Byron Bay record smashed by sale of $26 million retreat

Byron Bay’s status as the most expensive holiday home market outside of Sydney has been boosted by the sale of a hinterland property in Suffolk Park for $26 million.

Records show the property was purchased by a beneficial trust, Jersey Investments, which is linked to the billionaire Roche family, headed by matriarch Nutrimetics founder Imelda Roche. However, it is understood Roche’s daughter Clare Mulham is expected to take the keys to the property.

The 16-hectare property sold by Fiona Toltz Gower, daughter of the late stockbroker Michael Toltz, and Joren Gower sets a record for the North Coast’s lifestyle property market, ranking it among the state’s most expensive of its kind outside of Sydney.

The sale – negotiated by Pacifico Property’s Christian Sergiacomi – tops the previous $22 million when Rip Curl co-founder Brian Singer bought a house at Wategos Beach in 2020, and beats the hinterland record of $18.5 million set last year in Brunswick Heads by Helen Sali, wife of former Swisse vitamins chief Radek Sali.

The property was a major rebuild, land-clearing and landscaping project for the Gowers in the nine years since they bought it for $2 million.

The luxury three-bedroom residence with swimming pool, cabana, media room, fire pit, in-ground trampoline, and heated spa has until recently been offered as a holiday let.

Byron Bay’s values have soared in the post-pandemic market, thanks to a who’s who of rich-listers and entrepreneurs. At the time COVID arrived in Australia in early 2020 the highest sale in Byron Bay was $18.5 million for the Wategos Beach house of art collector and Dakota Capital chairman Danny Goldberg to F45 co-founder Adam Gilchrist.

The hinterland market first showed signs of revival post-Covid in late 2020 when philanthropist Tanya Nelson Carnegie paid $11 million for Bangalow’s Hillstone Farm.

Last year coal tycoon David Knappick sold his hinterland Coorabell acreage for $14 million to downsize to contemporary digs in nearby Coopers Shoot for $12.7 million. A week later activewear entrepreneur Lorna Jane Clarkson paid $14.1 million for Coorabella.

Fuelling the hype has been the high-profile presence of Hollywood heavyweights like Chris Hemsworth, a near neighbour to the Toltz Gower property, his brother Liam Hemsworth with $23 million worth of property in nearby Newrybar, and Zac Efron’s 128-hectare Glen Eden property north of Byron Bay in the Tweed Valley.

Mulham’s purchase comes a few months after her father Bill Roche died, aged 87.

Bill and Imelda Roche co-founded Nutrimetics in the late 1960s, and are known as prominent figures in the Hunter Valley wine industry and as large-scale property investors and developers worth an estimated $1.49 billion on this year’s AFR Rich List 200.