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by Carrie LaFrenz

Behind a wrought-iron gate and sandstone walls in the thick of apartment-dense Darling Point sits Swifts, a building described by the Australian Heritage Council as "perhaps the grandest house remaining in Sydney". Castellated parapets and a porte-cochère give the building's exterior a touch of Gothic Revival; inside the style is resolutely High Victorian. In the entrance hall the coat of arms of the Lucas-Tooth family, the brewing magnates who built Swifts in the 1870s, hangs above a glorious fireplace that on a cold winter's day wraps its warmth around you. Casting light onto the staircase is a stained glass window of King John signing the Magna Carta.

Through to the right is what's known as Swifts' "female side". A light-filled music room decorated with gilt bronze antiques leads to a whimsically adorned boudoir known as the opium den, its walls hand-painted with intricate Moorish patterns. The "male side" of Swifts is strong and domineering. The dining room features an original dark mahogany table with seating for 24. A black marble fireplace is a sombre testament to the room's historical use as a place to keep vigil until the body of a deceased loved one was ready for burial. Next to the dining room is a library filled with atlases and books on numismatics and history. A portrait from the 1980s of the late Doug Moran, the retirement and aged care mogul, keeps watch over his son, Shane, who uses the library as his home office.

"I've got this sense that I'm part of this history," says the 56-year-old, referencing the home's past. For 63 years it was owned by the Resch family, who, like the Lucas-Tooths, made their fortune from brewing. It was later owned by the Catholic Church, whose guests included Pope Paul VI. "The painting of my father, it's been there for decades. I definitely feel his presence. And it's good for the kids to see their granddad."

Over the past 20 years, the Moran family, who once held Australia's largest private collection of nursing homes, has ploughed more than $30 million of its fortune, and much love, into the restoration of Swifts. Urgent repairs were needed when, in 1997, Doug, his wife Greta and their six children bought the mansion for $12 million. Its rejuvenation was a project for a family looking to tighten its bonds after the devastation of the suicide of Brendan Moran, the third of four brothers. Doug and Greta had hoped the family would one day live together in Swifts' sprawling 54 rooms.

Instead, the family tore itself apart through a decade of lawsuits fighting over the family business, its fortune and even the culpability for Brendan's suicide. Through the late 1990s and 2000s the Morans seemed to represent how the weight of extraordinary wealth can crush the family that built it.

It's been 16 years since Shane abruptly left his post as chief executive of the family business, Moran Health Care Group. He's thriving in the same industry, having cornered the market for ultra-high-end nursing homes for wealthy Australians and is now taking prestige nursing homes into China, where the growth potential is staggering.

After years of avoiding the media, he's agreed to share his story, in part because it's timely to note his business success, and in part because he's proud of the restoration of Swifts. It's a restoration not just of one of Australia's most important historic buildings, but of a once cherished family project. And perhaps, in a small symbolic way, it's a restoration of a family's name.

Shane the heir apparent

Shane Moran had once been groomed as his father's successor. The product of an extensive education and able to converse in four languages, he seems to have cast himself as the opposite of his tempestuous father, son of a coal miner and who left school aged 12. When The Australian Financial Review Magazine visits, he's wearing a black Ermenegildo Zegna suit. His white Paul Smith shirt has a peeping paisley design around the collar. Nails are manicured, shoes are polished. He is details-oriented, pointing out that it took two years to restore the Fincham & Hobday mechanical organ in the ballroom.

It's late April and Moran has just returned home after a business trip to China. What was meant to be a straightforward yet significant occasion – the opening of a 170-bed aged care facility in Wuxi, near Shanghai – was anything but smooth. At 2 am on the day of the opening the project hit a roadblock when the Chinese government refused to hand over a 20-year lease unless Moran's business, Provectus Care, agreed to commit more capital to the project. Moran (politely, he says) threatened to return to Australia, an embarrassing prospect with 40 guests due to arrive in a matter of hours, including Chinese government officials and the Australian Trade Commissioner. By daylight the impasse was resolved and the opening a success.

Fluent in Mandarin (he also speaks French, Spanish and German), Moran says such last-minute drama is typical of doing business in China. In the past four years Provectus has partnered with three Chinese firms to build and manage high-quality aged-care facilities, lending its expertise in planning, design and staff training. The new facility in Wuxi, its second in that city, was built in partnership with one of China's richest men, Peixiang Feng, chairman of Sichuan Ying Xiang Group.

In early 2017 Provectus joined with state-backed Greenland Hong Kong and the two companies have earmarked sites for new aged-care facilities in Shanghai, Wuxi and three locations in Kunming. "Greenland is an amazing partner because they are blue chip," Moran says of the Hang Seng-listed $HK7.5 billion ($1.3 billion) company, whose Australian interests include the $600 million Greenland Centre, set to become Sydney's tallest residential tower. "Their parent, Greenland Group, makes Lendlease look small."

Aged-care crisis in China

Moran's knowledge of China has been honed for decades. After graduating in law, he began studying Mandarin in 1986, long before it became popular to learn. In 2001, after seven years of research and 40 trips to China, he received a PhD from the University of Western Sydney for his study of what he dubbed a looming aged-care crisis in the world's most populous country. The Confucian philosophy of filial piety taught the Chinese to care for their aged parents at home. But China's one-child policy (scaled back in 2016), longer life expectancy, gender imbalance and better employment options for women have reset a sixth-century custom. Of the about 181 million Chinese over the age of 65, less than 2 per cent use institution-based care. Every 24 hours another 20,000 turn people 60.

Local governments have now begun demanding that major housing developments include aged-care facilities. An even bigger change since Moran wrote his PhD thesis, he says, is shifting community values about aged care. "You can now satisfy these traditional Chinese doctrines of filial piety by looking after parents outside the home in a residential setting," Moran says. What's more, the Chinese love of brands carries into caring for elderly parents; younger Chinese are keen to say their parents are in a top facility.

In Australia, Provectus has carved out a niche for high-end, boutique-style aged care. After investing and selling stakes in various projects, it has one facility in Melbourne, one on the Gold Coast and two in Sydney, with plans for a third, as well as one site planned for Canberra. Together with its Chinese operation, Provectus has $350 million in assets, more than $100 million in revenue and 450 staff.

Beresford Hall in Sydney's Rose Bay, the first facility built by Provectus, is the only nursing home with a day spa in Australia; it offers services from manicures to Botox treatments. The refundable accommodation deposit starts at $750,000 and heads north of $2.1 million. Residents pay a daily service fee starting from $100 and everything is included: meals, therapy, nursing care and hair dressing (although not Botox). Shane's latest project is Darling House, a stately sandstone home built circa 1842 at Sydney's Dawes Point. It will become a 14-bedroom residence, complete with Persian rugs and antiques, giving it a "club" feel.

Shane intends to remain a boutique operator, with no plans to emulate the Moran Health Care empire built by his parents and now run by older brother Peter. According to Peter, Shane saw the opportunities in China long before many others: "I don't know anyone else in Australia who has those skills and has more expertise than Shane."

How Doug built the business

Aged care is how the family built its wealth. Patriarch Doug was born in 1924 in Emmaville, a small town in the northern NSW region of New England. He was a scrapper; the son of a coal miner, he grew up desperately poor and, when he was just 12, ran away to Sydney where he worked as a hotel bellboy. Before long he was sailing the seas, joining the British merchant navy during World War II.

In 1946, while working on Sydney's Warragamba Dam, he was thrown out of heavy machinery over a cliff, breaking bones and losing the sight in his left eye. One of the nurses who cared for him in hospital was named Greta King. They married in 1954 and Doug started a real estate agency in Kings Cross. Having read books about US entrepreneurial families such as the Morgans and Vanderbilts, he decided that real estate was a key in creating vast wealth.

Two years later, Doug and Greta joined forces more fully; the pair leased a mansion in Sydney's McMahons Point and turned it into a nursing home where Greta, recently trained at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and dressed in a crisp white uniform, cared for the elderly. Professional nursing in aged-care homes was in its infancy in an industry with few regulations. The higher standards set by the Morans built trust in their brand and the combination of Doug's real estate nous and Greta's nursing skills saw the business expand to a peak in 2000, when Moran Health Care was running 120 facilities spanning Australia, England, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and Singapore. Doug and Greta's net worth ballooned to more than $350 million and the pair moved in influential circles, counting Coalition ministers such as Tony Abbott and Philip Ruddock as friends, as well as National Gallery of Australia director Betty Churcher and architect Philip Cox.

Meanwhile Greta raised seven children. The eldest, Kerry, was born in 1956 and is best known as the head of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy in the 1999 referendum. Mark, who today runs his own high-end retirement and aged-care facilities, is the youngest, born in 1969. In between came Linda (born in 1958), Peter (1960), Shane (1961), Barbara (1963) and Brendan (1965).

Greta: nurse, businesswoman, artist

Greta – who at 86 is sharp as a whip and lives in an apartment at Sydney's Circular Quay – agrees to meet the AFR Magazine at Swifts, which Shane shares with his wife, Penelope, their son and three daughters. Greta sits across from Shane at a wooden table in front of a giant sandstone hearth and butler's silver safe in a room that was once part of the servants' hall. Fixing her floral scarf around her neck, her face framed by salt and pepper curls, Greta looks down at her blue Fitbit while recalling a moment in the 1970s when the then health minister, Ralph Hunt, asked Doug to build a nursing home in the NSW country town of Dubbo, which was in his electorate. Doug declined, until Greta pointed out the land was a fraction of the price that it would be in Sydney with the same income.

"It was a good business," Greta says. "I could talk Doug into things if I pointed out the financial side was a good idea. I thought it was a good idea because there was not anything for country people." The move into regional areas was pivotal in fuelling the company's growth.

She acknowledges her husband could be difficult to be in business with. He was impulsive, imposed his views on others and expected others to follow. He preferred that everyone call him 'Mr Chairman', even his own children. "He was not an easy person to get along with," Greta says. "The volatility would have a huge effect on everyone."

Shane initially resisted pressure from his parents to join the family empire. He was working in corporate advisory at Coopers & Lybrand when, aged 26, his father convinced him to become Moran Health Care's legal counsel. He spent 15 years working in the business, 13 of them as CEO. He admits it was hard working for his father who "often threw bombs".

Poverty drove a survival streak

"My dad was of the belief that the best education was on the streets, the school of hard knocks," he says, a sharp contrast to his own education. "Bankers would come to me and say unless you keep him out of things they would withdraw credit facilities. He was not always rational. He wouldn't ponder or procrastinate, he would make decisions without explaining or bouncing them off people. We tried to set up a formal board structure, which half worked. It's difficult in a family business at the best of times."

Doug Moran's extreme nature, says Shane, was perhaps understandable given his background. That poverty, Greta and Shane agreed, also instilled in Doug a survival streak and an entrepreneurial spirit. He was often dreaming up fresh ideas to generate money that no one else had thought of. He was, they concur, very good at building the business.

In 1976 Greta, after being hospitalised with a serious illness, told Doug that she wanted to step away from the business to follow her dream of becoming a painter. She shadowed war artist Henry Hanke, the winner of the 1934 Archibald Prize, a period that Greta describes as the happiest of her life. "I just loved painting, I loved everything about it," Greta says, becoming more animated. Hanke suggested that he refer requests for portraits by people who couldn't afford him to her. "It was the nicest thing anyone said to me in my entire life. But I made the mistake of going home and telling Doug how excited I was about it, earning money painting portraits."

In a cruel cull of Greta's short-lived dream, Doug asked her to instead manage a hospital project at Baulkham Hills in Sydney. He claimed she was the only one he could trust. This became the biggest regret of her life. "I would have loved to paint ... it consumed me," she says wistfully. "It was not a choice. That work at the hospital at Baulkham Hills, it was guaranteeing our house. I had to do it; we had no money."

Cracks appear in family

The family troubles started in 1995 when Brendan, who was in the middle of divorce proceedings, committed suicide following arguments with his parents and siblings. Aged 29, he left behind a wife, two children and a heartbreaking letter that pointed to a difficult relationship with his parents. Two years later, and perhaps as a way of healing from the trauma, the family set out on an ambitious project: the restoration of Swifts. Doug had heard that the house had passed in at auction and he and Greta, together with their three sons, inspected the property. Within 24 hours they had decided to take it on as a family. Shane negotiated the purchase for $12 million.

The building was dilapidated; part of the roof had collapsed, there was water damage and the once lavishly decorated walls had been painted over. There were dings in the wall in the foyer caused by the previous owner practising his golf swing. When the Moran family bought the property, it had been repossessed by St. George Bank. "At the time you couldn't imagine the problems," says Shane of the state of the building. "It's always a bigger job than you expect."

Shane moved in first, followed by Mark and then Doug and Greta in 2000 once basic restoration work was complete. Shane and Mark were both married at Swifts. Peter and his own family also moved in, the mansion's 54 rooms and multiple entrances allowing everyone to have ample space. "It was big enough not to see each other every day, but close enough to have a cup of tea," says Peter.

In 2000, the same year that Doug and Greta moved into Swifts, Brendan's widow, Kristina Moran, sued Doug, Greta and Peter in the NSW Supreme Court, alleging dysfunctional family dynamics had inflicted mental damage on Brendan, contributing to his death. The Morans fought the case to trial and endured eight weeks of sensational accusations of domestic violence, infidelity and emotional manipulation of the children by Doug and Greta. Shane accompanied his parents to court every day. After Greta's cross-examination, and shortly before Doug was due to take the stand, the family settled. Shane's younger sister Barbara would later tell the ABC's Australian Story: "The court case and the publicity of it, and the publicity of actually assassinating our characters … I think the result of that is it's destroyed some relationships."

Shane, who was close to Brendan, remembers his brother as affable and mischievous. "It was really hard on the family, on all of us, and it's still sad," he says. "Brendan was a product of working in a family business which is difficult, and wanting to do his own thing. My father wanted him to remain in the business. I ask myself, could I have done more because I was close to him? You always question that."

Shane gets marching orders

One year later, in 2001, came another family crisis. Shane, the chief executive of Moran Health Care and heir apparent to succeed Doug, was called to a surprise meeting with his parents at the company's Bridge Street offices. Doug told Shane he wanted him out of the business following problems in the British operations where occupancy rates had fallen below target and costs had ballooned. At the time, the British business was headed by Peter, but as CEO the buck was deemed to stop with Shane.

According to Shane, it was a period when banks were pressuring the company to adopt a more formalised company structure, one that was less controlled by Doug. Weeks after Shane's departure, the British operations were put into administration owing an estimated $30 million and marking a turning point for the company. Between 2002 and 2006, with debts to be repaid, Moran Health Care sold nearly all of its Australian businesses.

"The company was nearly broke when I joined and I felt I had helped build that business," says Shane. "I was shocked and frustrated with many things. I had my own ideas about where to take the company. My father made it clear this was his business and he would do what he liked." The meeting between parents and son had been short and painfully sharp. Shane felt it was an irrational conversation, made further unhinged by Doug saying that he wanted Shane to move out of Swifts. Soon all communication was via solicitors. Shane was shut out completely.

The difficulty was it was not just a chairman firing a chief executive – it was a father firing his son, and a mother caught between her child and husband. There was also the added complexity of sibling rivalry within a family business and the sharing of blame. According to Shane's long-time friend and chairman of Climatech Group, Marc De Stoop, the company's board never took any responsibility for the missteps in Britain. "His parents were pretty aggressive and Shane was always the peacemaker," De Stoop recalls of his friend. "It appeared Doug wanted everyone to pay homage to him. Shane was badly treated and it was difficult for him. He was cut off by the family and they were trying to bleed him into the ground."

Shane, Kerry sue their parents

Peter says it was a loss to the business when his brother departed, but he could understand why he left. He agreed that Doug was demanding, but says his father was also very generous. "That whole generation of men grew up in a tough world," says Peter. "When we were young, there was no spare money. My mum made Linda and Kerry's clothes. My dad didn't have much education himself but he provided the best education he could to all of us."

By early 2002 Shane had been removed from several family boards, including the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, which annually gives $150,000 and is one of his father's greatest legacies. Months later, Shane's older sister, Kerry Jones, also fell out with her parents over the direction of the University of Sydney Moran Foundation for Older Australians. She threatened to sue her father, accusing him of unfairly attempting to sack her as executive director of the foundation.

In 2003, having received letters from solicitors informing him he was cut out of the family trust, Shane sued his parents for entitlements he claimed he was owed from being CEO. According to Shane, his father had refused to pay the money on the grounds that he had paid for his school fees. The matter was settled out of court. But then in 2006 Shane and Kerry jointly sued their parents to obtain information about the value and restructure of the family trust. In 2009 they sued again over their entitlements.

Greta says being sued by her son was disappointing. "It was very sad and I missed Kerry and Shane terribly," she says of the two siblings who were estranged from the rest of the family. "I thought it's all right for him to sue his father and the company if he wanted to. But he shouldn't be suing me. I thought I'd been as good a mother as I was capable of being."

Greta tries to keep the peace

While being candid about how easy it was to have a "blazing row" with Doug, Greta still defends her husband's reasoning. "I told Shane, you know this is idiotic of him, you know the next day he's completely recovered. Doug said it over anger, over the expansion into the UK; he wanted to know when we were going to get some money, because we were pouring money into it. He was furious and with good reasoning. He could have asked politely what was going on but that was not his way."

During the fallout, Greta sent birthday and Christmas cards to Kerry. She tried to call her several times but admits she made no attempts to contact Shane. Peter, when asked about the years when Shane did not speak to the family, says: "It just happened that way. I don't think it had to be that way. But it's like anything, once it becomes a legal matter, that changes things."

Shane recalls those years as being the most challenging of his life. "It was dark. I had to refocus and work out which direction I wanted to go. I had a mortgage on a property and no income. My wife Penny was pregnant and we had a one-year-old. It was a long time ago. It was like a bad dream. But it's also the greatest thing that could have happened to me. It was a stepping stone, an opening to do other things."

S Moran & Co, the law firm Shane initially set up to handle the family business's legal work, helped to keep his own family afloat. He did some consulting work for Ramsay Healthcare boss Pat Grier, helping the private hospitals operator to enter the aged-care market (which it later exited). He consulted to others while starting Provectus in late 2001. The global financial crisis proved difficult, when Provectus had borrowed $20 million, secured with a second loan over Shane's home at Palm Beach as well as land in Rose Bay where he would later build Beresford Hall. Neighbours opposed to the plan added to his woes.

"There were many sleepless nights," Shane says. "Many times my wife said the banks and valuers were saying it's not going to work, should we cut our losses? But I've never been as sure of anything. It's actually exceeded my expectations."

Doug on his deathbed

Early in 2011, when Shane was living in Palm Beach with his wife and their young children – Matthew, Sophie, Lauren and Georgia – he received an unexpected phone call. It was Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen, who quickly got to the point that his father, Doug, was in poor health. Jensen had been counselling Doug that he needed to reconcile with his son before he passed away.

Shane met Jensen at Bishopscourt, down the road from Swifts, and was given a letter from Greta in which she asked him for forgiveness, admitting "my mistakes have been many". (He keeps the letter in his desk.) Straightaway Shane went to his parents' Circular Quay apartment where Greta was caring for Doug, administering dialysis treatment for his ailing kidneys.

"It was important to Doug before he died [to reconnect with family]," Greta says, her eyes glassy. "If he died without talking to Kerry and Shane, it would be on my conscience. If we can tell them how sick Doug was and they don't want to talk, it's on their conscience." Around the same time Jensen also engineered a meeting between Kerry and her parents.

That November 2011 Doug Moran passed away. His family's reconciliation allowed its fortune to be shared between the six children. Despite large parts of Moran Health Care being sold off, the three sons have each stayed in the aged-care industry. However, they are keeping business and family separate by taking their own path.

Siblings divide family trust

In the division of the family trust, siblings Mark and Barbara were given a nursing home at Little Bay, since acquired fully by Mark. He has also recently built an upmarket retirement village in Vaucluse. The family purchased a property at Neutral Bay for Linda. While Shane and Peter's businesses are separate, the two brothers are collaborating on new training programs for aged-care workers at the University of Canberra. Peter retained the name of the family business and continues to trade as the Moran Health Care Group. Its logo is unchanged from it earliest days, a smiling nurse in a crisp white uniform modelled on Greta. Shane and Kerry were given Swifts, which Shane took full ownership of in 2013.

Shane says that he and Greta have a close relationship now. As mother and son sit across from one another in the former servants' hall at Swifts, it's clear the family bond is intact despite their tumultuous history. Shane's eyebrows lift in surprise when Greta mentions that she intends to talk to one of her grandsons, Max, about getting some outside experience before pursuing his desire to work for the retirement village business run by his father, Mark, immediately after he leaves school. Greta is active in organising family reunions for milestone celebrations: the extended family got together most recently in April for Barbara's nuptials.

Greta visits Swifts once a week. Its ground floor is filled with antiques, many of which she collected. But the mud-room is lined with kids' backpacks and school hats. Shane and Penelope's children are the first to be raised in the 142-year-old mansion since the Lucas-Tooth family in the late 19th century. The children help care for chickens and ducks which have free range in the garden. The sound of clocks chiming is occasionally drowned out by the construction of a new quatrefoil pool and glass conservatory.

Shane says his mother has been a driving force in preserving the building and its place in Australian history. His mother responds, saying: "I'm proud of Shane for taking on Swifts the way he has. It means it will last for Australia." It may not be the exact legacy the family had once intended, but the Morans are writing their own chapter at Swifts nonetheless.

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