Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch re-list their Bronte house

Lachlan Murdoch, the former Bronte-loving media tycoon, and his model wife, Sarah, have relisted their Bronte house for sale.

Christies International has the Murdochs' redundant Bronte house on its books, presumably at less than the $13.5 million initial asking price sought in late 2009.

There is no price indication of the website listing.

The house was recently rented to actor Toni Collette while she undertook renovations to her hillside house.

It was an unsolicited bid in April 2005 that secured the $7.75 million house above Bronte Beach as the Murdochs’ base for their return to Australia from New York.

Photos of the house had been emailed to their New York office by News Ltd property officer Steve Payne, and the couple inspected it on brief trips to Australia.

It was bought from Graham Ford, the Bronte Surf Club president, who built it in 2001.

The Murdochs had been keen for the cosmopolitan beach strip, which represented a change from the Opera House vista from Point Piper where the couple had sold their four-level harbourfront for $20.8 million in March 2005, having paid $12 million in 1999 to the mining magnate Robert Friedland.

With too many stairs and too little grass, family patriarch Rupert Murdoch noted on his first inspection of the Wolseley Road Point Piper house that it was unsuitable for small children in 1999.

It’s likely Le Manoir, Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch's $23 million Georgian estate in Bellevue Hill, will become the couple's permanent base. But no development application has been publicly lodged since its late 2009 purchase nor since they spent $2.63 million on a property next door in February this year, which added 1,049 square metres to their initial 4,097-square-metre hillside purchase.

Le Manoir had previously traded at $26,000 in 1956 when bought by the French government from May McDonald, the New Caledonian-born widow of solicitor Roy McDonald, who was the founding president of the Hydroponic Society of Australia.

Woollahra Library records indicate its design for the McDonalds was by Copeman and Lemont after the land was hived off the 1919 Rocky Park subdivision undertaken by jeweller Melen Myers.

In the meantime the Murdoch couple continue their two-year lease on Coolong, the Vaucluse beachfront residence of expats Ivan and Marina Ritossa, in early 2010.

It's the house the Murdochs wanted before buying Le Manoir, which was unencumbered and unrenovated, for $23 million when they outbid nine other parties in November 2009.

In  2008 Coolong set the then Sydney residential record, with Allco founder David Coe securing $45 million from Ritossa, the global head of foreign exchange at Barclays Capital, through estate agent Bill Bridges and McGrath agent Hamish Robertson. 

The record Sydney house sale hit $53 million last year in Point Piper.

The Murdoch rental house with private beach dates back to Sir Alexis Albert, from the Boomerang music songbook family, who built on the 4,100-square-metre block in 1936.