Lifestyle blogger pays $43.5m for Bellevue Hill house that sold last year for $30m

Fashion designer-turned-lifestyle blogger Stephanie Conley-Buhre has again emerged as Sydney’s most bullish trophy home dealer, this time snapping up a Bellevue Hill house for $43.5 million.

The purchase follows the property flipper’s recent sale of her nearby Bellevue Hill mansion for about $80 million.

Both deals – under the advice of Cohen Handler’s Simon Cohen – are a masterclass in the steep capital gains that can be made in Sydney’s high-end real estate market.

The newly purchased residence of Conley-Buhre and her husband – venture capitalist Oskar Buhre – is known as Monkton. It’s an Espie Dods-designed home that last sold 18 months ago for $30 million by veteran investment banker Tim Burroughs and his wife Judith.

Lawyer and Uber Carshare senior executive Sarah Druce, wife of stockbroker Keiran Horth, had exchanged to buy the property in February last year but didn’t settle on it until a year ago. Its resale for 45 per cent more than she paid translates to a $1,125,000 capital gain each month she owned it.

Druce had not listed Monkton for sale, but well-placed sources familiar with the deal say she was tempted to sell after an unsolicited offer by McGrath’s prestige agents William Manning and Luke Hogan on behalf of Conley-Buhre.

Manning declined to comment when approached for this story, but his sale marks a triumphant return to the McGrath agency, where he started in real estate almost 30 years ago.

Monkton comes with a pedigreed list of former owners on title. In the 1920s it was owned by High Court judge Sir Dudley Williams, who sold it in 1958 to British Conservative MP Lord Angus Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon.

At the time, Lord Maude had come to Australia on the invitation of the Fairfax family to be editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. More recently, Burroughs, who was appointed to the Westpac board early last year, purchased it in 2001 for $8.9 million.

Conley-Buhre, the daughter of the late aviation pioneer and philanthropist John Conley, did even better on her former home, a Spanish Mission-style residence known as Alcooringa. She purchased it in 2021 for $28.5 million and undertook a dramatic upgrade before selling it for $80 million.

It sold to Aussie expat Hannah Chapman, whose purchase incurred a $5.5 million stamp duty.

Bell tower

Sydney’s highest-profile accountant, Anthony Bell clearly sees investment potential in the Rose Bay harbourside, given he has ploughed $9,657,000 into the Rosewater building opposite Rose Bay Marina.

The Bell Partners chief purchased the four-bedroom spread from architect Andre Heyko-Porebski and his wife Louise after it was listed by Ray White Double Bay’s Thomas Popple. It is one of eight in the north-facing block and upstairs of the $9.75 million pad purchased last year by Susan Balagiannis, of the Reserve Hotels family.

Don’t expect to see Bell in the building. He remains based on the Dover Heights clifftop, where, in 2017, he purchased the home of his mate, Seven’s star presenter Larry Emdur.

Crown land

The Southern Highland’s largest private landholder has struck again. Peter Crown, the tech investor who bought the Hume Coal mining site aggregation for $100 million in 2021, has quietly purchased one of the oldest farms in Sutton Forest for $38.5 million.

Newbury Farm is a 400-hectare property founded in 1822 thanks to a land grant to Sydney’s first harbour master, Captain John Nicholson. It has been owned by the Simpson family, of MinterEllison law firm fame, since 1936.

Edward Telford Simpson, the second of three generations at the helm of the law firm, purchased Newbury Farm in 1936 for £859.14. It later passed to his son, also of MinterEllison, Philip Simpson and his wife Caroline, the daughter of newspaper proprietor Sir Warwick Fairfax.

Following Philip’s death in 2008, Newbury Farm has been owned by the couple’s four children Edward, Louise, Alice and Emily.

Crown’s purchase, in a company name, takes his total holdings in the Southern Highlands to 1290 hectares, of which 780 hectares were sold by Hume Coal in 2021 after the state’s Independent Planning Commission knocked back a proposed coal mine by Korean steel giant POSCO.

Grand designs

Finally, the Centennial Park property “Formentera”, owned by former J.P. Morgan senior executive Annabelle Mooney and Novotech chief financial officer Rob Speedie, is up for sale with a $20 million guide through The Agency’s Ben Collier.

The six-bedroom residence on Lang Road was previously called “Sibylla” by the late doyenne of market research Liz Dangar after she undertook a redesign in the 1990s in the Italian Renaissance style.

It last traded in 2021 for $12.5 million, when car dealer Paul Warren and his wife Elizabeth sold it when they decamped for Palm Beach.