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This was published 10 months ago
Flower mogul splashes $76m on architect-designed Sydney house – and pays cash
By Lucy Macken
The stand-out winner from this year’s housing market has to be Bellevue Hill, with an extraordinary bull run of house sales led by flower businessman Leo Lynch and his wife Christina’s $76 million purchase of a Federation mansion.
Not since Sir Frank Packer started buying up the neighbourhood in the 1960s to add to his Cairnton estate has one person done more for local values than Lynch, whose purchase coincides with a $61.5 million sale of his nearby former home to freight industry boss Arthur Tzaneros.
Lynch’s purchase of the 1890s-built Leura mansion from yachtie Wilson Lee ranks as Sydney’s fourth-highest house sale of all time, and puts Bellevue Hill alongside Vaucluse and Point Piper on the list of Sydney’s top 10 house sales.
For their money the Lynch family have bought an eight-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansion that needs work, designed by architects Walter Liberty Vernon and Howard Joseland set on a 4260-square-metre parcel with a tennis court and a swimming pool.
What’s more, Lynch paid cash.
Mortgages are often left off Sydney’s top house sales. Certainly, tech billionaire Scott Farquhar didn’t need financing for his $130 million purchase of Point Piper’s Uig Lodge, nor his $71 million Elaine estate around the corner, although his Atlassian co-chief Mike Cannon-Brookes lodged a mortgage on his Point Piper estate Fairwater about six months after he bought it for $100 million.
Gold mining business John Changjin Li, however, has two mortgages on his partial purchase of the $95 million Edgewater mansion in Point Piper, one of which is held by his former wife Athena Changren Cheng.
The $76 million sale of Leura has been shrouded in secrecy given no comment from Pillinger’s Brad Pillinger, but in the months since it exchanged it has spearheaded a slew of sales that have delivered local homeowners stonking capital gains on the back of lavish redesigns and rebuilds.
The Lynches’ former home is a case in point: it last traded for $9.05 million in 2014 and after a knock-down rebuild returned a 579 per cent jump in value over nine years.
Pastoralists Robert and Camilla Cropper also did well from a designer rebuild, selling for $39.35 million recently, which was a 597 per cent jump in value in nine years.
Also doing his bit to fuel Bellevue Hill’s soaring values is fintech entrepreneur Stephen Dash. Dash has paid a total of $47.8 million for the Breuer estate, again through Pillinger, after he was introduced by buyer’s agent Simon Cohen.
Dash’s purchase includes the $33 million main residence that was long home to the late art dealer Eva Breuer and developer Tom Breuer, as well as two townhouses in front for kicks.
Lynch, 60, is a third generation of the wholesale flower family’s company, founded in 1915 and for which private equity group Next Capital took a majority interest in 2015. It was publicly listed in 2021.
Premier digs
Former NSW Labor premier Morris Iemma has followed up his recent resignation from a slew of top corporate roles to focus his attention on home affairs, buying a waterfront house in Kogarah Bay for $6.5 million.
The marketing by McGrath’s Liam Tsaprazis described the house as a “palatial street-to-shore family home”, for which Iemma has set a record high for the St George district suburb.
Iemma, who was premier from 2005 to 2008, recently stepped down as chairman of Venues NSW, Football NSW and the Cancer Institute of NSW given health concerns, but remains chairman of CEP Energy and Astra Institute of Higher Education, and co-owns lobby firm Iemma Patterson Premier Advisory with former Liberal MP Chris Patterson.
Iemma is a long-time resident of Narwee in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, where he and family have owned their home since 1992, as well as a couple of investment properties in the neighbourhood.
Second time lucky
Julina Lim, matriarch of the Oceania Property development family, has resold her Vaucluse home after last year’s $27 million purchase by Australia-China trade specialist Christian Wang fell through.
The four-level residence on prized Queens Avenue was one of a handful of properties Wang exchanged to buy, but never settled on, leaving the homeowners with a deposit and the peak of the property boom behind them.
The five-bedroom house with a six-car garage, rooftop terrace and gun-barrel harbour views on just 373 square metres looks largely unimproved since Lim purchased it in 2015 for $12.85 million from former investment banker and venture capitalist John Grant.
Just 18 months after Lim first sold it, it was sold again this week by The Agency’s Steven Chen after a single 20-minute inspection for $25 million, almost doubling Lim’s money in eight years.
Rising from the ashes
The South Coast holiday getaway of fashion designer Collette Dinnigan sold on Thursday afternoon by her husband, DiJones’s Bradley Cocks, for about $3 million.
The exact price remains undisclosed, but sold close to the $2.95 million to $3.2 million guide that was being asked for it most recently.
It sold as a house alone but was first listed in September as a turnkey offering with all furniture and art included with $4.9 million hopes.
Dinnigan purchased the Rosedale house in 2018 for $950,000, but it was burned to the ground in the bushfires of early 2020, and rebuilt into a contemporary four-bedroom house.