Puberty Blues house sells

A HOUSE made famous by the Channel 10's ratings winner Puberty Blues has been sold.

Puberty blues

IT was bittersweet for Toni Bowden yesterday as she and her two brothers, Warren and Graham Callender, sold their parents' Cronulla home.

To them, it was full of memories as they came of age in this home near Cronulla's famous beaches. To the rest of Australia, it is Debbie's house, made famous by Channel 10's ratings winner, Puberty Blues.

Yet after the auction it was another Debbie who stood beaming on the front lawn as its new owner.

Debbie Sawtell and her husband Bill, who are renting in South Cronulla, needed 48 bids and $1,382,500 to win the house and made more than a few of the 80-odd Shire locals at the sale relieved to hear they plan to move in, not demolish.

Two-storey and red brick with white window frames, 4 Oaks St is a time capsule of the '70s, complete with mauve bath and basin, multi-hued mosaic tiles, and top-to-toe patterned carpet and wallpaper.

Eric Callender, who died last year at 91, was a house-proud builder, wallpaper hanger and painter, and his children recalled with amusement that he used to bring home wallpaper off-cuts so not an inch of wall was left without it.

The Puberty Blues set directors changed only one wall -- a virulent red fleck on gold had to go.

From an upper balcony there are glimpses of Pacific blue, but like so many older houses, it wasn't the view that was important but the sense of home within.

Toni Bowden, a Miss Sutherland Shire bikini contest winner in 1972, can laugh now about how she "did my Debbie moments here'' and said: "If the new owners' kids have half as much fun as we did, they
will love it.''

The property sold through Dax De Traubenberg of Ressler Property, Caringbah.

At Beverley Park, local government elections played second fiddle yesterday when former Sydney Lord Mayor Frank Sartor put his Carroll St home up for auction through Professionals Montgomery Kristina Lee.

The former Rockdale MP and Labor minister and his interior designer wife Monique bought the Carroll St house seven years ago for $845,000 and turned the five-bedroom, dual-office house into the centre of their business and family life.

Monique Sartor's touch is evident throughout, while the grassed backyard holds Will's Garden, where son William and his dad planted carrot seeds and watched a giant pumpkin grow.

The need for a base closer to the city prompted the proposed sale, but yesterday the house was passed in at $1.35 million.