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Adman David Droga and wife Marisa will build a new mansion on the Tamarama headland in Sydney’s eastern suburbs that uses bricks, tiles and sandstone from the now-demolished Lang Syne home they acquired for $45 million last year to form windbreaks around the concrete slab home.
New York-based Mr Droga, who grew up in Perisher Valley in NSW’s Snowy Mountains, has appointed Luigi Rosselli Architects to design a replacement to the 1924 red brick home on the windswept coastal promontory between Tamarama Beach and Mackenzies Bay.
“This house is to me a step ahead to the future,” Mr Rosselli told The Australian Financial Review on Thursday.
Sketch of the new home planned for David and Marisa Droga’s home on their Gaerloch Avenue, clifftop site in eastern Sydney’s Tamarama. Luigi Rosselli Architects
“What I’d like it to be is an example of reusing materials – we have to learn how to reuse the materials and do it as cleverly as we can.”
As they design a new home to replace the building that stood as a landmark for nearly a century to passers-by on Sydney’s famed Bondi-to-Bronte coastal walk, the owners and designer aim to create a house that better reflects its location and the environment.
Homes on the clifftop have long had to adapt to their surroundings. Late former owner Harry Griffiths designed an outdoor barbecue in the yard overlooking the cliff with wind breaks to protect cooked food from getting cold when it came out of the brick oven.
The new two-storey, six-bedroom house with a basement garage will have plants and lichens planted into gaps of the structures, over the roof and cascading over the balcony edges.
Render of the new house planned for the clifftop above the Tamarama Point. Luigi Rosselli Architects
Mr Rosselli declined to give a construction cost for the home, but said a cost of $10,000 per square metre was a “starting point”. He declined to give the size of the house. Mr Droga, the chief executive and creative chairman of ad agency Accenture Song, declined to comment.
The home is due to be completed sometime next year.
Materials from the now-demolished home are currently being stored on-site. Cleaning old bricks and reusing them came to the same total cost as buying new bricks, Mr Rosselli said.
“At this stage it’s still labour-intensive,” he said.
Mr Rosselli said the old home wasn’t up to the current standards of living.
“It was an impossible house,” he said. “It was a house done by somebody who must have been hating light, hating the view.”
Water-facing rooms had windows looking onto an enclosed verandah, rather than to the water directly, Mr Rosselli said.
“There was borrowed light and view and air through an enclosed verandah. The verandah had a set of windows looking towards the water. They were minute and badly framed in the wrong direction.”
The new design aimed to create a “sympathetic dialogue” between the house and its surroundings, with large windows framing ocean views, outdoor spaces and landscaped native plants, he said.
The Droga family has, since 2018, funded a scholarship for an Indigenous student to study architecture at University of Technology, Sydney. A graduate from the Droga Family Indigenous Architecture Scholarship will work with the Rosselli team on the project.
“In future, the home will also serve to promote the Droga Family Indigenous Architecture Scholarship and more,” Mr Rosselli said.
The property sits on 1088 square metres across three separate titles.
Mr Droga, whose former roles included creative director of agency OMON and creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi London, founded his own agency, Droga5, in 2006. In 2019 consulting giant Accenture acquired Droga5 in a deal valued at $US475 million, Forbes reported.
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