Property of the week: 33 Hilltop Rd, Avalon Beach

There are no points for guessing why Peter Stutchbury labelled his Avalon Beach creation Treetop House as the elevated home sits seemingly suspended over the leafy peninsula suburb.

With mature spotted gums and casuarinas as a permanent backdrop framing Pittwater in the distance, the three-bedroom residence is a perfectly preserved early career example of the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal award-winner.

Finished in 1993, Treetop House was built just below an ancient ridge-line above picturesque Pittwater playing homage to its raw bushland setting and water views. The property has earned its architectural stripes, having appeared in various design publications including Architectural Digest celebrating Stutchbury for his visionary use of industrial materials, all while maintaining a deep connection to the landscape.

Vendors Ben and Kirsten Welsh, who work in the advertising and film industries, bought the Avalon home in 2018 after already experiencing life in a starchitect’s design.

“We used to live in a Bill Lucas house in Castlecrag and through being there, we really discovered how living in a home designed by a really good architect was something you had to experience. So when the kids grew up and moved out, we found ourselves looking at houses around Pittwater by Peter Stutchbury, Glenn Murcutt and Richard Leplastrier,” Ben said.

“It’s a magical house. One of the most amazing things is that you feel as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist once you’re in it, because you’re higher up than you would normally be. You’re up in the tree canopy on a hill so you get terrific views and a sense of isolation, but at the same time you can just walk to the shops.”

The aptly named Treehouse sits among the canopy.

Despite having fallen in love with the neighbourhood, the Welshes are leaving Sydney to be closer to family in Victoria. They have, however, found one savvy way to keep the memory of their preferred Northern Beaches suburb alive by recently launching their own drop, Avalon Wine Company.

Treetop House is anchored by a 6m vertical blockwork tower acting as a structural core grounding the entire property. Above this, a cantilevered timber platform forms the top floor main living level housing the everyday family zone opening to balconies on both sides and the lush treetops.

The house feels open to the elements thanks to the deep balconies.

“The house is a lesson in architecture. What’s incredible about a great building is not looking at it from outside, but looking at the world from within. That’s when you can really appreciate great architecture. Anyone can do an interesting design and stick it somewhere nice but with this place, because there are a lot of windows, every angle has something to look at that’s quite remarkable,” Ben says, adding that although the couple had done little to the Stutchbury design during their residency, they had introduced more than 1000 plants to the 1071sq m block.

“There’s a kind of tamed wildness to the planting and the environment, with big rocks and trees that are not all the same. We’ve been very careful not to create anything too formal.”

The material palette of Treetop House also includes interiors styled to suit the surrounding landscape including oiled tallowwood floors, polished plywood joinery and a Jarrah staircase.

In addition to the primary living space, kitchen and dining area, the upper level is also home to two bedrooms with a shared walk-in wardrobe and a full spa bathroom. On the middle level a separated main bedroom suite has an ensuite and built-ins while the lower level has a bonus multipurpose family room or home office with ensuite. All three floors are accessible by lift.

The house is close to Clarevill Beach, Long Beach, Taylors Point Wharf and Avalon Sailing Club as well as Angophora Reserve.

Treetop House has a price guide of $4.5 million and is on the market via private treaty through LJ Hooker Avalon Beach agents Thomas Mackay on 0429 236 879

Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.

Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.

Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.

Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.

Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.

“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.

Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.

In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.

Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.

Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.

Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.

In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .

The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”

Property of the week: 33 Hilltop Rd, Avalon Beach

The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales