Loui Nelken

Cloyne, the landmark Toorak residence, has been listed for sale through Sotheby's International agents Greg Herman and Robert Curtain.

The five bedroom, five bathroom Harold Desbrowe-Annear-designed house, with prominent port corchere, last sold in 2011 at around $3.5 million.

It now comes with a $4.8 million asking price.

Cloyne is one of the few substantially intact homes designed in the 1920s by Harold Desbrowe Annear.

It was built at 611 Toorak Road, Toorak in 1926 for Louis Nelken, reputedly a former Royal family butler, who married into the establishment Baillieu family. He was a director of Australian Knitting Mills.

Louis Nelken married Lesley Chrystal Madden, the daughter of chief justice Sir John Madden, in 1921 dressed "in girlish frocking of white satin with georgette over-scallops and a bodice strewn with pearls."

Brother Guy Madden did the giving away, and a handful of relatives saw the knot tied in the Madden dame's Cliveden flat parlour. The party then motored to the Alexandra Club.

There were ads in 1930s suggesting they were off to Upper Macedon with the furniture up for sale.

They finally left Cloyne with a swell party in 1955 attended by members of the Victorian establishment families, Baillieu, Hordern, Myer, Manifold, Chirnside and also the Dekyvere's from Sydney.

The couple moved to Amesbury on Domain Road, South Yarra and he moved after her 1963 death to Marne Street, South Yarra.

Source http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/forward-planning/advice-and-hot-...