Bishopscourt (former Greenoaks), Greenoaks Avenue, Darling Point — Gothic Revival mansion associated with Thomas Sutcliffe Mort and Edmund Blacket; Anglican archbishops’ residence from 1911.
Bishopscourt, at Greenoaks Avenue, Darling Point, began as a two-storey sandstone cottage called Percyville, built about 1841 for ironmonger Thomas Woolley. In 1845–46 merchant and entrepreneur Thomas Sutcliffe Mort leased then purchased the cottage and its estate (about 2.8 hectares). With architect John Frederick Hilly he enlarged it into a gentleman’s residence renamed Greenoaks. From 1859 Edmund Blacket — Mort’s friend and the colony’s leading Gothic Revival architect — added the definitive academic Gothic fabric, including the celebrated picture gallery and porte-cochère, creating what heritage assessments still rank among the finest Gothic picturesque houses in New South Wales.
Mort was a major colonial businessman (wool, shipping, Mort’s Dock, refrigeration, AMP) and a church patron who gave land for nearby St Mark’s, Darling Point. Landscape gardener Michael Guilfoyle helped form Greenoaks’ romantic sloping gardens from 1849, drawing plants from Guilfoyle’s Exotic Nursery at Double Bay. After later private ownership and subdivision, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney bought the house in 1910–11 as the Archbishop’s official residence and renamed it Bishopscourt. Architect Leslie Wilkinson remodelled parts of the complex in 1935. The property is State Heritage listed; it has been in private ownership since the Diocese sold it in late 2015.tt.