Cleveland House, Buckingham Street, Surry Hills

G’day, Charles Touma here, and today I’m on Buckingham Street in the magnificent Surry Hills to talk about a property that is not only the oldest building in Surry Hills, but also considered to be one of the original properties in Sydney. Back in 1823, Cleveland House was built on a very large parcel of land. The main house was built fronting Buckingham Street and outer buildings were built largely between Buckingham and what is now Chalmers Street. The house was built by a former convict, Daniel Cooper. Cooper had arrived in 1816 to Sydney from England as a convict but was pardoned in 1818, enabling him to build a business empire which included a pub, a store, and a shipping company, later including a brewery. His shipping company became a pioneer in shipping Australian wool to England and he soon established a large trading company called Cooper & Levey.

By 1823, he had the financial means to develop the property here on a 10 acre block. At the time, the property stood on its own with views over the city and Cockle Bay. He secured the land for £180 in 1819, and construction costs to build Cleveland House was estimated at £4000. Cooper and his wife left the property in 1831 having separated, and leased it to Joseph Weller and his family who had built a whaling business in New Zealand. In 1834, Andrew De Metz took the property over and turned it into the De Metz Ladies Academy, his daughters being teachers at the time. It had 17 pupils, all who were boarders, paying £70 per annum. An advert of the schooling claimed that “every attention will be paid to the health, comfort, religious and mental improvement.” The severe economic depression of the 1840s however forced the De Metz family to leave Surry Hills. In 1855 the Cleveland House estate was subdivided in to eight blocks, though the house and its outer buildings were kept together on one block. In the 1870s the outer buildings were turned into a factory making Bennett’s cordial and that business was eventually sold to Peach & Jones Bottle Merchants in 1896. Not long after that, Cleveland House was turned into a convent for nuns and a commercial laundry was built next to it.

Between 1988 and 1990 the outer buildings were demolished and redeveloped into a residential apartment building called Princes Gardens, with 103 units. In 1999, Cleveland House itself was placed in the New South Wales Heritage Register. Now I’ve been selling real estate in Surry Hills and Redfern for 20 years and in fact last weekend we sold a property right here on the old Cleveland House Estate established by Daniel Cooper, being apartment 79 at Princes Gardens. We sold it during lockdown last weekend for $1,185,000 via 57 private inspections when we also received six individual offers. I hope you enjoyed the brief history of the oldest house in Surry Hills. I’m passionate about this area and will continue to dig out other stories about these fantastic suburbs of Redfern and Surry Hills. My name’s Charles Touma, and my office on Thurlow Street is always open for you to come in and have a chat.