From supermodel to hoarder: Jean Newington's Woollahra home sold for $2.8m

Jean Newington was one of Australia’s top supermodels in the 1950s and ’60s when she was gracing the pages of Vogue and the catwalks of New York and Paris, but by the time she died two years ago, aged 83, she was reduced to living in a falling-down terrace in Woollahra.

By the time Westpac took possession of the Queen Street house from her estate earlier this year, the furniture, knick-knacks and “collectibles” that crammed the rooms had been removed and sold off, and fresh paint, polished floors and styling rendered the interiors almost unrecognisable.

The three-bedroom house with no parking sold for $2.8 million under the hammer soon after, thanks to the efforts of two bidders who pushed it above the $2.7 million guide of Phillips Pantzer Donnelley’s Catherine Dixon.

It was a celebrated sale typically with no acknowledgement of the fashion icon who had called it home.

Newington was a long-time Woollahra local who despite retreating from society soon after her husband Jacques Bonnet died in 2014 was still regaled  years after she died as  a bohemian eccentric by some and a hoarder and recluse by others.

Her modelling career started in 1955 when, as a Dover Heights Domestic Science High School student, she was discovered by a photographer and soon after won the Australian Photographer’s Model of the Year contest.

For the next five years Newington worked in Paris, becoming “one of the most photographed faces in Europe”, according to a 1960 story in the Australian Women’s Weekly.

“When I came to Paris I was a fresh-faced, healthy girl from Bondi Junction,” Newington is quoted saying at the time.

“I couldn’t speak a word of French, and everyone was very kind. Two days after my face appeared on the cover of L’Officiel,  half my friends stopped talking to me. What the other half had to say made me wish they’d joined in the boycott, too.”

Newington’s career took off in New York. She was earning about £600 a week, bought a brownstone in Manhattan, developed a penchant for expensive jewellery and signed with the late agent to the stars Eileen Ford.

Newington returned to Sydney in 1969, and became known as a savvy property flipper in the 1970s, buying and selling almost a dozen homes in the eastern suburbs.

“She had a good eye for property and she was even better negotiator,” said her lawyer of 40 years, Richard Licardy. 

Despite being bankrupted in 1988, and discharged from that bankruptcy in 1991, Newington’s last property purchase was the Queen Street terrace for $1.72 million in 2008, bought with  Bonnet and with a minority interest to David Hyams, a long-time friend who she regarded as the son she never had.

However, a dispute with Westpac in the last decade of her life consumed much of her remaining wealth, leaving little to her estate even after the house was sold by the bank earlier this year.

However, records show there remains one piece of real estate to her name: a two-metre-square space between two buildings at 1 Mansion Lane, Potts Point, purchased on a whim by Newington in 1981 for $5000.