After finally departing the Byron Bay mansion, Cedar Springs (left) in Possum Creek, built by actor Paul Hogan, British born banker Duncan Mount (right) and his horse mad wife Sally are auctioning off their fabulous collection of antiques at Shapiro's Auction gallery in Queen Street Woollahra on October 26th.
Hogan built the house for his 1990 wedding to actress and
Crocodile Dundee co-star
Linda Kozlowski, However he rarely visited the property and it was on the market for 10 years before the Mounts moved into the 25 room palace.
The Mounts have taken up temporary residence in a $3.5M penthouse in Bellevue Hill, built by would be property developer
Gary Baker who has fallen on hard-times with the collapse of his property empire. Baker and his wife
Karin Upton Baker, boss of
Hermes were neighbours of the Mounts in Sydney.
Last year the Mounts began to sub-divide Possum Creek with it's hundreds of rolling acres of prime land and forests that back onto the uber resort of Byron. Each of the plots sold for $2M as the couple prepared to enter the Sydney social scene aga
in.
The furniture collection was housed in Byron Bay and the couple's equestrian centre on the northern beaches at Ingleside which they sold for $7.3M earlier this year. The remainder of the Possum Creek property with Cedar Springs is priced at $7.9M.
Emigrating from Hong Kong in 1996, Duncan and Sally paid $15M for the Spanish style mansion
Boomerang in Elizabeth Bay, selling six years later for $20.5M . The glamorous pair were a regular sight around the Eastern Suburbs as they ferried their kids to school in a Bentley Continental convertible.
The Mounts threw some memorable parties at Boomerang including one for
Jennife
r Lopez.The house was also featured in the film
Mission Impossible 2 and
Tom Cruise offered to buy the house from the Mounts as his Sydney base for he and then wife
Nicole Kidman.
Duncan mentioned over drinks to
the Shuttle one night that he was slightly miffed that Cruise's film crew clambered through Boomerang for 2 weeks and although Tom promised him an invite to the movie's premiere-the invitation never arrived.
Auctioneer
Andrew Shapiro says : '
'This is the biggest collection that has ever come on the market, and it is all museum-quality,'' ''It's even bigger than the Elton John collection which sold at Christies in 2003.''Amongst the 250 lots there are designs by modern artists like
Andre Dubreuil,
Mark Brazier-Jones and
Scott Cunningham with works cast in bronze, finished in ornamental glass plus paintings and a range of traditional antiques, mainly French, Italian and English from the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection is estimated to sell for about $500,000.
You can view and drool over the pieces at the Shapiro's
on-line catalogue here.Meanwhile the woes of the Mount's close former neighbours, Gary and Karin Upton Baker continue as around the same time as the Mount Collection sale, their beautiful Elizabeth Bay duplex which is directly opposite Boomerang goes up for auction.
The scene for parties for the likes of
Giorgio Armani and
Elle McPherson, the property has a 3 car garage with a turn table-now empty. The Upton Baker's Bentley and
Rolls Royce Phantom having been sold to satisfy creditors.
Boomerang which featured in Mission Impossible 2
