Burroughs scores $30 million for Bellevue Hill home after taking Westpac board seat

Veteran investment banker Tim Burroughs and his wife Judith will likely remember this Tuesday as a momentous one: his appointment to the board of Westpac was announced to the ASX at the same time as the couple’s Bellevue Hill home, Monkton, was sold.

The appointment of the former chair of investment banking at Goldman Sachs Australia was announced by chairman John McFarlane, and Burroughs is expected to take up the role in March.

The Bellevue Hill residence Monkton has sold for more than $30 million.Credit: Domain

He’ll serve alongside Lendlease chair Michael Ullmer, to replace former directors Steven Harker and Peter Marriott.

The sale price of the Burroughs family residence remains undisclosed by The Agency’s Ben Collier, but was listed late last year with a guide of $30 million to $32 million, and is believed to have sold well within that range.

The Burroughs have owned the landmark residence designed by acclaimed architect Espie Dods since 2001 when it was sold by Richard and Sandy Walker for $8.9 million.

The Mediterranean-style house boasts an impressive line-up of owners over its more than century-long history. In the early 1920s it was owned by the High Court judge Sir Dudley Williams, who sold it in 1958 to British Conservative MP Lord Angus Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Monkton last traded in 2001 for $8.9 million when sold by the Walker family.

Lord Maude purchased Monkton when he was brought to Australia by the Fairfax family to be the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, but only until 1963 when he returned to the motherland and the frontbench of the Tory Party, no doubt well-equipped for his role as spokesman on the colonies a few years later.

The Burroughs’ home went to auction on Saturday and passed in on a vendor bid of $30 million, and is believed to have been negotiated soon after.

It was one of six properties auctioned by Collier on Saturday, of which four were sold, totalling almost $70 million in sales.

Former Westpac director Steven Harker is no stranger to Sydney’s trophy market. In 2019, he and his wife Linda Heighway sold their waterfront home in Point Piper for $40 million to start-up investor Gabriel Jakob, making it one of three properties in a row on which Jakob is planning to consolidate and build a single mega-mansion.

Monkton is the most expensive house sale in the eastern suburbs so far this year, topped only in Sydney by the Lavender Bay sale of Idlemere for $42.2 million by property veteran and Sydney Swans board member Greg Paramor and his wife Kerry.

Lynda Van Der Weegen, wife of Histopath Diagnostic Specialists founder Dr Chris Douglas, took it off their hands.