The Brooklyn Park property at 46-50 Marshall Tce has a colourful history.
A historic Brooklyn Park property that served as a convent, orphanage and a Catholic schoolhouse looks set for redevelopment after being offered for sale for the first time in 40 years.
While a grand five-bedroom home dating back to the late 1800s has local heritage status and cannot be demolished, the sales listing for 46-50 Marshall Tce says there’s possibility to rezone it for commercial use.
The remainder of the expansive 4457sqm property, which spans four titles, “represents the ultimate blank canvas for the creative developer’’, the listing says, suited to luxury townhouses or mixed-use development.
It’s served as a convent, orphanage and a Catholic schoolhouse over the years.
It’s dated and in need of some TLC.
Vendor Martin Brennan, whose late parents bought the property four decades ago, said the home started out as a convent for the Salesian Sisters.
Before conversion to a family home, he said the building included a chapel – with stained glass windows above the entry door still bearing the initials SJB, in homage of Saint John Bosco.
The building later became a Salesian college, Mr Brennan said, where one of his brothers – who attended the school as a youngster some 20 years before the family purchased the property – received a “slap over the wrists by one of the nuns’’.
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A three-storey building at the rear of the property, long since demolished, was known as St John’s Boys Town, which records show was an orphanage but Mr Brennan said was used as the college boarding house.
Records also show the former building earlier operated as the St John the Baptist Home for Boys – which provided alternative accommodation for Catholic boys committed to the Boys’ Reformatory at Magill from 1898.
However, Mr Brennan said the Home, once described as an “institution for the education and training of uncontrollable boys’’, was on an adjacent site and was never on his parent’s property.
It’s on a huge 4457sqm block in the middle of suburbia.
It’s close to Adelaide CBD.
After his family bought the home, Mr Brennan said local clergy visited regularly and the residence became somewhat of a “24-7’’ drop-in centre for local youth.
“My mother was trained as a counsellor and … she just helped young people to navigate their way through life,’’ he said.
“There’s hundreds and hundreds of young people and families that knew our parents very well and would know the house very well.’’
With younger generations of the family not sharing the same attachment to the home, Mr Brennan and his siblings have reluctantly decided to sell.
He said the property would suit development for retirement living, with the home repurposed as an office and allied health space, to meet local needs.
“It’s going to be a bit sad (to sell) but you’ve got to be careful about growing too attached to things,’’ he said.
“It’s (a property that has) always been of service in some shape or form to the community.
“It would be good to see it repurposed and serving the community again.’’
Offers for the property, which is listed without a price guide with Ray White Henley Beach, close on May 4.
– Lauren Ahwan