The List, nos 6, 82 and 198: Harry Triguboff, Arthur Laundy and Bob Magid
With fitness routines that speak to their enduring determination, veteran operators Harry Triguboff, Arthur Laundy and Bob Magid are not taking things lying down.
The wealthy can be highly secretive about most things. But they don’t hold back when it comes to sharing their strategies for keeping fit.
Billionaire publican Arthur Laundy reminisces about the physical workouts he got handling the security at his pubs in the old days before professional firms took over. “Oh god yeah, I did the security myself; if a problem occurred you had to fix it up,’’ says Laundy, who owns 80 pubs on the eastern seaboard, along with a handful of luxury hotels such as the Sofitel in Noosa. “It was quite a bit of exercise from time to time,” he says with a laugh. “In those days there was no security. It did not come in until the 1990s when we started employing security firms. The old publicans had no security at all.”
Multi-billionaire real estate developer Harry Triguboff has taken a less physical approach to exercise over the years and is keen to divulge his disparate training methods. At 88, he has a passion for billiards (it helps take his mind off things); walking (he likes strolling around Bondi Beach and Sydney’s Double Bay with friends); and swimming. When The List asked to photograph him at his private swimming pool, he responded: “Which pool? I have three swimming pools at my house.”
The Meriton Apartments founder, who is building around 3000 apartments on the eastern seaboard this year, says he religiously swims 20 laps of breaststroke a day. Despite already having two pools, he built a special indoor pool and a bubbling spa in the next-door neighbour’s house after adding it to his Vaucluse waterfront compound a few years ago. A tennis court was scrapped to pave the way to expand his lush Mediterranean garden, which includes a pond full of 10 sizeable carp as well as a resident water dragon.
The other two swimming pools are right on the harbourfront, where the self-made Triguboff has built a cabana, and there’s a timber boat shed where he enjoys the odd glass of champagne overlooking Sydney Harbour.
Read the full 2021 edition of The List: Australia’s Richest 250
Triguboff divulges that he once owned a motor boat, but his wife Rhonda declared “You ain’t no captain.” It has since been sold.
At night when he returns home from his city office, he plays billiards by himself, a childhood habit he picked up in Tianjin, south of Beijing, where he grew up. “I have been playing billiards all my life; it takes your mind off,” he says. “When I was a small boy they bought me a billiard table. We had a beautiful house and gardens built by the manager of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. The house is still there but the garden has been turned into apartments.”
Just around the Sydney Harbour foreshore at Point Piper, Robert Magid, a hotelier, property developer and investor, is equally forthcoming about his exercise habits. The youthful-looking Magid, who owns Sydney’s luxury Pier One Hotel as well as The Lindrum in Melbourne and turns 80 in October, has lived next to one of the country’s best-connected businessmen, David Gonski, at Point Piper for many years, on the former Paradis Sur Mer estate.
Magid, who like Triguboff was born in China, recently took up swimming in his seafront pool and has just bought a wetsuit to cope with the cooler months “I try to do 20 freestyle laps, but I don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer to do 20 of those laps; the pool is not large,” he says of his 13m harbourfront pool. So how often does he swim? “That is a moot point. It depends if it is summer or not. I often do it four times a week, after tennis. However, I am ashamed to say that I have only been swimming fairly recently. It’s more a visual pool than an active pool. The grandchildren like to jump into it. And we get a lot of waves coming in from the sea.
“I also have a gym, and I bought myself a folding bicycle so I can go around [nearby] Centennial Park,” he says. “I only ride on the footpath, I don’t trust myself in the traffic.”
At Point Piper, where Magid has lived for 25 years, he complains that he fields numerous calls from real estate agents wanting to sell his harbourfront spread. “I am approached about every month to sell and every time the price is higher – it’s an obscene amount of money,” he says, declining to reveal just how many tens of millions of dollars are being discussed. “The view from our garden is an almost rural view – if we look across the harbour we see trees all over Mosman and Neutral Bay, and on our left is the Harbour Bridge and the city. But most of what we see is wilderness; we have Shark Island and Manly in the distance. We see the entire spread of the harbour.”
Hotel tsar Arthur Laundy, valued at $1.4 billion, is also on the cusp of turning 80. Unlike his compatriots, he has eschewed a Sydney harbourfront home for the delights of the Parramatta River, out west.
The publican, who owns Sydney’s Watsons Bay Hotel, The Farm Byron Bay, and the Crowne Plaza Terrigal on the NSW Central Coast, having started amassing the hospitality portfolio since his late twenties, lives in an apartment in a waterfront complex at Cabarita, 16km west of the Sydney CBD. His home, one of several he owns in NSW, is deliberately close to his favourite pub and Laundy Hotels headquarters, the Twin Willows Hotel at Bass Hill.
A rugby union player in the 1950s and early 1960s, Laundy has stuck to the same exercise routine daily for the past 20 years, swimming 10 laps of the 30m pool in his apartment complex using a combination of freestyle and backstroke.
“There’s also a gym and bike riding,” he says. “I don’t do anything too exciting in the gym, but I do a lot of stretching. If I am lucky I am on the computer early in the morning, then I do the swimming, but if I go down late I don’t have time to do the gym as well.”
And does he swim all year round? “Yes, even if it is raining; in the winter the pool is heated.”
It seems you can’t keep a good man down.
Read the full 2021 edition of The List: Australia’s Richest 250
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