Nicole Kidman's property journey: From an $81,000 unit to an historic Georgian mansion

Nicole Kidman was still a teenager in 1987 when she bought her first home, a one-bedroom apartment above the shops in Mosman village for $81,000.

It was not an ambitious first home purchase – Sydney’s median apartment price was $86,200 – but it was purchased with no mortgage.

Kidman was tasting fame for the first time after the TV mini-series Vietnam, in which she starred, had broadcast to rave reviews just a few months earlier, and had enough money to secure her a foothold in the property market.

The one-bedder opposite Mosman’s Buena Vista Hotel remains the only Australian real estate Kidman has owned in her name.

In 1990, she was thrust into the global spotlight when she married superstar Tom Cruise, and the Darling Point duplex the couple bought in a trust in 1995 for $4.2 million became celebrity ground zero for Sydney’s paparazzi. The second half of the duplex was added in 1998 for $4.75 million.

That Darling Point home remained Kidman’s Sydney base after she and Cruise separated in 2001, and her acclaim as an actor took off in the years that followed with critically acclaimed roles in Cold Mountain, The Interpreter and The Hours – for which she won an Academy Award. It was sold for $12 million in 2009.

Marriage to country rock star Keith Urban in 2006 was followed by a real estate reshuffle. She off-loaded a two-storey penthouse in the Walsh Bay Pier – purchased months before her second marriage – for $4.65 million.

The Darling Point property was listed with $20 million hopes in 2008, and sold for $12 million the following year.

She bought her historic Georgian mansion Bunya Hill at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands in 2008 for $6.5 million from NAB senior executive Peter Coad, retaining the 1878-built residence on 45 hectares to this day as her Australian holiday home.

As for her Sydney base, she bought one of three penthouses in the Latitude building at Milsons Point – a few kilometres from her mother Janelle’s Greenwich home – for about $6 million in 2009 from Mark Bouris.

The adjoining penthouse was added in 2012 for more than $7 million to create a mega spread, and a gym added by way of a third apartment two storeys down for $2.68 million in 2011.

Kidman’s permanent base since she and Urban married has been Nashville, where the couple bought a seven-bedroom mansion with tennis court and pool in Northumberland for $US3.47 million in 2008.

A Hollywood home was included in the 2008 buy-up when she paid more than $US4.7 million for the manse of record producer and songwriter Ron Fair, and a New York bolthole in 2010 in a newly completed 19-level building in West Chelsea for $US10 million.

The woman who is ranked on the 2017 Financial Review Rich List worth $347 million has come a long way from the Mosman one-bedder she gifted to her sister Antonia in 1993 and that was later sold for $260,000 in 1998.