Bronte House

Above Bronte Gully, tucked behind the beach-road fuss, sits a Gothic cottage that looks like someone dropped a picture-book house into a subtropical garden. Bronte House at 470 Bronte Road is among the oldest surviving houses in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis began buying land at “Nelson Bay” (Bronte Beach) from 1836 and started a house about 1838, but financial crisis forced him to sell the unfinished property in 1843.

Barrister Robert Lowe and his wife Georgiana bought the estate and finished the house in 1845. Georgiana Lowe — artist, botanist and gardener — shaped the celebrated early gardens and left some of the earliest pictorial records of the house and district. The Lowes stayed only about four years before returning to England; Robert later became Viscount Sherbrooke. After several later owners, the Ebsworth family held the property from 1882 for three generations until sale to Waverley Council in 1948.

Waverley Council still owns Bronte House. It is leased to private tenants who maintain house and grounds, with occasional public open days. The property is listed on the NSW State Heritage Register.