When Victor Evatt decided it was time to sell the family mansion — valued at up to $10 million — he opted for an unconventional approach.
“Want this property?” he wrote in black marker, on a sign staked in the front garden of Leuralla.
“I was going for a bespoke look I guess,” Victor said.
Not all his family members were particularly happy with his method.
“But then again, some people are not happy looking through a garden and seeing a bust of Vladimir Lenin,” Victor said.
Along with seven bedrooms, verandahs, function rooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, servants’ quarters with a Downton Abbey-like bell system, and gardens, the 2.2-hectare property in the Blue Mountains town of Leura comes with a sculpture of the Russian revolutionary.
Victor’s father, renowned defamation barrister Clive Junior Evatt, mounted the “slightly larger than life” ceramic Lenin torso high on a plinth in the front garden in 1983.
The next morning, the bust lay smashed to pieces.
“[Some] disgruntled locals decided they didn’t want to have Lenin along Olympian parade looking over them,” Victor said.
But his father, undeterred, pieced it back together and resurrected it with concrete.
“That’s why it still stands today, because it’s so hard to break,” he said.
“I don’t know whether the new owner will want it.”
Mansion once a toy museum
Another thing the new owner may not want is a giant model of the Matterhorn with toy train tracks running beneath it.
It’s one of the few remnants of Leuralla’s 40-year chapter as a toy museum.
Clive Junior was a keen collector of arts and antiquities, and filled the house with railway memorabilia, sculptures, dolls, model cars and more than 200 barbies.
The entire collection was auctioned off when the museum closed for the last time in 2022.
“The museum was really a way of keeping the house, but also sharing the house,” Victor said.
The extended Evatt family no longer has means to cover the maintenance of the expansive property.
“Really, the cost of maintaining it is just impossible,” Victor said.
“It’s got a strong history, and nobody wants to see that end — but it’s time.”
A haunted house?
Victor’s rich great-grandfather Harry Andreas had the house built for his family of four between 1910 and 1914.
The home was supported by a group of servants until the mid-1950, when it was handed to Victor’s grandfather.
From that point, Leuralla was visited as a weekender, and hosted notable musicians, artists and friends.
But some say an eerie whisper of the mansion’s original history lingers.
The first housekeeper, Sophie, lived at Leuralla for many years, and some say she never really left.
“Apparently many people over the years have seen somebody standing inside the house at the windows when there was nobody at the house,” said Victor.
He has never met Sophie, but many visitors say they have.
“When we were children, my father would turn off the electricity and run through the house like a ghost pretending to be Sophie and disrupt our sleep,” Victor said.
After owning the home for more than 110 years, Victor and his relatives would like to see one family tradition continue at Leuralla.
“There’s a wall in one of the rooms that has all the heights of children going back into the 1930s, of my siblings and my relatives — we’d like to see that chart continue with the next family,” he said.
Auction this month
The house is locally heritage-listed, but the property itself has 11 existing subdivisions, which Victor recognises would be attractive to a developer.
But he said ideally, the property’s future would be realigned to its original purpose.
“It’s a magnanimous house … [and] it has a special significance because it was a magical place for children to grow up,” Victor said.
” [We are] keen for it to go to somebody who’s going to put the time, and the care, and the love into it — that has been done to it for many generations.”
Leuralla will go to auction in June.
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