Charles Fairfax swaps $100 million Fairwater home for $5.3 million Dover Heights digs

As the Point Piper estate Fairwater was being sold for about $100 million this week, Charles Fairfax, the son of the late chatelaine, took possession of his own, comparatively humble home.

The third son of Lady (Mary) Fairfax, who died a year ago aged 95, is now the owner of a $5.3 million house in Dover Heights with five bedrooms, a double garage and a swimming pool.

It isn’t quite the 1.121-hectare estate on the beachfront with a historic John Horbury Hunt-designed Victorian mansion on title, separate dwellings on title for live-in staff and vast beach frontage, but it is by all normal standards a very comfortable family home.

The three-level property was previously owned by Cassandra and Laurence Blumberg, director of gold mining company Mintals, who bought it in 2005 for $3.15 million from human rights lawyer and author Jacquie Ashton and her husband Tim Ashton, of the polo playing family.

Records show the Blumbergs sold it a year ago for $4.97 million to a trustee company, headed by the trustees of Lady Fairfax’s estate, Lee Thomas, Peter Done, James Momsen and Bruce Solomon.

And as tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes exchanged on the $100 million family estate this week, the Dover Heights property was transferred into Charles Fairfax’s sole possession for $5.3 million.

Mr Fairfax and his siblings Garth Symonds, Warwick Fairfax and Anna Cleary are expected to be the main beneficiaries of the sale of Fairwater.

Fairfax’s former home in Bellevue Hill, a three-bedroom apartment bought in the same family trust for $2.35 million in 2005, has been leased for the past year for $1600 a week.