in a similar style to his windows in the Arts Centre of Victoria and the Australian National Library.
There are several other smaller complementary stained-glass windows throughout the now contemporary house.
An update – the only one since its original incarnation in the late 1970s – was undertaken for the current vendors, the Saville family.
It was Gordon Barton, the late business entrepreneur, who had the 1970s house built - with stone floors quarried from a 14th-century convent in France by Burgundian monks - along with the Leonard French stained-glass feature windows.
The cul-de-sac residence on a 2311 square metre block comes with self-contained boathouse with slipway.
It's been offered by Michael Pallier at Sydney Sotheby's International Realty in conjunction with Bob Guth at Bradfield Cleary.
It last traded at $4.75 million in 1993 when bought from Gordon Barton, the entrepreneur who started Interstate Parcel Express Company (IPEC) while still studying at university.
It was listed in the early 1990s after Gordon Barton and his wife, Mary Ellen, decided to remain and retire in Europe.
The original Loch Maree – which up to the 1950s had been a private girls' school that once hit the headlines when a raw milk enteritis scare broke out – changed hands when society photographer Joe Fallon purchased the site.
Fallon's visitors to the then house included Prince Philip, whom he'd met in 1946 as a naval officer.
Prince Philip occasionally visited the historic limed-redwood boathouse situated next to the now heated harbour's edge pool.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported two unofficial visits by Prince Philip to Fallon's house in 1954.
On one, he slipped out of Government House to a private pool-side party, where "a gramophone played Hawaiian music" and 50 guests danced until 11pm. Kitty Kelley's controversial book The Royals mentioned Prince Philip's visits.
Fallon later subdivided the property and sold a large waterfront to the diamond merchant Albert Joris. Joris in turn sold it to Gordon Barton in 1966, who remained in Morella Place, Castle Cove, until the Michael Dysart-designed residence was completed in 1972 at a cost of $280,000. They Barton couple moved into the boatshed when they renovated the big house.
"It had a beautiful boatshed which had a magical quality," Mary Ellen Barton recalled in the late 1990s.
"It was the perfect love nest. Gordon and I moved in there when we renovated the big house and rather wondered why we weren't living in it permanently," she said.
In the 1970s the Fallon main house, which had been bought by Barton from Fallon's widow, Desiree, disappeared.
