Patricia Ilhan building her new future in Brighton

A semi-empty nest prompted Patricia Ilhan to put half of her Brighton beachfront property on the market — but one key thing is missing.

Patricia Ilhan has put half of her Brighton beachfront property on the market.

You know it’s time to downsize when you lose count of how many bathrooms you have in the house.

However many there were, Patricia Ilhan, widow of retail tycoon “Crazy John” Ilhan, didn’t need them as some of her four children started leaving the nest.

It prompted her to put half of her Brighton beachfront property on the market this week with an eye-watering $20 million-plus price tag.

And that was the half without the house. The buyer will be able to build a new house on the empty block.

Patricia Ilhan was married to the late John Ilhan. Picture: Josie Hayden

Ilhan knows how to take charge and find her own voice. When her husband died suddenly of heart disease in 2007, she raised her four children, all under the age of 10, at the Brighton home.

Looking out her bedroom window towards the Brighton Yacht Club, Ilhan says it’s time to move forward again.

She has made plans to demolish the Brighton mansion to build something “more suitable” as she marks her next chapter.

“We are selling the block next door and building a new house where we are.”

Ilhan found love again with partner of four years Chris Blackman.

She said they met many years ago when he was “just a dad” at her daughter’s school at Firbank.

“He was just the dad at school except his daughter would come over and sleep at my house every weekend, so I feel like I’ve helped raise her anyway.

“Then it was really the last four-and-a-half years that has been more getting to know him, not as just a dad but more as an intimate partner.

“It’s a bit like the Brady Bunch.”

Ilhan knows how to take charge and find her own voice.

The late John Ilhan.

Patricia and her former husband founded the Australian Food Allergy Foundation after discovering her third daughter Jaida had a life-threatening allergy as a toddler. She recently reached out to the parents of a Brighton Grammar boy who died following complications from anaphylactic shock.

“I’ve had to shoot her up with an epi-pen so many times to keep her alive,” Ilhan said of her own daughter. “We thought we were given this child for a reason and it was our duty to do something about it because at the time nothing was being done.”

Ilhan, Blackman and the remaining kids will move out for the two years it will take for the new house to be built.

But just how many bathrooms does the old Brighton pile have? Ilhan laughs: “Eleven, I think.”