Fifteen Eastbourne Road sits on one of Darling Point’s more exclusive pockets, and from the back garden it barely reads as a house at all — ivy has worked its way up almost every available surface of the red brick, curling round the chimneys and colonising the upper windows like the garden simply refused to stop. It’s undeniably romantic. It also raises an obvious question about what, exactly, is living in there with it. We’re going to go ahead and assume spiders. A great many spiders.
Known to its agents as “Kendall Lodge,” the house dates to around the 1920s and spent its last few years being fully reimagined by interior designer Tamsin Johnson and her husband, bespoke tailor Patrick Johnson, before selling in March 2026 for $21 million through The Rubinstein Group. Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, two car spaces and 892 square metres of exclusive cul-de-sac, with a marble-topped kitchen island, leadlight windows framing harbour glimpses, and enough ornate ceiling plasterwork to make the neighbours nervous. Median house prices in Darling Point sit around $9.1 million, which puts this one comfortably ahead of the curve before you even get to the ivy.
Once you’re through the genuinely lovely arched timber front door and past a red-white-and-navy striped stair runner — bold enough that we’d suggest a hand rail and a moment’s pause before attempting it after a second glass of wine — the kitchen delivers a rooster portrait mounted at eye level, a curious choice of wall art for a room whose entire purpose is cooking things that used to have feathers. The island bench, meanwhile, appears to have been built from a stack of individual marble slabs rather than one continuous piece, as though the stone ran out mid-pour and everyone simply agreed to call it a design choice.
The lounge doubles down on the mixed messaging: a fireplace flanked by the word “Because” on one side and, we’re told, “Effort” on the other, with what looks like the kitchen’s marble off-cuts propped up on display just above it. Upstairs, a large-scale artwork of an embracing couple hangs a little too intimately close to the stairwell for a family home, and a green sculptural piece in the sunroom is doing its very best impression of a balloon that’s given up on staying inflated. Downstairs, past a proper walk-in wardrobe and a marble bathroom that plays it commendably straight, there’s a turquoise clawfoot tub parked next to a sauna, which is either the most relaxing room in the house or the site of its most confusing decorating meeting. Twenty-one million dollars, an interior designer’s full attention, and somehow still room for all of this. Genuinely, we wouldn’t change it.
