John Spender buys $3,975,000 Double Bay apartment after Headingley House sale

John Spender buys $3,975,000 Double Bay apartment after Headingley House sale
Jonathan ChancellorSeptember 15, 2015

Having sold Headingley House in Woollahra, John Spender QC is off to Double Bay.

He has paid $3.975 million to buy in Juliana Lim's Oceania complex on Bay Street, the Bay Residences , a 14 apartment complex designed by Kann Finch architects. The legal paperwork shows the lawyer transfered the home into joint ownership with wife Catherine earlier this month under 104B of the Duties Act.

Estate agency 1st City Hasemer & Caldwell.Eyles - Double Bay has one left.

Headingley, which was his diplomat father, Sir Percy Spender purchase from the Kater pastoralist family in 1949 for £11,676, fetched $13.1 million.

It was bought by New York fund manger Alwyn Heong who sold in his Rose Bay harbourfront Indah for $27.08 million to barrister Georgina Black, the partner of Graham Edwards, chief executive of the UK’s property giant Telereal Trillium.

The LJ Hooker Bill Malouf marketing says the 1880s Woollahra house had been redesigned by acclaimed architect Professor Leslie Wilkinson in the 1930s.

Spender, the dapper Queen's Counsel, who now does commercial arbitration, moved into the stunning Georgian-style Wellington Street residence in 1985.

While he was the Member of the House of Representatives for the seat of North Sydney - before Joe Hockey's election - he would occasionally take the trip from his eastern suburbs home to the lower North Shore electorate in his late father's white Rolls Royce.

This article first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph.

Jonathan Chancellor

Jonathan Chancellor is one of Australia's most respected property journalists, having been at the top of the game since the early 1980s. Jonathan co-founded the property industry website Property Observer and has written for national and international publications.

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