From the Editor: Saving Double Bay

A remarkable, yet unremarked upon, change has taken place in the Eastern Suburbs in the past 20 years, creeping across the neighbourhood almost unnoticed. The change is in the power balance of the area.

It used to be that the rich and the influential of the East lived in the pocket between Point Piper and Paddington.

These were areas where big, stately homes were owned by power-brokers and captains of industry, fashion mavens, media heavyweights, artists and bankers with fat superannuation-fund bonuses in their back pockets. But gradually over the years this set has moved east to the coast. 

The once working-class beach strip from Bondi to Coogee has been colonised by the rich, the cool, the powerful, the influential, the keepers of the annual bonus. Decision-makers now live in cliff-hugging houses with Pacific Ocean views.

The stately houses of the bayside villages remain, quietly stoic, but it’s around Bondi where the real estate prices are “shooting the lights out” as agent-to-the-top-end-of-town, Peter Starr, put it in this magazine recently. The power has moved bayside to beachside.

Double Bay is arguably the suburb to have lost the most in this shift. What was once the home of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful, with a thriving retail and food scene, it lost its cool when Westfield Bondi Junction opened in 2004, followed by the GFC hitting hard in 2008.

Efforts have been made to bring the Bay back, and our story Saving Double Bay, ponders whether those efforts have been successful.