Deborah Hutton wants to ‘get out of the madness’, a family home and never put a heel on again
Style icon Deborah Hutton is making a post-pandemic move she never thought she would.
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Like many of us, style icon Deborah Hutton could never have imagined that this year’s Sydney lockdown could have dragged on for as long as it did.
“Back when it started, did you think we were going to be here until October?” she exclaims during a candid interview, primarily about the looming auction of her beautiful Hamptons-style home in Bronte.
“Like, bullshit.
“There was no way in the world they were going to lock us up that long, but that’s exactly what happened.”
Hutton also can’t believe she’s about to turn 60 — on December 20.
She was joking about it with a friend earlier that day. “He was laughing … we’re all dropping like dominoes (turning 60, she means) and I’m the next one.
“He said, ‘ol Darls, just prepare yourself’
“I said, ‘prepare myself for what?’
“It’s amusing, I don’t feel 60, I don’t think I look 60, I don’t act 60 … I certainly don’t act 60.
“So I’m actually looking forward to it.
“Especially now that we can hopefully spend some time together with friends, without masks and border closures.”
DEBORAH HUTTON’S SEARCH FOR A SIMPLER LIFE
Talking to this mega star — she’s had such a rich life so far, being a model, magazine editor, TV personality and homewares queen — it soon became clear that Covid, and what she calls the “watershed moment” of approaching 60, has been hugely motivational.
Transformative.
Hutton’s decided she wants a simpler life. A veggie patch. And a family home.
“Covid, in many respects, has done a lot of things to a lot of people in terms of the way they think they want to live,” she said,
“I don’t have to live in Sydney to work so I’m just wanting to get out of the madness.
“I can work on my hats (her Canopy Bay sun-protective range) and my homewares and I can do it from anywhere.
“I’m leaving the eastern suburbs.
“I’m just ready for a different energy.
“There’s a frenetic energy in Sydney, we’re frantic, we’re all back.
“I felt it this week, I thought, oh my god, I just want a bit of a simple life.
“I never want to MC and put on a heel ever again.
“I never want to put a heel on ever again, full stop.
“But I’m happy to go out there and do some key notes on skin cancer.
“I think as you get older it’s a beautiful thing to be able to have strength in saying ‘No, I’m focused more on this now, this is what I want to do’.”
She’s not sure where she’s moving to yet — somewhere coastal; possibly the “northern beaches” of Wollongong and certainly no more than “an hour and a bit” from Sydney; her beloved Sydney Swans and her golf club at Rosebery.
And whereas her three-bedroom Bronte home was built with purely herself in mind, she says “my future is not me being solo”.
It’s with the new love of her life, meditation guru Andrew Marsh.
“So that’s why it’s exciting for me to move on and plan more of a family home, you know — and no, I’m not pregnant,” she laughs.
Hutton’s planning for the future.
“The next house I’m going to build is bigger, it will include more people,” she said.
“I’ve got nephews in the Southern Highlands; they’re in Bowral — 14 and 16 — so I want to build a house down near there, so that they can come and stay.
“So it’s going to have more bedrooms.”
SAYING GOODBYE TO YOUR FOREVER HOME
Her current home, with its three bedrooms — one that she calls a “multipurpose room”, where friends from the US came for dinner and ended up staying a month during Covid; but is also her meditation room — is a stunner.
Hutton bought what was then a 1920s freestanding cottage for $3.8m in 2015 and rebuilt it.
But it was the view from the “little lounge” of the house, built on Bronte’s most elevated position, that won her over.
She says the huge upstairs living room of the new house, with extraordinary views up and down the coastline, “makes my heart sing every time I walk up those stairs”.
“I love the fact that I can see sunrises, moon rises, whales; I love the feeling that if I’m in this room alone I don’t feel alone, it’s a cosy big room.
“And then you go downstairs and I love my bathroom and I go in there and soak myself in a tub.
And then I go and have an infra-red sauna and come back out and have a shower and I feel like I’ve done an entire spa afternoon.”
There’ve been tough times, too. The reno hadn’t been long finished in 2018 when her ex-partner of six-and-a-half years, Robert Delhunty, concocted a bizarre story that had her believing a stranger had attempted to break into her home with a “rape kit”.
Hutton was at a wellness retreat during Delhunty’s court appearance in January 2019 — just months before Covid hit — when he avoided jail but was ordered to do 300 hours of community service and fined $660 plus more than $13,000 for wasting the police’s time.
But the court heard she’d written a letter supporting Delhunty’s continued treatment for his mental health and accepting his apology.
Today she describes the drama as “unfortunate”.
These days, the house has “one of the best security systems known to man … that was one good thing that came out of that”, she laughs.
But the house has plenty more going for it than good security.
I was impressed from the minute I walked up the front steps through the Myles Baldwin landscaped front garden.
The wide white-timber-panelled entrance hall with its grand staircase feels welcoming.
I said ‘wow’ as Hutton proudly showed me her “multipurpose” space; I loved the master bedroom and the sauna; and I let out a double wow when I saw the upstairs.
With its $10m price guide ahead of a November 27 auction, Michael Pallier, managing director of Sotheby’s, and Bethwyn Richards of The Agency, have every reason to be confident.
The eastern beaches market is booming — the Bronte house price record was smashed a few weeks back with the sale of 1 Marine Drive for $23.5m and Tamarama’s last week when a home fronting Tamarama Marine Drive went for more than $25m.
Pallier describes Hutton’s house as “beautiful … you could spend $100m and I don’t think you could replicate it”.
Richards says: “It’s incredible; magnificent.”
Hutton, meanwhile, will no doubt miss what she thought would be her “forever home”, but says “the next one is definitely the forever home.
“Until we sit down in eight years time and I say, no,” she laughs.
“No, we’re done. We’re done.”
DEBORAH HUTTON’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE EASTERN SUBURBS
Deborah Hutton has had a passionate love affair with eastern suburbs property ever since she bought her first home there in 1998, a Rushcutters Bay flat for $305,000.
She thought then that three-bedder, which the developer, Garry Rothwell of Winton Property Group had “knocked a few dollars off”, would be her “forever home”.
“It was the cutest apartment … I thought I’m never gonna move,” she told me.
But a year later, she and the late celebrity agent Harry M Miller, with whom she had an 11-year relationship, shacked up in two properties — “his ‘n’ her penthouse and pool house” — at Harry Seidler’s The Horizon in Darlinghurst.
“We were the first in Horizon … oh my God, they’d be worth a fortune now!”
Then came her move beachside — first, a house in Wonderland Ave, Tamarama, bought for $3,375,000 in 2007 and sold for $4.2m in 2015; and then her current home in Bronte, which had cost $3.8m that year.
“I built it as my forever home,” she said.
“Every time I’d make a decision about something I’d say yes I’ll spend that money because it’s my forever home.
“And then the architect who did this, when he found out I’m selling, he said your forevers don’t last that long! (bursts out laughing).
“And I said yeah, right, sorry about that.”
And even though Hutton is quitting the east, she says she’ll still be “around”.
“I’ll get a bolthole — that’s the whole plan — a little one or two-bedder or something.
“I don’t really mind if it’s next to a train line, so if I want to travel up and down the coast, I can.
“Though I could always drive.
“But I’ll still keep a toenail in Sydney.”
Deborah Hutton will be hosting: Find Your Dream Home on Foxtel in 2022.
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