Built's Marco Rossi sells Tamarama's most expensive hole in the ground

Tamarama’s most expensive hole in the ground has quietly sold, five years after it was first listed with $15 million hopes by Marco Rossi, head of privately held construction group Built, and his partner Stephanie Stokes.

The couple purchased the Thompson Street property in 2008 for a then suburb high of $11 million and demolished the house to make way for a DA-approved, Wallace E. Cunningham-designed residence that was expected to be the Rossi family’s forever home.

However, while the expensive excavation work was done, the glamorous house is yet to be built because Rossi and Stokes then opted to move to Bellevue Hill, where they bought the Yoorami estate in 2016 for $15.25 million.

The beachside parcel was briefly touted as having an $11 million guide when it was scheduled to go to auction in 2018, but was pulled from the market before the hammer was raised. This time around Ray White Double Bay’s Ashley Bierman has been billed with the sale, but declined to reveal the sale price.

Mostyn’s new Horizon

Retired rock publicist Patti Mostyn is back in town, having sold her Port Douglas home of the past eight years and bought into Darlinghurst’s landmark Horizon building.

Mostyn, who previously worked with the likes of Elton John, Sting and George Michael, paid about $6.6 million for the four-storey townhouse in the Harry Seidler-designed complex,  more than doubling the $3.22 million it last traded for in 2013.

Jason Boon, of Richardson & Wrench Elizabeth Bay, had a $6 million to $6.5 million guide before she snapped it up after just 10 days on the market.

Mostyn and her late husband Eric Robinson, who died in 2015, moved to Port Douglas in 2014, and off-loaded their designer home in Watsons Bay after they left for a little more than $4 million to internet entrepreneur Tony Surtees and his wife Anne.

The couple bought a Port Douglas house known as The Glasshouse for $1.4 million in 2013, and sources say it sold in May for about $6 million.

Slices of Fairfax

Beacon Hill Estate, the Bowral weekender of the late legal luminary Roddy Meagher, has sold after two years on the market.

This is the architect Glenn Murcutt-designed house commissioned by Meagher and his late wife Penny after they bought the 40-hectare property in 1983 for $260,000 from the late James Fairfax’s Retford Park Estate.

The house was completed in the early 1990s and named after a World War II beacon that once stood on the property’s highest point to transmit signals from Sydney to Canberra.

The former QC and president of the NSW Bar Society – described by the former NSW chief justice Jim Spigelman as “one of the intellectual giants of our legal history” – died in 2011, aged 79. His daughter, Amy Gerstl, listed the property for $6 million in April 2019, but more recently it was carrying a $5.5 million guide, and settlement will reveal the result.

Meanwhile, lawyer and author Julie Singleton has bought the 20-hectare land parcel next door to Beacon Hill, another subdivision from Fairfax’s Retford Park estate.

Singleton was one of eight registered bidders to compete at the online auction at which the price was forced up $950,000 more than the reserve to sell under the hammer for $2.9 million through Shena Jackson and Greg Wall, of JacksonWall.

Retford Park was the country home of Fairfax from 1964 – when he bought the original four hectares for £15,000 – until he died in 2017. The Italianate revival-style mansion Retford Park and surrounding gardens were gifted to the National Trust of Australia in 2016, and much of the 80-hectare estate subdivided for housing.

This isn’t Singleton’s first Bowral acquisition. The former wife of adman John Singleton bought a 2000-square-metre block from the Retford Park subdivision five years ago for $400,000 on which she has since built, and she is expected to lodge a DA to build on her newer acquisition.

Life’s a Palm Beach

Point Piper furniture king Anthony Scali, of the Nick Scali retail giant, is having a good 2021, judging by his Palm Beach real-estate portfolio.

Scali bought a beachfront house for $9 million in late 2019 just months before COVID-19 wreaked havoc worldwide, making it the third property for the family on prized Iluka Road after he bought property developer Denis O’Neil’s double beachfront properties in 2013 for just shy of $12 million.

And without any renovation of the somewhat dated 1940s house he bought two years ago, it was listed with Ray White Palm Beach’s Noel Nicholson with $11 million hopes more recently.

Nicholson – whose son Jimmy made his debut as The Bachelor on the dating reality TV show this week – wouldn’t discuss the sale despite property records showing it sold this week leaving it to sources to put the result at bang on $11 million.

Making a Mosman play

Seven’s chief financial officer, Jeff Howard, and his wife Sarah have followed the lead of the boss, James Warburton, and moved to Mosman, paying $5.3 million for a four-bedroom Federation house.

The purchase comes just a few months after the couple pocketed $3.15 million for their former Chatswood home, owned since 2004 when they paid $940,000.

When Warburton and his wife, Audi chief marketer Nikki Warburton, aren’t at their recently purchased $4.25-million Palm Beach getaway, the couple live in Mosman’s Beauty Point, where they bought for almost $5 million in 2007.

Still in Mosman, former PwC consulting partner Neil Livesey and his wife, Cognizant Australia chief Jane Livesey, have listed their Chinamans Beach house for $16 million to $17.5 million, given tree-change plans.

This is the architect Rolf Ockert-designed residence they commissioned after they bought the Hopetoun Avenue property in 2012 for $3.275 million, and which won the Mosman Design Award in 2017.

The Liveseys have handed the keys to Belle Property’s Tim Foote given they are spending more time in Berry Mountain, where they have been renovating the historic Glenworth Estate and established the Harvest Brewing Company.

It’s got to be Byron Bay

Sydney goes into lockdown and, like clockwork, Byron Bay’s high-end values go crazy on the back of it. Take the Wategos Beach home of Johanna Gustafsson and Nicholas Baxter, managing director of industrial cleaner Austech Chemicals.

Known as Wattai and designed by architect Peter Maddison, of Grand Designs Australia fame, it has sold for $14 million through Liam Annesley of Byron Bay Real Estate – almost three times what it last traded for just five years ago.

Updated in recent years, the major design was already done when Gustafsson and Baxter purchased it in 2016 for $5.6 million from former 1970s AFL player Allan Sinclair (dad of the Sydney Swans’ Callum Sinclair).

Annesley has also sold the Wategos Beach home of photogenic AFR Young Rich List-ers Emma Gibson and Robert Bates, although he and his co-agent, Atlas’s Helene Adams, won’t reveal how close the sale result was to the $7.5 million guide.

Bates, who co-founded 7 Trinity Biotech, purchased it in 2018 for $2.65 million and had undertaken a major renovation about 18 months ago.

Making a sound Vaucluse investment

Ben Alexander, founder and co-chief investment officer at fixed-income fund Ardea, and his wife Lisa have bought in Vaucluse, paying about $25 million for the home of Mariette Khouri.

The sale price remains undisclosed but was being touted on social media as a high for Vaucluse for the year, which was $20 million until Christie’s Ken Jacobs and Darren Curtis sold the home of Hong Kong arts patron Yang Yang for more than $35 million on Wednesday night.

The Khouri family have undertaken a major redesign of the Olola Avenue residence in recent years, having purchased it from the Waugh family in 2016 for $6.1 million. It boasts a vast garage that has played host to the various wheels of Ferrari aficionado Lecha Khouri, the owner and host of Supercar Advocates and group chief executive of the family’s Fenlan Group.