Actor Simon Baker upsizes to $6.5 million Bronte trophy home from Bondi Beach apartment
The Hollywood-based actors Simon Baker and Rebecca Rigg have splashed out $6.5 million on a Bronte home.
They made the bullish off-market purchase of the recently completed three-bedroom contemporary home last month.
The couple have an apartment on the Ben Buckler peninsula overlooking Bondi Beach and a hideaway at Nashua, in the Byron Bay hinterland.
Before that they owned a Paddington terrace, which was sold in 2007 for $3.3 million.
They had paid $2.63 million for their Bondi bolthole, in an older-style block, in early 2014. The three-bedroom, two-bathroom unit has a staircase to a 135sq m rooftop terrace.
Ballina-raised Baker is known to enjoy a surf. Their new Bronte pad was designed to capture beach and ocean views, with approval from Waverley Council in late-2012.
The sale of the hillside 380sqm property with flat-roofed home is the highest price in Bronte since last October. The holding, close to Macpherson Rd village, had last sold in 2005 for just $3.1 million.
It is just a short distance to the fashionable Three Blue Ducks cafe.
The top Bronte sale sits at $16.5 million along the exclusive strip known as The Cutting on the ocean side of Bronte Rd overlooking the beach and ocean.
Baker, who recently undertook his first directorial job, is best known for his lead roles as Patrick Jane in TV series The Mentalist, and as Nicholas Fallin in The Guardian.
He has also promoted brands such as Givenchy and Longines and the ANZ Bank — but it seems in this case there was no need for any local mortgage financing.
The couple relocated to the US in the mid-1990s.
Actors Simon Baker and Rebecca Rigg married in 1998, having met in the early ’90s on the set of Aussie soap E Street in which their characters, Baker’s Constable Sam Farrell and Rigg’s Nurse Amy, were also a couple. Rigg stepped back from her acting career to raise the couple’s children Stella, Claude and Harry.
The couple weren’t sighted around Byron Bay on their recent trip home, perhaps because of their eastern suburbs home search.
But they typically escape the paparazzi by heading to their hinterland retreat, having paid $1.5 million for the 7ha property in 2009. The rambling homestead with pool and tennis court was once owned by Northern Rivers royalty, the Scarrabelotti family.
This article and photo first appeared in the Saturday Daily Telegraph.
