There are few Australian trophy homes that are worth more than the Point Piper property Elaine that sold earlier this year for a record $71 million, but the Fairfax family's Fairwater estate next door is certainly one of them.
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Whether that value is ever tested on the market remains unknown because Lady (Mary) Fairfax had stated publicly that she planned to bequeath the estate to the people of New South Wales when she died.
Following her death on Monday, aged 95, it remains to be confirmed if her beneficiaries plan to hold to that long-ago plan.
Fairwater and Elaine are significant landmarks not only because they are both set on two of the largest privately held harbourfront holdings in Sydney's most expensive suburb, but they have long stood as monuments to the newspaper dynasty that has owned them for more than a century.
Elaine was sold in April by John B Fairfax for $71 million to tech billionaire Scott Farquhar, ending 126 years of continuous Fairfax ownership.
Unlike Elaine, prestige agents say the heritage-listed Fairwater residence remains in far better condition and sits on a much larger parcel of about 8000 square metres, 14 per cent larger than next door.
Fairwater was built in 1882 for stockbroker Francis Edward Joseph after he bought the leasehold allotment from James White, of the pioneering Hunter Valley pastoralist family.
???The two-storey blond-brick residence on Seven Shillings Beach was designed by leading architect of the day John Horbury Hunt, with additions in 1910 by Manson and Pickering architects in the Arts and Craft style with a series of projecting bay windows and balconies.
???Records show that in late 1900, Sir James Oswald Fairfax paid 5350 pounds for the leasehold, and his son Sir Warwick Oswald Fairfax took sole possession of it in the 1960s, moving in permanently in 1968.
Lady Fairfax has owned it since Sir Warwick died in 1987, the same year her son Warwick Fairfax privatised the publicly-listed media company only for it to collapse three years later.
The Fairwater estate includes a number of protected mature trees that date back more than a century, including a Bunya pine, Port Jackson figs and silky oaks.
