From the street, 20 Heyington Place in Toorak looks like a well-preserved 1930s manor house. Red brick facade, manicured gardens, exactly what you would expect from one of Melbourne’s most expensive streets. Walk up the driveway and it still looks like a standard, albeit immaculate, stone parking bay. Then someone hits a button on a remote control, and the ground opens up.
The property went viral recently after Melbourne-based content creator Morgan Waterhouse posted a walkthrough that has since been watched millions of times, and it is easy to see why. The hydraulic tilt hatch lifts the paved driveway clean off the ground, revealing a concrete ramp that drops straight down into a fully lit underground tunnel and into an eight-car basement garage. It is, by any reasonable measure, a Batcave.
The house sits on a 2,043-square-metre allotment at 20 Heyington Place, Toorak, and was originally designed by architect A. Mortimer McMillan around 1933. The owners engaged architect Stephen Jolson and builder Anthony Larne Constructions to carry out the transformation, with landscape designer Paul Bangay responsible for the gardens. The property most recently carried a price guide of AUD$34 million to AUD$37.4 million, roughly $35 million USD at current exchange rates.
Above ground, the house has been restored and extended with the kind of detail that takes years and a very large budget to execute properly. The ground floor opens with a grand reception room featuring an ornate custom fireplace, a formal dining room with diamond leadlight bay windows, and a billiards room with a black-felt table and a custom wet bar fitted with dual Vintec wine fridges. Oak timber floors and custom stone surfaces run throughout.
The main living area has floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors that retract fully to open onto the terrace, an integrated fireplace with an electronically retractable television built into the wall, and gallery-style spotlights installed specifically to display a large collection of fine art and paintings. The kitchen runs a matte-black island bench with an integrated sink, custom dark cabinetry, Miele ovens, and a Pitt stove configuration where the gas burners sit flush within the stone benchtop. Behind that is a full butler’s kitchen wrapped in white stone and marble with its own central island, used for larger scale entertaining.
The four bedrooms and five bathrooms are upstairs, fitted and finished to the standard the rest of the house sets.
Then there is the basement. Beyond the eight-car garage, the lower level was built as a fully soundproofed private compound. There is a home theatre and rumpus room with modular sectional seating, a high-end sauna, a steam room, and a fully mirrored home gym. The gym includes a rectangular glass viewing window built into the ceiling that looks directly up through the water of the swimming pool above, which is one of those details that sounds like something from a film set and turns out to be real.
The property is no longer on the market, but it has re-entered the public conversation following the viral video, and it sits alongside a small number of Australian homes that have redefined what the term private compound actually means.