Australia’s best homes: Our top homes in NSW, Vic, Qld and SA for 2022

From waterfront mega mansions to impossibly angled abodes, from the tiniest pads around to sustainable marvels, these are Australia’s greatest homes.

We gave ourselves the task of finding Australia’s greatest homes.

What makes a great home in 2022?

While the mega mansions that sit prominently on billionaires’ row in affluent suburbs certainly capture our attention with their record breaking real estate sales, how do they fare against environmentally-friendly homes or even tiny homes at the very extreme end of that spectrum?

Of course, we will always be in awe of the architectural grandeur of residential estates that represent vast wealth and a life that is so foreign to most of us, but is that reason enough to give them top billing in our exclusive list of Top Homes?

Finder.com.au founder Fred Schebesta in his Coogee Castle, which features on the list of NSW’s Top 50 Homes. Picture: John Appleyard

With our panel of experts, from architects, to designers, real estate agents to our colleagues, we set ourselves the monumental task of picking, for 2022:

+ the Top 50 Homes in NSW

+ the Top 50 Homes in Queensland

+ the Top 50 Homes in Victoria, and

+ the Top 50 Homes in South Australia

Both metropolitan and regional areas have a plethora of historic homes and architecturally significant abodes, making the decision of which homes to keep in the Top 50 lists all the more complicated.

Bizarre Yarraville home for sale. Estate agent Huss Saad inside the home with the functioning Hills Hoist chandelier. Picture by Wayne Taylor

It’s our second crack at putting the list together, we last did in 2020, such as NSW’s Top 50 Homes of 2020.

Ultimately, while our team of experts discussed the merits of each home endlessly, we came to the realisation that, as a society, our definition of what makes a great home has changed significantly in the past couple of years.

Casuarina’s incredible Spaceship house.

Covid has put the spotlight squarely on our homes in respect to creating spaces where we can live, work and even feel like we’re on holiday when the option to travel is temporarily suspended, perhaps now has become onerously expensive.

Architects have largely embraced this new direction, delivering homes with oversized bedrooms and ensuites, large indoor/outdoor entertaining areas and hotel-inspired styling to meet the resort brief.

Mandalay’s Chesapeake Estate features on Queenslands Top 50 Homes list.

Sustainable homes have also come a long way, both in terms of design and homeowners’ resolve to build a home that does not cost the earth.

Low-impact and high performance building materials are key to an eco-design, and you’ll be amazed by how some of the homes included in our top 50 have met this criteria.

Grab your local metro News Corp newspaper on Saturday November 12 as we showcase our top 50-to-26 homes for each state.

Then on Sunday, grab your News Corp paper as we count down 25-1 in each state. It will also feature from online at from 5am, Sunday, November 12 at top50homes.com.au

The Lozenge is rated as one of South Australia’s Top 50 Homes.

In our office, there was fierce debate about which homes qualified to be on this list and of course this is such a subjective topic.

Inevitably you may agree or completely disagree with the experts on our panel, but either way we welcome your discussion at: top50homes.com.au.