Collette Dinnigan may be coming home but Sydney market is too hot

Fashion designer Collette Dinnigan and husband Bradley Cocks are scouring Sydney’s east for a city bolthole.

Collette Dinnigan inside the Golf House apartment. Picture: Hugh Stewart

Fashion designer Collette Dinnigan and entrepreneur husband Bradley Cocks are scouring the eastern suburbs for a city bolt-hole, but worry Sydney city’s real estate market is too hot.

Fresh from returning from a “nomadic” life in Italy for the past year and purchasing a lavish rural estate in the NSW Southern Highlands, Dinnigan wants a city cottage for a few days a week but her rural holding will be the family’s main residence, given the children will be educated at local schools.

“We are still looking to buy something in Sydney; it’s a very difficult market though,” she says.

“At the end of last year when we came back from Italy it (the property market) was too hot.”

Dinnigan wants something “charming” such as a cottage in Sydney. “We loved living in Watsons Bay, or we want Paddington or Woollahra — it’s easy for schooling and walking to work. It’s nice to have an area that I know, I have known that Paddington area for 20 years,” Dinnigan told The Weekend Australian.

Ideally Dinnigan wants a two or three-bedroom cottage with the potential to be refurbished. “But I don’t like modern refurbishments. I want quality and authentic, rustic, charming appeal.”

She would also consider a boat house and will assess the new purchase on a case-by-case basis.

Meanwhile Dinnigan and Cocks have listed their Milton residence on the south coast seaside town of Mollymook but will retain their Milton farm.

She says there has been plenty of buyer interest in the four-bedroom, two-bathroom property since it was listed with price expectations of $2.95 million earlier this month.

Earlier this week, Dinnigan and Cocks were busy moving to their new Southern Highlands property, Springfield Farm at Avoca.

The 8ha property has five bedrooms and a three-bedroom groundskeepers’ cottage. It was on the market for $4.75m.

The Southern Highlands move is a first for the couple, who sold their Watsons Bay property for about $9m last year through McGrath agent Dominique Ogilvie and former McGrath agent Ben Collier.

“We love the (Southern Highlands) property, it’s got very good bones, we will live in it first before we do any renovations,” Dinnigan.

“I will make it very feminine, at the moment the gardens are very ‘parterred’.

“I want to add more romance and more whimsy to it and make it slightly more hidden and enchanting, not bold and masculine.”

Dinnigan would like to do more interior design work, particularly hotels, fresh from her success designing the interiors for the Golf House apartments in Surry Hills as well as the interiors for the Bannisters By The Sea resort on the NSW South Coast.

All the apartments in the seven-level Golf House project, being developed by the Spanos family, have sold off the plan