A loo with a view and no railings on ‘an impossible site’ in Sydney

Holland House in Sydney’s Middle Cove was as famous for its architecture as it was for a ballet performed on the cantilevered terrace that hovers 12 metres above rock and bush.

The cliff top home on an impossible site at 31 Rembrandt Drive was designed by one of Sydney’s most divisive architects, Neville Gruzman, and is now on the market for the first time in 40 years and with balustrades for safety.

“Gruzman was a Sydney sensualist,” said Tone Wheeler, who was among the first of dozens of architects to visit the first open house. He was referring to Holland House’s changing floor levels, its rich materials and the sunken lounge near a copper fireplace.

Inspired by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanese architecture, Gruzman was known for over-the-top mid-century homes. He catered to clients like the Hollands who liked to entertain, and weren’t afraid of the cost or making a big statement.

(Having confidence to sit on a toilet in front of a wall of glass helped, too.)

At 165 square metres, the three-bedroom home now being marketed by The Agency i s about 100 square metres smaller than most new builds.

The house, set on an 859-square-metre block, is not heritage listed, though it is included with other homes by Gruzman on Docomomo Australia Modern Register.

Gruzman, the mayor of Woollahra in 1996, was known for being litigious, initiating 30 cases in 40 years. After his death, fellow architects described him as a stirrer, and a man who made loyal friends and mortal enemies. Like the Sydney homes he designed, he was complex, unusual, and difficult to categorise.

Reviewing the Hollands new home in 1967 for Australian Home Journal, architect Basil Beirman wrote that its success on one of the most difficult sites he had seen gave his “jaded architectural palate a stimulating lift”.

Beirman loved everything, except the lack of railings. They “might be acceptable at three or four feet [a metre] above the ground, but [at] 30 or 40 feet was not.”

“Hand-rails might spoil the terraces aesthetically, and balustrades spoil the view. But if the owners share, even a little, my dislike of standing so high without any apparent safeguard, I don’t think it will be long before they do something about it,” he wrote.

Wheeler said Gruzman would take an idea and then push it to excess. Holland House’s design was “dramatic and relentless with the entire eastern wall covered in windows.”

Gruzman designed a dressing room for his wife Margot at their Darling Point home that was wall-to-wall mirrors.

The late architect Bruce Rickard, said every Gruzman design was different yet had several elements in common. “They have a beautiful spatial flow, the living areas all face north, and they are exquisitely detailed.”