Myer family feuds over plan for neighbouring Sorrento beach houses
Myer family siblings Celia Burrell and Richard Shelmerdine are in a legal battle over her plans to build a $3 million beach house next door to his.
A shallow Sorrento bay that was once an unhappy home to almost 500 convicts and settlers in Victoria’s first, failed colony has become a beach house battleground between brother and sister in one of the state’s wealthiest families.
Celia Burrell and Richard Shelmerdine, siblings in Australian retailing dynasty the Myer family, are fighting in the state planning tribunal over Burrell’s plans to build a $3 million, three-storey beach house next door to her brother’s beach house, facing Sullivan Bay in Sorrento.
Sullivan Bay, in Sorrento, with the house and tennis court of Richard Shemerdine, Celia Burrell’s undeveloped property, and Martin Strode’s beach house side by side in the foreground.Credit: Eddie Jim
Both properties occupy an exclusive row of beachfront homes on land that was part of the historic Collins Settlement Site, where the British established a doomed colonial outpost in 1803.
Shelmerdine sold his sister the undeveloped property for $3.4 million in 2011, but is attempting to thwart her plans to build there, even though the dwelling has been approved by the Mornington Peninsula Shire Council.
Shelmerdine is seeking to overturn the council’s approval by an appeal in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
He has been joined in his cause by property developer Martin Strode, who also owns a multistorey beach house next door to Burrell’s land, on a property that he also purchased from Shelmerdine.
A render of the proposed beach house at 3080A Point Nepean Road, which has council approval but is being contested in VCAT by neighbours on either side.
Court documents show that Shelmerdine and Strode both argue that Burrell’s approved beach house is too bulky, exceeds the approved building envelope, is unsympathetic to the landscape and would require unacceptable destruction of coastal moonah vegetation.
