Bay of plenty a billionaire’s playground

When Gerry Harvey and Katie Page bought land in Byron, people thought they were mad.

The most easterly point of Australia has become a playground of the nation’s millionaires - and billionaires who buy homes and set up luxe resorts.

When Gerry Harvey and Katie Page bought a piece of land south of Cape Byron in 2002 with plans to build a luxury resort, everyone thought they were crazy. Back then Byron Bay was known as a hippie, surfie town and a popular school holiday destination, but it was not a place where this country’s most successful entrepreneurs and artists came to relax and unwind.

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How times have changed. The most easterly point of Australia has become the playground of the nation’s millionaires - and billionaires - who not only holiday there but buy homes and even set up their own resorts and hospitality ventures.

There’s Harvey and Page’s Byron at Byron; mining magnates Brian and Peggy Flannery’s $100 million Elements of Byron Resort and Spa; Melbourne real-estate mogul Anthony Catalano’s boutique hotel Raes at Wategos; and the wealthy Melbourne-based Liberman family bought the Beach Hotel on Byron’s main street in 2017 for $70 million.

And that’s before you get to the celebrities: actor Chris Hemsworth (estimated by Forbes to be worth $US64.5 million, or $90.7 million), who paid $7 million in 2014 for a house in nearby Broken Head and is reportedly spending $10 million building his dream home (dubbed “fortress Hemsworth” by the locals), as well as the likes of television personality Carrie Bickmore, and former media executive David Gyngell and his wife, Channel Nine news host Leila McKinnon, who have relocated their family to the northern NSW coast.

Harvey, who founded retail giant Harvey Norman with the late Ian Norman, and Page, CEO of the company, decided to buy a property in Suffolk Park, just south of Byron Bay, after seeing the stunning 18ha subtropical rainforest that covered the land.

Harvey Norman CEO Katie Page and husband Gerry Harvey spotted the area’s potential early on. Picture: James Croucher

Harvey, who is worth $1.58 billion, has always had an affinity with Byron Bay, having fond memories of fishing there as an 18-year-old, while Page loves the people who have been attracted to the area since the 1970s.

“When we did it no one could understand why,” Page tells The Australian. “It was in Suffolk Park, not even a Byron Bay address, and people were questioning what we saw in it. The amazing rainforest and waterways, that is what we saw, and it was just so beautiful. The other thing I really loved about Suffolk Park that wasn’t well known at that time is that it is a very creative type of area.

You have all the people who are attracted to Suffolk Park and Broken Head; they are very creative.”

Page says she decided that if they were going to develop a resort on the land they wanted it to complement the environment, but with five-star luxury. They hired friends John and Lyn Parche, who ran hotels around the world, to take on the project. “They had a background with Aman Resorts and I wanted the skill set they had with [founder] Adrian Zecha, who has resorts in some of the most extraordinarily unique places in the world,” Page says.

The $100m Elements of Byron Resort & Spa.

It was not easy to develop their idea, as they met fierce opposition from the council and the local community. Byron at Byron Resort and Spa finally opened in December 2004, with the main building and pool looking over the extraordinary rainforest that originally caught their eye. The luxury and service elements - led by the Parches - were an immediate hit and the tranquillity of the resort soon attracted high flyers from across Australia and the world.

“We were quite visionary when you see what is happening now in Byron, and even when you look at how Suffolk Park has evolved,” Page says. “There are people who want to stay where we are and in the hinterland. It was just a small area then but now it is very big.”

A few years after Byron at Byron opened, the Flannerys came across a beachfront property north of the seaside hamlet and bought it on the spot. The couple had made their money in mining and property development (Brian is worth $1.02 billion) and Peggy purchased the land as a place for them to retire.

The couple’s Byron at Byron Resort & Spa.

“I didn’t even know it was zoned tourism; that was a bit of a shock,” she says of finding out she could not build her dream home on the $18.5 million plot. “Then we had to work out what to do with the site, and that is how it all started.”

Seven years, hundreds of hours of community consultation and $100 million later, they opened Elements of Byron Spa and Resort.

Then came a series of expansions (there are now 203 villas) and a solar-powered 1949 heritage diesel train to get passengers from Byron to the resort (it was a pet project of Brian’s to ease traffic congestion concerns). “You can go to a million places but you can never get the same feeling you do when you come to Byron. I think it’s the natural surroundings,” says Peggy of what attracted her to the place. “You can come to Byron and be yourself.”

Page puts the incredible popularity of Byron among Australia’s elite down to a number of things, including the spectacular natural surroundings and the memories people have of the area. Byron and its surrounds are the closest thing Australia had to Woodstock, she says, as well as being a surfing haven during the 1970s and 1980s.

“So you have all these people [who went there] who are now grown up and are Macquarie Banker types, but they all think back to when they were teenagers and they had that free and easy lifestyle,” she says. “Now they want to come here and put on their thongs and board shorts and relax. But they still want it styled in a certain way; it has to have a bit of luxury about it. That is the interesting thing.”

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