Quambone Castle is a 1022 square metre, seven-bedroom, six-garage, helipad-equipped Gold Coast hillside mansion with 180-degree uninterrupted ocean views, a full-size tennis court, a home cinema, a gym, a sauna, a billiard room, a wine cellar, a commercial cool room, and a pool. The pool is brown. We want to get that out of the way early, because the listing photographs it from a very respectful distance and the drone makes it look more contemplative than it is. The pool is not contemplative. The pool needs attention.
The listing describes Quambone Castle as ‘a canvas for your dreams’ and ‘a statement of opulence, affluence and leisure,’ and to be fair, all of those things were once true. Built in 1998 and sitting on 1.5 hectares of private hinterland above Worongary, the bones are genuinely extraordinary: sandstone balconies, hardwood floors that have been polished to a mirror shine, a kitchen with dual granite islands and a commercial walk-in cool room that suggests whoever built this house was expecting to cater for considerably more people than ended up living here. The entry hall has arched doorways. The staircase has wrought iron balustrades. There is a framed print of a man diving into lava hanging in the hallway, which the agent has left in, presumably because at this point the lava man is load-bearing.
The home cinema has crimson drapes, a gold and black damask carpet, and a striped sofa that is in better condition than the pool. The games room has a Chesterfield-fronted bar with a mirrored back bar and a Gottlieb pinball machine in the corner. The bathrooms have skyline views and backlit coral reef photography in the shower. The master suite has its own small kitchen. There is a helipad in the forecourt. There are six garages.
The tennis court is half red and half the colour of a tennis court that has been left to its own devices, which raises more questions than the listing answers. The mouldy exterior walls are doing their best. The agent calls the whole thing ‘a remarkable portion of real estate’ which is technically accurate and diplomatically vague in equal measure. For the right person with deep enough pockets and a genuine appetite for a project, Quambone Castle could be everything the listing says it is. For everyone else, it is a very large, very expensive, very brown-pooled reminder that maintenance is not optional. But it’s got a helipad.
