Luxury Excess: Australia's Most Over-The-Top Mansions
Some houses have money. These houses have money and no interest in hiding it. Luxury Excess is our category for the mansions, manors and mega-builds where restraint was never part of the brief — gold leaf on the walls, marble by the truckload, wine cellars, home theatres, six-car garages, chandeliers doing far more work than any chandelier should reasonably be asked to do. This isn't a dig. We love it. There's something genuinely admirable about a house that commits fully to more, more, and then a bit more on top, and these are the Australian properties that took that brief and ran with it in every direction at once. If your idea of a good real estate listing includes the words “imported Italian marble” or “full-size indoor bar,” you're in the right place.
For SaleFort Knox, But Damp
Made the list because somewhere in the design process, someone looked at a two-storey void running through the middle of a castle and thought 'yes, that's where the pool goes' and nobody in the room disagreed.
SoldStudio 54: Kenthurst
Made the list for being an actual functioning nightclub that also happens to come with 5 acres, a tennis court and a cricket practice wicket.
Not for saleJesus Take The Wheel: Oran Park
Made the list for a spiral staircase so dramatic it needed a compass rose inlaid into the marble floor beneath it, a ceiling that appears to have been designed by someone who had just discovered what a computer could do, a life-size Jesus statue standing vigil in the master bedroom, and a crucifix mounted directly behind the dining table so that every family dinner is technically a Last Supper.
For SaleGidget Goes to Palm Springs
Made the list for two bars (one with a keg, one with banana-leaf wallpaper), a yellow water slide off the upper deck, brolgas painted across every wall of the kitchen, and an open-plan ensuite arrangement that assumes a lot about your relationship.
For SaleThe Randwick Royale
Made the list for an upstairs landing dressed in full gold leaf and marble columns, a blue bathroom going head to head with a rust bathroom for supremacy, and a basement bar with its own five-stool lineup and granite wet bar.
SoldThe F.A.C. Manor: Beverly Hills, NSW (Not That One)
Made the list for a living room where the wallpaper and the carpet are both doing maximalist florals simultaneously and somehow neither one blinked first, a home office that appears to have been designed for a Victorian-era villain, and an exterior that promises Beverly Hills California and delivers Beverly Hills NSW, which is its own very specific thing.
For SaleLion Around: Geelong's Lion-Statue Mansion
Made the list for fourteen lion statues, a billiard room where the photos have colonised the ceiling, a garage named The Stables with a coat of arms above the door, and a wine cellar with a porthole window looking up through the floor of the pool.
For SaleSix Ensuites and a Climbing Wall
Made the list for a staircase that spirals through three storeys like a piece of sculpture, a bedroom with its own indoor climbing wall, and a “wellness retreat” tucked inside the garage.
For SaleThe Earth Castle
Made the list for having functional drawbridges, a cascading indoor waterfall, a secret room behind the wine cellar, and a living grass roof you can do yoga on while overlooking the valley.
For saleBaltimore: The Gold Coast's Only Home Casino
Made the list for having a fully operational casino in the living room — roulette wheel, card tables, custom bar stools embroidered with 'Baltimore Casino' in gold, and a carpet that could only have been chosen by someone who had just returned from a very good time at Star City.
For saleQuambone Castle: A Fixer-Upper With Delusions of Grandeur
Made the list for a 1022sqm Gold Coast mansion that the listing calls 'a canvas for your dreams' and the photos call 'a very large project.' The pool is brown.
SoldThe Sandcastle House
Made the list for a hand-corbelled limestone turret nobody wanted to build, a moat you cross on stepping stones because apparently the drawbridge budget ran out, gothic light fittings the owner spotted at Disneyland and simply had to have, and a cheetah-skin runner laid down the spiral stair for reasons the listing does not attempt to explain.
For SaleSydney's Pink Palace
Made the list for looking exactly like a tin of Taubman's Canyon Pink fell off a high shelf, rolled through every room of a Harry Seidler high-rise, and nobody was handed a rag in time.
SoldLiving In Freakin' Disney World
Made the list for being inside Golden Oak, the only residential neighbourhood Disney has ever let anyone actually live in, complete with a home cinema built as a full-scale Millennium Falcon cockpit, an exact replica of the marble fireplace from Cinderella's Castle apartment, and an outdoor pizza oven shaped like Toothless.
SoldIvy League: Darling Point
Made the list for being a genuine c1920s Darling Point trophy home, renovated by a celebrity interior designer and sold for $21 million, that still found room for a rooster portrait hung with pride in the one room dedicated to eating things that used to have feathers, a kitchen bench that looks like the marble ran out halfway through the pour, and a staircase runner striped enough to double as a field sobriety test.
Buy stuff from the houses.
We found the houses. We tracked down the vibe. We did the hard work so you can impulse-buy a cheetah-print cushion at 11pm and call it interior design.