Approval for Bell Financial Group chief Alastair Provan $1m Palm Beach renovation plans
The Bell Financial Group chief Alastair Provan secured approval for his Palm Beach renovation plans.
The Bell Financial Group chief Alastair Provan secured approval for his Palm Beach renovation plans earlier this month. It simply involves demolishing the neighbouring house and extending his existing weekender.
The extension, which will have the new master bedroom plus ensuite, study, and more garaging, has been costed at $1.17m with its Quattro Architecture design.
In 2019 the Hyde Park-based Provan and his wife Jan added the adjoining lot for $5.2m to the double block they’d bought in 2004 for $4.3m from the late Ten director John Studdy.
All up it’s 2745sq m on Bynya Road overlooking the ocean.
As more money than ever is being poured into renovating or replacing already pricey property on Sydney’s northern beaches, the recent honours for the priciest project go to radiologist power couple Naree Jessup and Richard Welshman.
Their $4.79m new build will replace the 1970s home they purchased in 2019 for $4.1m.
It will be a two-storey, five bedroom home with an infinity pool, bar and gym on its 1370sq m Ralston Road holding.
Work to be done
Geoffrey Ainsworth, the pokie scion, seeks $600,000 of alterations to the Palmie weekender that he and poet Johanna Featherstone bought for $7.45m in 2018.
And work is under way on the $1.8m plans for the Avalon waterfront of providore Simon Johnson and his partner, medical diagnostic firm manager David Nichols. They traded in their Iain Halliday-designed Whale Beach abode for a Riverview Road waterfront with boathouse and jetty which cost $4.1m through LJ Hooker agent David Watson in 2018. Halliday has done the design while Johnson has a recently secured a yacht to match.
Lifting the appeal
Not as lavish on the development front, but a sign of the times, sees Doug Flynn, who made his corporate name in Britain at Rentokil, get approval for a $150,000 lift installation at his Whale Beach weekender.
His neighbour, barrister Tony Bannon, indicated support but with concerns about the likely reflections from the moving external lift along with lift noise.
Apparently arthritis on the right knee is causing Flynn difficulty with the 40 steps from the garaging at the Gabriel Poole-designed pole house which cost him and his wife Lynne $2.9m in 2009.
Birthday buddies
Birthday buddiesIt’s been one long lost summer for those at the pricey tip of the peninsula amid the Northern Beaches lockdown. Perhaps a busier Australia Day long weekend than normal, but no big parties, not even for property developer Garry Rothwell’s 76th birthday, and no international stars either. Just home-grown ones like filmmaker Kate Riedl, spotted out power walking with the ANZ’s Maile Carnegie, who with her executive consultant husband Charles Carnegie spent $3.52m in 2015 and secured approval for their Whale Beach James de Soyres redesign late last year.
Riedl and Macquarie Bank head of personal banking Ben Perham paid $6m for their Palm Beach weekender in 2017, buying from the former Chanel PR supremo Gail Davidson and adman Mike Hale.
Perham is an occasional entrant into the Macquarie Big Swim from Palm Beach to Whale Beach, which is set for next weekend. Perham’s former boss Nicholas Moore is a regular, given he’s had a Whale Beach weekender since paying $2.25m in 2000 and rebuilding in 2005. Moore typically betters Perham’s time by a minute or two.
Koombahla buyer
Interior designer Jennie Cadman, wife of Duane Cadman from the StepStone Group, has emerged as the $8.8m buyer of the Palm Beach property, Koombahla.
It was sold by former Woolworths boss Bill Wavish and his wife Vonnie, who are now renting overlooking Balmoral, having also sold their Kurraba Point harbourfront for $19.5m last year.
Over their 11-year ownership, the weekender had been fetching $25,000-a-week peak rental. It was the venue of Jennifer Hawkins and Jake Wall’s engagement party. No approval yet for Jen and Jake’s Whale Beach project at Dame Joan Sutherland’s knockdown home, Rocca Bella.
But there’s no neighbourhood opposition to their $3m plans for the 3300sq m estate, bought for $6.95m through David Edwards at LJ Hooker from Lorraine Tarabay, the chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor has been spotted house sitting elsewhere on the peninsula, as its owners took off for Italy early during the pandemic, along with their two cats.
City living
Lisa Keighery, the widow of fashion designer Mark Keighery, has bought back in the city in a ripple effect following the sale of Simpsons Hotel in Potts Point as a residential investment project to Amber Symond, the wife of mortgage broker John Symond.
Its seems the $12.5m Simpsons seller Keith Wherry will be upgrading within the nearby Pomeroy complex on Macleay Street.
And his redundant Pomeroy unit has been snapped up off market by Keighery, who sold her Palm Beach beachfront to Bruce Corlett, the former director of Servcorp and previously FAI, Ariadne, Stockland and Industrial Equity Limited.
Settled early January amid the lockdown, the deal was done in September by McGrath agent Will Manning.
The Corletts had quit the peninsula in 1988 with their Coasters Retreat waterfront Whitehaven fetching $725,000 in boomtime 1988 then resold at $707,000 in 1996.
$10m-plus sales
There were six sales above $10m at Palm Beach during 2020, taking the all-time total to 25, and two at Whale Beach, with its tally at eight including $13.1m in 2012 to John Grill, the mining services veteran.
The top sale late last year came when the Watsons Bay-based Clear Skincare Clinics founder Dr Philippa McCaffery spent $11.5m on her Whale Beach Road weekender through LJ Hooker agent Peter Robinson.
Record price
Palm Beach got its official new record house price of $24m back in February with the sale of Melaleuca, the trophy home of the late media legend Sam Chisholm to Mike Messara, co-CIO at Caledonia. The price matched the Packer family’s nearby internal 2015 transfer to Gretel Packer at a nominal $24m.
The Chisholm family’s sale eclipsed the $22m sale next door of Kalua to retired car dealer Laurie Sutton in 2012.
Kirkby’s century
There were well-wisher letters delivered to Morning Bay on Pittwater last week, including one from the Queen, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Elisabeth Kirkby on January 26.
Kirkby was last in the news in 2014 when she became Australia’s oldest university graduate, with her thesis on the orthodox economic theories that did little to relieve the hardship caused during the last Depression under the influence of leading economists including J.B. Brigden and E.O. Shann. She’s of course best remembered as the actor in the role of Lucy Sutcliffe in the 1970s soap opera Number 96, and representing the Australian Democrats on Macquarie Street from 1981 until 1998.
Competing Bids spotted a $3.2m purchase on the bay late last year by Darren Holland, the Aventus chief executive. Morning Bay’s previous highest sale was $2.75m in 2016 when hotelier Justin Hemmes bought from architect Laurence Eastwood.
King of the hill
Commanding sweeping views over its 50ha in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, this hilltop property is for sale at $3.9 million-plus.
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