RecipeTin Eats’ Nagi Maehashi cooks up $7m high-end home purchase

In property-obsessed Sydney, success so often translates to high-end real estate, so it is perhaps no surprise to discover best-selling author, food blogger and Good Food columnist Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats has shown up on the high-end housing market.

Records show Maehashi paid $7 million for a Victorian-era house in Hunters Hill that was sold off-market by BresicWhitney’s Nicholas McEvoy just four years after the same house sold for $4.75 million.

Nagi Maehashi and her dog Dozer at the Mona Vale house she sold for $6 million.Credit: James Brickwood

Maehashi is a former Brookfield Multiplex senior executive who opted out of corporate life to focus on her love of cooking and developing her global hit website.

The blog was turned into a book in 2022 called RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, which not only scored a place on the New York Times Best Seller list but was also last year awarded Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards – all while amassing 5 million followers across Facebook and Instagram alone.

Maehashi is coming from Mona Vale, where she purchased a house in 2019 for $3.5 million and sold it for $6 million to Clean Energy Partners’ Colin Liebmann and his wife, Julia.

Newcastle Nuts

Fernwood is the 1874-built house in Newcastle that was sold by the Norris Nuts family for $3.45 million.Credit: Domain

Still with our star influencers, the Norris Nuts YouTube family have sold their Newcastle family home for $3.45 million, more than triple what they paid for it nine years ago.

The historic 1874-built house, Fernwood, was purchased in 2015 for $1.05 million by family matriarch Brooke Norris, wife of former Olympic swimmer and bronze medallist Justin Norris.

But Justin’s bronze Olympic medal has long since been overshadowed by the family’s online success alongside their six kids Sabre, Sockie, Biggy, Naz, Disco and Charm, whose Norris Nuts social media accounts total almost 12 million followers and subscribers on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

The Norris family behind YouTube channel The Norris Nuts have swapped Newcastle for North Bondi.Credit: Internet

The Norris Nuts are off to North Bondi, where they have bought two neighbouring houses for a total of almost $30 million and added a $10 million block of apartments up the road, creating a $40 million property portfolio in less than two years.

Original Bondi Beach

The Andrew Burges Architects-redesigned house is one of Bondi Beach’s original cottages.Credit: Domain

Entrepreneur-turned-online publisher-turned-producer Jackie Maxted is selling one of Bondi Beach’s rare original sandstone cottages with a $7.25 million guide.

Jackie Maxted is a former online publisher, entrepreneur and yoga devotee.Credit: Jacky Ghossein

The historic house had scored a contemporary redesign by architect Andrew Burges when Maxted purchased it in 2015 for $4.55 million, soon after her Beauty Heaven Group was bought out by Bauer Media.

Maxted, who is best known more recently for producing the Netflix series Chef’s Table, has since bought an apartment in Bronte, paying $4.825 million in 2022 to Mandy and Daniel Simmons, a partner at one of Asia’s top-performing hedge funds OCP Asia.

Maxted’s Bondi Beach home goes to auction on April 13 through PPD’s Alexander Phillips.

Fun money dries up

The fun money market has thrown up a few questionable results for luxury holiday homes. Take this week’s house sale by UK private equity investor Thomas Fussell, who copped a $1.1 million loss on his Pearl Beach holiday home, selling it for $6.6 million.

The Pearl Beach holiday house was sold by Thomas and Louise Fussell for a $1.1 million loss.Credit: Domain

The co-founder of intelligence software Fast Search paid $7.7 million for the north-facing house in 2021, only to list it late last year with $8.5 million hopes through Coast Realty’s Stuart Gan.

Fussell and his wife Louise may not be fussed about the loss, given they set a local record in August when they upgraded locally to $12.25 million digs on the beachfront.

The sale comes as Gan has set a non-beachfront record of $4 million up the road selling a contemporary retreat to mining industry executive Julian Ludowici and his textile designer wife Bettina Moebius-Ludowici.

South of Sydney in Bundeena, the landmark beachfront pink house of stockbroker Tim Eustace and Salvatore Panui has sold for about $2.6 million – a loss on their purchase price of $2.85 million last year.

The landmark pink cottage was sold by stockbroker Tim Eustace and Salvatore Panui less than two years after they bought it.Credit: Domain

It was sold by PPD’s Debbie Donnelley after the New Zealand press revealed the couple had purchased a clifftop “castle” in North Taranki as their retreat away from their other historic home, Iona, the Darlinghurst mansion they bought in 2016 for $16 million from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin.

Clontarf classic

A sale campaign has started on the landmark Clontarf house long owned by the late Barbara Fienberg, who, alongside her daughter Anna Fienberg, wrote the award-winning children’s series Tashi.

The modernist house, designed by architect Peter Swan in the International style, was built in 1959 and updated in 1979 by architect Bruce Rickard after it was purchased by the Fienberg family for $115,000.

Anna Fienberg’s family home in Clontarf is for sale for $4.5 million.Credit: James Brickwood

Inside there are illustrations on the walls by the late Kim Gamble, who contributed illustrations to the Tashi series until his death in 2016.

Fienberg and her sister Linda have listed the family home with a $4.5 million guide with Marcus Lloyd-Jones, of Modern House.