The Boy from Oz: Hugh Jackman's property path from two-bedder to trophy homes

Hugh Jackman was a relative nobody in 1997 when he and his then new wife Deborra-Lee Furness bought their matrimonial home, a two-bedder in Melbourne’s historic Cavendish House for $240,000.

Anonymity was clearly not the issue it would later prove to be given the couple had no need to hide the purchase behind a trust or company name and instead lodged it in their married names Hugh and Deborra-Lee Jackman.

The couple had met two years earlier on Jackman’s first professional acting job after he graduated from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, joining the cast of the ABC series Corelli  which starred Furness. They married the following year at St John’s in Toorak.

Since then Jackman’s career has propelled him to super stardom to the point that just looking at family homes in Melbourne’s leafy Albert Park in 2001 made The Age – but no eventual purchase.

In 2007 the A-list couple took up residency leasing some of Sydney’s finest homes: starting in the Point Piper mansion Altona, before corporate records show they then moved to a Woollahra mansion with tennis court and swimming pool the following year while he filmed X-Men Origins: Wolverine that was then owned by property developer Rob Palmer.

There was a stint in the Edgecliff colonial mansion Woodlands bought by former Crown Resorts chief Rob Rankin in 2003 for $6.8 million that was later leased to the Jackmans, and subsequently to Rupert Murdoch’s eldest daughter Prue MacLeod.

Indeed, Jackman’s professional credits have long proven more extensive than his real estate portfolio, of which the former highlights include two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe, Emmy, and as of earlier this year a Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album for The Greatest Showman.

However, the couple’s relatively nomadic lifestyle is anchored by two main homes they own on either side of the planet.

In 2008, while still renting in Sydney, the couple bought a three-storey luxury apartment in New York’s Meier Towers overlooking the Hudson River for $US21 million in time for him to move there to start work on the Broadway musical A Star Is Born.

The purchase by Jackman’s Maximilian Eliot Trust was spruiked as a savvy one on behalf of the couple, settling for almost half the original $US40 million asking price by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.

There is also a holiday home in the Hamptons set on a double block that Furness tells Vogue has been a designer labour of love with architecture firm Stelle Lomont Rouhani for the past four years.

It is due for completion in November and set on a site bought by the Treehouse Advancement Company in 2015 for $US6.5 million.

Then there’s the Sydney bolthole overlooking Bondi Beach where he, Furness and their children Oscar and Ava stay when they’re in town.

Set on the top floor of the boutique block of six apartments developed by film producer-turn-property developer Rebel Penfold-Russell, it was bought in 2015 for $5.9 million in a trust run by Melbourne-based promoter Paul Dainty and LA-based business manager Howard Altman.

That same year the couple off-loaded their Melbourne apartment in the the 1920s-built, Chicagoesque-style Cavendish House for $740,000, for a gain of $500,000 over the 18 years they owned it.