308-314 Stanmore Road, Petersham

Boutique Airbnb in former Petersham fire station to fetch $10 million

Jenny Brown|Apr 26, 2022

The shape of the rouge-painted brick building tells most of the story. It’s a big old fire station on Stanmore Road in Sydney’s Petersham.

In 1886 it was the first piece of dedicated infrastructure built by the new Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the professional entity formed to take over from volunteer or insurance company brigades.

You need to picture horse-drawn fire carts, brass bells clanging, thundering out of those three wide doorways.

Originally known as the Marrickville Fire Station, it was also the first to be permanently manned and needed bedrooms in boarding-house quotas.

It is currently for sale at a quoted price of $10 million-plus.

This is not the first time the 27-room brick structure on an 891-square-metre corner site of the inner city has been on the open property market since the impressive and renamed Stanmore Fire Station ceased operation in 1991.

It has been sold and resold over the past decades, taking on various different functions in the process, including that of box factory, piano-roll manufacturer, private home and, with glass-fronted pool, commercial kitchen, conference room and 13 rentable hotel rooms, is now being offered in its current iteration as a boutique Airbnb operation.

308-314 Stanmore Road, Petersham — The building now operates as a successful BnB. Photo: Dean Richter

Colliers marketing agent James Cowan says that, while the set-up and furnishings being sold as part of the package would allow a new owner to walk in and almost immediately pick up on the hospitality operation, he believes it’s more likely to become a restaurant or commercial offices.

“There’s a lot of versatility in the building, but I just feel there is now a strong demand for offices in striking landmark buildings like this because people just don’t want to go back to working in ordinary partitioned city offices,” he says.

“COVID has shown that people want new facilities that are unique and different. They want something that gets them excited about going to work.”

After converting it to a private residence and putting in the pool, Sydney builder Scott Feneck sold the heritage-listed station in 2006 because, Cowan says, “with 27 rooms he found it just too big for a private residence”.

Until recently, the vendors ran it as the Hotel Petersham Fire Station Paradise. Andy Van Bang Tran and Amy Thi Lan Nguyen bought it in 2019 for $7 million-plus. Now, as Vietnamese-based hospitality operatives, they have decided to put their focus back on their homeland market.

Cowan says that, while the pair had considered the potential of mixing up the use of the building with perhaps a florist, a restaurant, residential conversion or as an office headquarters, “ultimately they feel a new buyer will be able to realise the uplift in value quicker than they can”.