Sandringham Display Home in Melbourne

To our knowledge Eden Brae have not built a Sandringham in Sydney. In fact, Eden Brae do not have the Sandringham on display which makes it very hard to visualise the design. Perhaps this explains why no one has built one!

Eden Brae source many of their designs from RSS Design Studio – a Melbourne based design company. The Sandringham design is also built by Porter Davis – a Melbourne based builder. They use the name 'Somerville'. It seems that Eden Brae and Porter Davis license a number of RSS Design Studio layouts eg. The Waldorf.

Porter Davis have the Sandringham on display about 50 minutes north of Melbourne CBD. Today we travelled to Melbourne for a couple of days at the Australian Open and decided that we should take the opportunity to inspect the display home ahead of our contract meeting with Eden Brae.

There are a couple of minor differences between the standard layouts used by Eden Brae and Porter Davis. For example Porter Davis runs the staircase in the opposite direction to Eden Brae. Overall though the Porter Davis layout was very similar to what we were expecting. The void over the rear living space is a stunning feature! We also loved the upstairs layout – the size of the living space and bedrooms which is very well suited to our family.

Overall it was definitely worth the visit and confirmed that we are heading in the right direction.

Entrance Hallway: The Porter Davis layout has the staircase running in the opposite direction.

End of entrance hallway looking into kitchen & living space

View of Dining/Living from Kitchen

Upstairs living space

The void is probably the key feature of the Sandringham layout

Confusion with Facade

Sent an email to Eden Brae today. Ever since our tender presentation in November, our chosen facade has been referred to as 'Long Island' not 'Hampton' as per previous discussions. We referred to the initial email and photo that we had sent to Eden Brae's sales representative that did not appear to have a balcony despite Eden Brae now telling us that the facade would have a balcony. It didn't make sense. We were assured that we would love the 'Long Island' facade.

Over the christmas New Year break, SJ did some digging and worked out that Long Island is in fact a different facade. Both the Hampton and Long Island facades are from Porter Davis in Victoria which has the same design partner as Eden Brae – RSS Design Studio. We requested the Hampton facade from Porter Davis, which Eden Brae agreed to provide in early 2016.

Both Long Island and Hampton are hampton-style facades but Long Island has a balcony and Hampton doesn't. To make things even more confusing, the Porter Davis site now promotes a facade called New England which looks very similar to the Hampton but applied to different floor plan/s. In fact, it looks like they might even use different names for the same facades across difference ranges.

The Hampton facade. Image sourced from Porter Davis website.

The Long Island facade. Image sourced from Porter Davis website.

The New England facade which looks very similar to the Hampton facade.
Image sourced from Porter Davis website.

So I sent an email to Eden Brae today ahead of our contract meeting at the end of the month. Hopefully we can sort it out before their design team starts on plans and elevations. The big lesson here is – check, double check and keep on checking. Hopefully the promise of the facade doesn't turn out to be a facade.