A lone jackhammer is all that keeps a pre-COVID beat on the walk to Neil Perry’s Rosetta Trattoria on Harrington Street in Sydney’s The Rocks, pulverising Sydney sandstone to make way for a new block of luxury apartments on which work began pre-bust.

By the logic of then, the inhabitants of The Harrington Collection – “58 living spaces of unrepeatable significance” – would have flowed down the street and into Perry’s upmarket eatery as inexorably as those of Harry Seidler’s nearby Cove, part of a rising tide of gentrification in the once working-class suburb.