Vaucluse is close to an even split. Just under half the homes here are separate houses and four in ten are flats or apartments, so a job in this suburb is as likely to be a whole-house bathroom as a unit.
Which one it is changes the approvals, the access and the program, before anyone picks a tile.
What is different about renovating in Vaucluse
Houses and apartments, roughly half each
The 2021 Census counted 3,792 private dwellings in Vaucluse: 48.7 percent separate houses, 40.4 percent flats or apartments and 8.4 percent semis and terraces. We build in both. In a house there is no owners corporation, so the work starts once you sign, and the constraint is the family living around it. In the apartment blocks, most of them on New South Head Road and Old South Head Road, the owners corporation sets the rules and bathroom work needs a registered by-law before a trade turns up.
Sites on the peninsula
Vaucluse sits on the South Head peninsula with the harbour on one side and cliffs falling to the Tasman Sea on the other, all of it Hawkesbury sandstone. Homes here are built up and down that fall, and the material clients most often want is the one that is hardest to move: natural stone arrives in full slabs, and a curved island, a floor-to-ceiling splashback or a marble bathroom wall needs whole pieces rather than offcuts. We work out the route into the house before we price the stone, not after it is cut.
The water on both sides also puts Vaucluse inside the marine corrosivity categories in AS 4312, which is a reason to specify tapware, fixings and hardware for the environment instead of picking them out of a catalogue.
Heritage, and which council you are in
Vaucluse is split between two councils. Most of it is Woollahra, the ocean edge is Waverley, and they publish different development controls. Under Woollahra LEP 2014 the suburb has one heritage conservation area, the Bell Street neighbourhood, a run of one and two storey late Victorian weatherboard and corrugated-iron cottages where the controls protect the streetscape. Vaucluse House on Wentworth Road is on the State Heritage Register. That mostly bears on the outside of a building, but if your home is a listed item or sits inside Bell Street, check with Council before the scope grows past the kitchen and the bathroom.
This is the part we carry. Thirty years and more than 1,000 Sydney projects, run by the family that owns the business. We price the job as one fixed number, sequence the stone and the trades so the rest of the house stays liveable, and hand over the waterproofing certificate at the end. Fine Touch Group holds NSW Builder Licence 151772C.
