Australia’s youngest billionaire set to spend $145m on Melbourne’s ghost mansion
Australia’s youngest billionaire is spending a stunning $145m from his crypto gambling empire to overhaul Melbourne’s ‘ghost mansion’. Take a look inside his plans for it.
This is the first look at what will be Australia’s most expensive house ever.
In the Melbourne billionaires’ enclave of Toorak, cryptocurrency gambling magnate Edward Craven, 28, is spending a stunning $145 million to overhaul the property known as “the ghost mansion” into a sleek, modern home unlike any other in the country.
This year’s The List – Richest 250, where Craven appears among the nation’s wealthiest people, has obtained renders of the plans for the property on prime land on the prestigious St Georges Road, which Australia’s youngest billionaire paid $80 million for less than two years ago.
This article appears in The List — Australia’s Richest 250, published March 15, where Craven is ranked in the top 40.
That transaction obliterated the previous record Victorian house price of $52.5 million, and Craven’s rebuild is several times more expensive than Leon Kamenev’s amalgamation of four waterfront sites in Sydney’s Vaucluse into a single mansion, which was completed last year.
Designed by renowned Melbourne architect Paul Conrad, Craven’s huge Toorak property will feature about 8000sq m of internal space.
It draws inspiration from previous work Conrad undertook for a client in the Hamptons in New York State.
The symmetrical front facade shows an elegant formality said to give a sense of “harmony and balance” from the street and an air of calm and retreat at the rear of the main house.
Work began on Craven’s property in early February, after the demolition of the half-built French Renaissance-style mansion that once dominated the site. The house earned its macabre reputation after sitting untouched and empty for 32 years.
Excavation is underway for an extensive space below ground, and traffic on the prestigious road has been disrupted by the constant activity on the site, with work being overseen by Melbourne building and developing firm Davies Henderson.
The renders for Craven’s huge mansion reveal what will be a contemporary home, with two storeys above ground.
A large front entrance opens into spacious ground-floor living areas. The back of the property will include a sizeable in-ground pool and a modern outdoor entertainment space, set next to considerable lawn areas.
Steps lead down from the pool to a huge tree and plant-lined and fully grassed private internal courtyard to create space that could be used for entertaining and functions.
The estate’s main building flanks the pool and courtyard space to one side, with the renders also offering a glimpse of what will be large indoor ground and below ground areas.
Enquiries to the local Stonnington council about the property revealed there was no need for planning approval for Craven, given that permission had previously been granted for the site back in 2001. A building permit has been issued for a dwelling of up to four storeys.
Architect Paul Conrad has been quoted saying Craven’s new build would not be a “big house for the sake of a big house”.
He indicated he was more concerned with the quality of the spaces in the mansion rather than the number of bedrooms and other features.
Craven’s revamped property is set to take about three years to complete, and requires demolishing the “skeleton” of the existing structure on the site that had sat idle.
The so-called “ghost mansion” was once owned by Hoyts Entertainment owner Leon Fink, who died in 1993. Two years before his death, Fink sold it for $5 million to David Yu, chief executive of property developer Ausvest, just as Australia was emerging from its last recession.
Yu left the property untouched. He quietly put it on the market in early 2020, having owned it just shy of three decades. He had reportedly turned down several offers for it over the years, and in 1992 his plans to subdivide the land into nine lots had been rejected by local authorities.
When the initial build was abandoned, electrical wiring had only been partially installed, and wires are said to have been left hanging from the ceiling, while the garden was left unkempt and overgrown for the best part of 30 years.
Craven’s Stake.com business partner Bijan Tehrani hosted a Halloween party at the “ghost mansion” in 2022, which filled the property with zombies, werewolves and naughty angels as more than 400 influencers and young entrepreneurs turned up.
Demolition began last November, with a wrecking ball being seen from a nearby property knocking down much of the previous mansion’s red brick outer walls.
The new house is likely to be considerably bigger and more impressive than nearby Toorak mansions such as Harry Stamoulis’ $70 million knockdown and rebuild, which also took about three years to complete.
That mansion is understood to include five bedrooms, a ballroom, two kitchens, nine bathrooms and powder rooms, and live-in staff quarters.
Craven will likely be 31 by the time the house is ready, but he has another Toorak mansion to reside in while building works at St Georges Road take place.
He paid $38 million in March 2022 for a two-level Orrong Road home set on almost 2000sq m, which had been rebuilt by Melbourne property developer Will Deague.
The Orrong Road house was also designed by Paul Conrad and may provide some further clues regarding Craven’s plans for the “ghost mansion”. It includes a pool, a curved staircase and a sculptural reflection pond in the private entry court, while an installation of 50 ball lights by Articolo Studios graces the dining area.
The property’s outdoor precinct and plantings were created by renowned garden designer Paul Bangay.
Craven started his Stake.com cryptocurrency casino and sports book business with Tehrani in 2017. Because it’s an online gambling platform, the website is banned from operating in Australia, but the firm has made huge profits from hundreds of thousands of punters in unregulated markets around the world.
Stake.com has evolved into one of the biggest gambling entities globally, and in 2022 Craven and Tehrani created another valuable online company, the Kick streaming platform, which is growing quickly and has plans to rival global giant Twitch.
Both the Stake and Kick brands will also feature on the cars of Formula 1 team Sauber this year as part of a naming rights and sponsorship deal for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
