Gold Coast Hinterland’s ‘Great Gatsby’ mansion sells for $5.5m

THE grand vision on Mt Tamborine took a long time to emerge from a stuttering start but emerge the VIP mansion did. Now, it has changed hands for $5.5 million.

This mansion in North Tamborine has sold for $5.5m.

A WOMAN whose job is making dough out of dough has popped up as the new owner of what previously might well have been called the VIP mansion on Mt Tamborine.

Alicia Atkinson has spent a healthy $5.5 million, a record for the mountain, on a glamorous home exhibiting shades of the Great Gatsby era.

The property has a colourful past and for years was something of a mystery to Mt Tamborine residents.

This mansion in North Tamborine has sold for $5.5m.

Alicia is no mystery. She is the director of the bakery and cafe divisions of Gold Coast company Retail Food Group, whose businesses include Brumby’s Bakery and Michel’s Patisserie.

RFG has been a winner for investors since it listed on the ASX and 46-year-old Alicia appears to have contributed to that success, and also to have benefited from it.

Her Mt Tamborine property has been purchased from Tony and Christina Quinn, the couple who built the VIP Petfoods business before it drew a $410 million ‘bite’ from a private equity group.

The Quinns, who after VIP moved on to sweeter things by buying the Darrell Lea chocolates business, picked up the Curtis Rd property for $1.25 million in 2011.

It was an unfinished work of former bankrupt Bob Sukic, who started building it in 2007, and was bought from receivers to a Sukic company.

This mansion in North Tamborine has sold for $5.5m.

Dapper Bob later also saw the family home at Sorrento sold from under him for $565,000.

His Mt Tamborine exercise puzzled many ‘Tamborites’ who had no idea who was behind the giant home’s construction.

One suggestion was that a wealthy pastor had commissioned it and another was that it was being built as a weekender for a bishop from the former Yugoslavia.

The Quinns spent millions on the house when they bought the task of completing the Sukic dream.

The end result has been an opulent white mansion, complete with chapel and caretaker’s residence, sitting on a private 2ha site.

Alicia’s new pad also has an indoor pool, theatre, music room, marble pillars and floors, gold trimmings in a formal dining room, and a tennis court.

The price she has paid, $5.5 million, is quite a drop on the $10 million or so ask originally suggested for the mansion.

Alicia has bought the property through GJDT Investments and company records give her a Sanctuary Cove address — a $1 million property owned by a company associated with former RFG boss Tony Alford.

Alicia, in 2011 and while listed as an executive of RFG, was appointed chief operating officer of a company well removed from the food industry.

The listed Vmoto makes electric scooters and at one time was the subject of nibbles by an entity with RFG links.