From her parents’ garage to a $13.75m waterfront home by age 37

Now 37, Lu has remained on the Young Rich List since, most recently with an estimated net wealth of $53 million.

Miner takes gold

Recent talk among the good folk of Longueville has been of a $19 million house sale, and after weeks of incredulous looks it was confirmed this week when micro-cap investor Gervaise Heddle settled on the heritage-listed Hazelwood residence.

Not since the Rossi estate in nearby Northwood sold for $24.1 million to lender Owen Chen - since burnt to the ground - has the Lane Cove Council area seen a house sale reach such dizzy heights.

But there it is in ink, the $19.25 million purchase with no need for a mortgage by Heddle, the former chief executive of gold explorer and developer Greatland Gold, and his partner Jocelyn Fuller.

Cashing in on the grand residence with swimming pool and tennis court is former Oroton board member Eddie Chieng, chair of boutique property developer Selangor Dredging Behad, and Yoke Lan Choi, who purchased it almost 20 years ago for $5.95 million.

Hazelwood has had a slew of prominent owners since it was built in 1886 by local landowner Richard Hayes Harnett and sold to bank inspector James Ballantyne two years later.

From the late 1970s it was owned by the late property developer Marshall Brentnall, who doubled the land size buying adjoining blocks and commissioned a major extension in the early 1990s that won a Master Builders Association award.

Brentnall and his wife Lyn sold it in 1996 for $2.9 million to mining entrepreneur Alan Doyle, who is best known for co-founding Turnbull Doyle Resources with future PM Malcolm Turnbull and the late former premier Neville Wran.

Speaking of Doyle, his former wife Donna Doyle has sold her Mosman home for $9.2 million through Pello’s Stefon Bertram, which is a handsome gain on the $5.95 million she paid for it in late 2016 to cricket power couple Alyssa Healy and Mitchell Starc.

At the time Doyle was trading down from a $17 million house up the road a few months after her former husband was named in the Panama Papers linking him to nine offshore entities.

Not that there’s anything wrong with offshore entities, but the house sale was enough to prompt an audit by the tax office, which alleged Donna had not declared income from overseas sources, and slugged with her a $14 million tax bill.

Roxy’s buyer

The $15.8 million buyer of Roxy Jacenko’s lavishly adorned Vaucluse home has emerged on title records as Zhang Wen, who doesn’t share Jacenko’s high profile locally but does come with her own impressive array of corporate interests.

Zhang is a director of China’s food, beverage and medicine giant Goubuli Group, and daughter of the company’s chairman Zhang Yansen, who has been spearheading an expansion into Australia’s pharmaceutical and coffee markets for more than a decade.

Think co-operating agreements with Blooms Health Products and the Gloria Jeans franchise, as well as buying a stake in probiotics company BJP Laboratories and Phytologic vitamin distributor.

Zhang’s purchase was a good deal for Jacenko even with the $6.5 million she paid for the house in 2018 and the millions of dollars spent on the Blainey North do-up.

Don’t be surprised to see the nearby Vaucluse house that Zhang purchased in 2018 for $6.5 million from Gresham corporate advisory managing director Neville Spry and Susan Shehadie hit the market soon.

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