Prestige Property: 92 Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill, NSW
Expansive, elevated family living in a blue-ribbon location.
Expansive, elevated family living in a blue-ribbon location.
A true entertainer’s dream, this newly complete home is a masterful study in modern luxury.
Here, in the sought-after address of Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill arrives a capacious, four-level, residence offering approximately 1000sqm of internal living space across 8-bedrooms, 9-bathrooms and a 6-car garage – with parking for a further three additional vehicles available on site.
Boasting flexible living and an elevated, contemporary palette driven by charcoal, chrome and white tones the Simon Hanson of Bureau SRH designed home offers elevated modern family living.
What is quickly decipherable is that no detail has been spared in the construction of the home, with a combination of Japanese tiling and European oak chevron parquetry underfoot, coupled with a professional gallery lighting system.
The ground floor sees the dining and living, which flows via floor-to-ceiling glass doors out to the landscaped gardens.
It’s here, a state of the art kitchen boasts integrated SubZero fridges, a Zip tap, Miele, Wolf and Ilve appliances arrives alongside a kitchenette.
Throughout the home there is eight bedrooms, all complete with ensuites that see Kohler branded fixtures, book-matched marble and bespoke joinery.
The master bedroom is found on the first floor with an expensive dressing room and opulently decorated ensuite. Also on this floor is an exceptionally large home office.
The top floor sees a parents’ retreat, as well as a large rumpus area for relaxing. The basement is complete with an expansive entertaining room, complete with wine cellar and billiards table, alongside a bathroom. Here, floor-to-ceiling glass doors open the space out into the garage complete with automated turntable. The basement to the first floor is serviced by private lift.
Built to entertain, the home offers plenty to be enjoyed, with the outdoor area replete with an outdoor kitchen, mini putting green, basketball court, gym, sauna, outdoor shower and magnificent swimming pool.
Further, the home is secured by CCTV, video intercom and code entry.
The residence is conveniently only moments Sydney’s most exclusive private schools, Bellevue Hill village, waterfront parks and Bondi Junction shopping and transport.
The listing is with D’Leanne Lewis (+61 419 676 667) of Laing+Simmons, Double Bay, EOI; lsdb.com.au
What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires
Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.
The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.
That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.
The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.
As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.
The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.
The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.
“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.
While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.
“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”
That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.
While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”