Bubs Australia founder sells off Newport cottage after being ousted as CEO

By any measure Bubs Australia co-founder Kristy Carr has been busy of late, so it was somewhat surprising to see her Newport house at the end of Bungan Beach hit the market this week with a $5 million guide.

Carr was recently ousted as chief executive of the infant formula maker by new chair Katrina Rathie, who herself was only weeks into the role.

Krisy Carr’s contemporary Newport home is set directly behind her weatherboard cottage that backs onto Bungan Beach.Credit: Domain

Carr and the company’s recently deposed chair Dennis Lin then fired back, mounting a push to spill the board in a bid to parachute A2 Milk’s former executive Peter Nathan into the top job.

Carr has since stated on her LinkedIn that she was prevented from saying goodbye to her team, and Bubs’ second-biggest shareholder Jack Gance, of Chemist Warehouse, has weighed in with his support for the spill.

If that’s not exhausting enough, Carr is also juggling an investment reshuffle, offering up the cottage next door to her own contemporary beachside home – which is not for sale, despite the houses typically trading as a twin set.

Bubs Australia co-founder Kristy Carr recently resigned from the company board.Credit: James Brickwood

What’s more, listing agent LJ Hooker’s Lachlan Elder said this is the first time the cottage has been offered to the open market because it traded exclusively among neighbours for decades.

Carr purchased both properties for more than $12 million, of which $4 million was paid for the cottage, set on the beachfront’s largest block of 1500 square metres.

Among the previous owners of both are Amaysim co-founder Rolf Hansen, who sold up to live on his boat in Germany, and hotelier Ben May, who headed to the eastern suburbs.

A 1970 classic

Here’s one to delight the Labor lovers among us: a 1970-built house in Bardwell Valley in mint retro condition, long home to the late local Labor MP Bill Morrison, is for sale for the first time.

The Bardwell Valley home of Bill and Marty Morrison is up for sale for the first time since it was built more than half a century ago.Credit: Domain

Bill Morrison was Minister for Science in the Whitlam government.Credit: Mervyn George

The north-facing home with a swimming pool might never have materialised on the clifftop if not for the persuasive powers of former prime minister Gough Whitlam, who in 1969 convinced then diplomat Morrison to give up his gig serving as Australia’s deputy high commissioner to Malaya to contest the federal seat of St George, as it was then.

Morrison did, winning the seat against incumbent Liberal Len Bosman – although it was another three years before the Whitlam government would follow suit and win the election in 1972. By then Morrison and his wife Marty had already built their family home in the electorate, remaining there until he died in 2013. Marty, a teacher-turned-human rights and refugee activist, died in 2021.

Pricing the Morrison family home will be no easy feat for Raine & Horne’s Steve Lembidakis, but meantime buyers should budget near the $2.5 million level ahead of the June 24 auction.

That’s settled then

Settlement this week also revealed Yang Jingmin, of a property development family from China, as the buyer of Clontarf’s recently sold $32.18 million modernist mansion Portovenere.

The sale through Monika Tu’s BlackDiamondz almost tripled the $11 million that the property last traded for in 2016 when sold by the Belgiorno-Nettis family to Madina Tao and Mongkol Phara, of Cambodia’s ruling families.

The sale of the 3000 square metre property in Clontarf is the highest locally.Credit: Domain

Still with big-ticket settlements, former ASX-chief Dominic Stevens and his wife Emma have pocketed $52.25 million for their Bellevue Hill home, Belhaven, from local trophy home seller Douka Kontopos.

The sale result confirms its place as the fourth most expensive house sale of 2022, and more than doubled the $21 million he paid for it in 2017.

The Point Piper boat shed sold in 2021 for $38.5 million to a Murdoch family trust.

Sarah and Lachlan Murdoch have transferred ownership of their Point Piper boatshed into their own names.Credit: Darrian Traynor

And two years after Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch purchased a boat shed in Point Piper for $38.5 million, they have finally lodged it in their own names. It was recently transferred from their McCullough Robertson trust, in which it was held after they purchased it from the Scharrer family in 2021.

The Murdochs are known for biding their time on property. They waited a year after buying a $4.4 million house in Bellevue Hill in 2016 that threatened the privacy of their Le Manoir estate before they put it in their own names.

Up the river with $11m

Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart is set to welcome US tech pioneer Adam Bosworth to her Brisbane neighbourhood after he moved Down Under and bought a house two doors from her Brisbane River estate in Hawthorne.

Bosworth, a former senior executive at Google and Microsoft, paid $11.1 million for the riverfront house sold by Dan Wade, an executive in Rinehart’s privately owned mining company Hancock Prospecting. Small world, huh?

The three-level house purchased by tech veteran Adam Bosworth is set on 1619 square metres of river frontage in Brisbane.Credit: Domain

Wade had renovated the house since he purchased it in 2020 for $9.9 million and listed it earlier this year with Place Bulimba’s Sarah Hackett.

Wade did better on his Noosa investment. The waterfront house was purchased in 2020 for $10.9 million, gussied up and sold late last year for $23.25 million to Jaclyn Gazal, the wife of Bellevue Hill rag trader David Gazal.

Rinehart is registered as a Perth resident on her corporate records, but her Brisbane estate – a consolidation of two properties purchased for a total of $18 million – is one of the city’s most expensive.