Tobacco wholesaler family sell Palm Beach house for $27m to restaurateur

Sydney has long commanded jaw-dropping house prices – think James Packer’s $70 million mansion in Vaucluse, Lachlan Murdoch’s $38.5 million boat shed in Point Piper and techie Mike Cannon-Brookes’s $100 million digs – but beyond the limits of the eastern suburbs the most expensive house has stood at $25 million since 2018, when Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham bought the Mosman mansion Hopetoun.

Until now.

Take a bow multimillionaire hospitality entrepreneur John Szangolies and wife Heather, who have bought a Palm Beach getaway for about $27 million.

What makes the 1970s brick house 40 kilometres up the coast a record-breaker is not just the scarcity of holiday homes for sale ahead of summer, but also the 1200 square metres of north-facing waterfront land set privately on the northernmost stretch of waterfront away from the rubberneckers on nearby Snapperman Beach.

It’s an appeal Szangolies might appreciate from his beachfront getaway down the road, purchased for $9.2 million in late 2016 following the sale of his Urban Purveyor Group of restaurants to Quadrant private equity group for almost $200 million.

Szangolies’s new holiday house has for the past 37 years been the weekender of Virginia Nelson, wife of the late tobacco magnate Arthur Nelson, who in the 1990s was the rich-list owner of Australia’s biggest tobacco wholesaler.

Proving that Iluka Road residents never leave – they just swap houses – the Nelsons bought the house in 1984 for $1.07 million from art collector and director of leather goods company Loris H. Hassall, Geoffrey Hassall, who later purchased one of the few other double blocks on Iluka Road for $1.85 million.

The Nelsons had quietly listed the family retreat with LJ Hooker Palm Beach’s David Edwards and his son BJ with a guide of $24 million, neither of whom were contactable this week, but sources say it is expected to be a knock-down rebuild for the Rose Bay-based Szangolies.

It not only tops the lower north shore’s $25 million high but the northern beaches high set by Cannon-Brookes last year when he bought Jennifer Hawkins’ Newport home for $24.5 million.

The $25m doer-upper

Businessman Victor Comino and his wife Chrissy have followed up their recent $48 million purchase of the Southern Highlands property Sutherland Park from the family of the late Sir William and Lady Tyree by buying a doer-upper on the Watsons Bay beachfront for about $25 million.

This is the house long-owned by Gee Teong Low, son of the late developer and hotelier Tan Sri Low Yow Chuan, who was long known as the “father of tourism” in Malaysia.

The Cove Street house – purchased in 1993 for $1.8 million – is flanked on either side by houses owned by Low’s siblings, Low Gee Tat and Low Su Ming, and remains half-built after the council approved a rebuild of the property in 2018.

Cashed-up Angelis buys into Rose Bay

Jim Angelis, the founder of Australia’s largest privately owned insurance broker, Coverforce, has joined the ranks of Sydney’s trophy-home owners by buying the landmark Rose Bay waterfront residence Villa Florida.

The sale price remains undisclosed by BlackDiamondz’s Monika Tu, but she had maintained a $45 million asking price since last year on behalf of veteran stockbroker Brent Potts and his wife Pauline, who are moving to their newly purchased $25 million downsizer spread in Darling Point.

Angelis’s new home is the 1928-built residence which was previously owned by Barry Humphries in the late 1980s and was sold to the Potts clan in 2000 for $9 million by mining industry businessman Jack Horseman.

Angelis’s home upgrade – he owns a contemporary residence he built in Vaucluse on a property purchased for $4.9 million in 2009 – comes just a few months after Coverforce was bought out by fellow broker Steadfast for $411 million, no doubt lining Angelis’s pockets considerably given he was one of the company’s largest shareholders.