STAR PAD DEMO
BRAD Pitt, a celebrity in the world of movies, won’t be visiting one of his former ‘‘locations’’ if he ever gets back to the Gold Coast — the location is out of the picture.
It was a rather posh house perched upon Spyglass Hill at Sanctuary Cove, a property that afforded the ultimate in privacy for the rich and famous.
The resort’s owner, Mulpha, bought the 1000sq m ‘‘pad’’ for $3.26m and demolished it to facilitate the development of its site and an adjoining hectare.
The 31-year-old house moved into star status in 2013 when it was given a $3m-plus makeover and made available for big-ticket rentals, possibly at $15,000 or more a week.
Pitt and former wife Angelina Jolie reportedly aren’t the only A-listers to have ensconced themselves in the luxury and seclusion afforded by the property.
It’s been linked to other ‘‘names’’ such as Pink, David Grohl, Paris Hilton and London High Court litigant Johnny Depp.
The Spyglass Hill property had been through five owners prior to Mulpha and on one occasion was sold by a receiver.The seller to Mulpha, one Kelly Stride, is the only one to come out ahead, selling for $400,000 more than she paid in 2017.
The house sits on a near 3000sq m site, one of the biggest in the resort, and this will be added to the adjoining land to enable Mulpha to develop 26 lots.
They’ll sit within a body corporate known as Araucaria, taking its lot numbers to 98.
The Mulpha purchase of the Spyglass house is another chapter in the resort’s colourful history, one that started with the passing of the Sanctuary Cove Act in 1985 and the launch of the 474ha project by the late Mike Gore the following year.
The resort was bought from Bruce Judge’s Ariadne Australia in 1989 for $341m by Japan’s EIE investment group, backed by the Long Term Credit Bank.
An EIE offshoot, holiday club Southern Pacific Goshu, spent $34.4m between 1989 and 1991 buying 40 homes at the Cove, many of them built to Japanese tastes.
It paid $1.62m for the Spyglass house but receivers moved in on EIE and Southern Pacific in 1992 and the property was auctioned nine years later and sold for far less.
It had but one neighbour, a single-level home on nearly 2000sq m.
The ex-Goshu house had five bedrooms, all with en suites, and a separate granny flat for the use by the likes of butlers and maids.
An attraction for the movie stars, after a hard day’s filming, might have been the magnesium pool which was touted as naturally detoxifying bodies and relieving stress, anxiety, aches and pains. One of the women who looked through the stunning home in 2017 when it was on the market remarked, as she peered into one of the toilets, that the seat probably was ‘‘the one that Brad sat on’’.
“If I buy the place and ever sell it, I’m taking that seat with me,” the apparently flush lady remarked.
Where the seat has ended up after the demolition is anyone’s guess.