Harry Triguboff's daughter Orna buys block of North Bondi apartments for $11.5m

North Bondi’s Ben Buckler headland was once best known for its sewage outfalls and the consortium of surfers, actors and a few professionals who called it home, but as Sydney’s billionaires descend in ever greater numbers it is becoming one of Sydney’s most prestigious neighbourhoods.

But instead of grand waterfront mansions luring the families of the rich list to the northernmost end of Bondi Beach, it is the low-rise 1940s apartment blocks that are being bought up and refashioned into luxury private homes.

The most recent big-ticket buyer is Dr Orna Triguboff, the eldest daughter of property developer Harry Triguboff, who has purchased a block of four rundown units for $11.5 million.

The block, Wendy Court, was scheduled to go to auction last month through Raine & Horne’s Ric Serrao, with an exemption on the sale that it could be bought by a separate buyer through a different agent if sold prior.

It turns out that buyer was Triguboff, a meditation and yoga teacher and founder of Kabbalah-inspired college Neshama Life, who lives in the Swell development at Bondi Beach.

The block was approved for alterations and additions a decade ago with an additional level added to create a penthouse and Triguboff is expected to go ahead with an amended DA to make the additional top-floor spread her own.

Triguboff joins a who’s who of Sydney taking a keen interest in North Bondi. One of the first such buyers was founding chairman of Caledonia Investments Michael Darling and his wife, food and travel author Manuela Darling-Gansser, who bought a block of 10 apartments in 2011 for $14 million and converted it into a family compound.

Caledonia’s co-chief investment officer Will Vicars followed with a few major investment purchases, first buying a block of eight for $11.5 million in 2017 and last year adding an art deco block for $11.3 million.

Billionaire Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar and his wife Gabrielle have bought a new clifftop triplex as their own for $27 million and in recent months added the 1970s block of six apartment next door for $18.5 million for their personal use.

Nursing home scion Mark Moran and his wife Evette are completing a luxury fit-out of an amalgamation of three apartments they bought from outgoing Premier Investments retail chief Mark McInnes for $11.5 million in 2018.

Then there’s film director-turn-property developer Rebel Penfold Russell, whose most noteworthy development was on Ramsgate Avenue, where she developed two blocks of 13 units into the high-end block of six called Coast, which is now the Sydney home to the likes of Young Rich List designer Erin Deering, and Hugh Jackman and his wife Debora-Lee Furness and rich-list fashion designer Erin Deering.

Indeed, in the five years since Jackman and Furness settled on their $5.92 million pad, North Bondi’s median house price has soared almost 42 per cent to March, according to the latest Domain Data.