Tim Gurner likes control. He oversees a multibillion-dollar pipeline of luxury apartment towers and swanky wellness clubs, but he’s also the one signing off on the perfect sauna door handle, driving six hours north of Brisbane to select a perfectly sized palm tree, and deliberating over the perfect signature Gurner scents piped soothingly through his properties. “I’m a little pedantic about it,” he says about smells.
This eye for detail is no doubt how he rose in a decade from being a small Melbourne-based property developer to having a national footprint and ambitions to be no less than the “leading wellness brand in the world”. “Tim leaves nothing to chance,” says publisher Morry Schwartz, who mentored Gurner at his property development company between 2006 and 2010. “Tim is highly intelligent, a great thinker and understands things very quickly. I know a few people like that, but not many who are able to control the world around themselves like Tim.”
But for a man who likes control, what’s intriguing about Gurner, 43, is that – at seemingly regular intervals – total chaos rains down upon him. Thrust unwillingly into these situations, he finds that, despite straightening every pile of designer books on every display-suite coffee table at perfect right angles, his world is rendered completely askew. And sometimes it’s his fault.
Twice he’s made comments so unpopular they unleashed a global backlash. In 2017, he suggested aspiring home-buyers needed to stop buying “smashed avocados for $19 and four coffees at $4 each” (Millennials, predictably, did not appreciate this budgetary advice from a then-35-year-old multi-millionaire). Then, in 2023, he told a property summit Australia was suffering a post-COVID-19 productivity decline and people needed reminding that “they work for the employer, not the other way around”. This could be achieved, he said, via “pain in the economy” and a jump in unemployment of “40, 50 per cent”. His comments were viewed 27 million times on Twitter (now X). “What a complete and utter knob,” one person tweeted, and that’s a mild example of the fury he unleashed. (Though Gurner apologised for his insensitivity, he doesn’t totally let the issue go when I interview him. “I didn’t say it perfectly at all. But this issue [of productivity] is real,” he says. “After I made those comments, I had every single business leader in the country calling me saying, ‘Great point.’ ” And this is perhaps what makes Gurner so “fascinating”, as City of Yarra mayor Stephen Jolly puts it to me. “He says what the ruling elite normally think, but haven’t got the balls to say.”)
But back to control and chaos. In 2023, Gurner finished the Saint Moritz apartments, dubbed “the tower of power”. He’d promised that the $550 million development, on a prime Melbourne bayside site in St Kilda, would reach a “level of luxury and amenity that’s never been done in Australia before”. Even those buying a $750,000 one-bedroom apartment would feel, he said, like they were living in a six-star resort, with a concierge and free access to cryotherapy, a Himalayan salt room and flotation tank in the anti-ageing wellness spa. “It’s visionary, it’s ballsy, it’s gutsy,” says Antony Catalano, the regional-media mogul and hotelier who purchased the top penthouse for $30 million. “For someone who was 36 at the time he signed the deal, Saint Moritz was impressive by any measure.”
Gurner sold the penthouses to the wealthy and famous, including cricketing legend Shane Warne (who died before he could move in), football media personality Sam Newman and IVF pioneer and Afterpay investor John McBain. But, it turns out, hell hath no fury like a penthouse owner scorned.
Earlier this year, billionaire investor Alex Waislitz, who bought a $20 million penthouse, threatened a class action against Gurner, citing “a number of owners experiencing defects which are not being satisfactorily resolved”. It’s hard to tell how serious Waislitz’s issues are – he declined to speak to Good Weekend – but Catalano’s complaints were significant and he was a thorn in Gurner’s side for several years. (We’ll return to this feud later.)
Gurner is “fascinating”, says City of Yarra mayor Stephen Jolly. “He says what the ruling elite normally think, but haven’t got the balls to say.” Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
In June, another chaos agent entered Gurner’s carefully curated life and threatened something he really cherished: the reputation of his anti-ageing wellness clubs. Gurner’s five Melbourne clubs – he plans to open one in Bondi next year – are where he brings his obsession with longevity, essentially a bid to control life itself, to the people (well, the kind of people who can afford a membership upwards of $179 a week). Gurner tells me he’s spent $1 million on his experimentation with anti-ageing and “bio-hacking”, including having his blood filtered in Mexico. (Last year, in a feature on the anti-ageing movement, Good Weekend revealed that Gurner taped his mouth at night to stop mouth-breathing. “Now that property mogul Tim Gurner has taped his mouth shut,” one reader commented, “will he stop putting his foot in it?”)
It was at Saint Haven, his marquee club in South Yarra, that I first met Gurner late last year (in person, he’s kind, serious, really intense and quick to bristle when challenged). He took me through a room where members were lying down in curtained cubicles receiving IV drips of vitamins and supplements, and showed me the “fountain of youth”, which dispenses reverse osmosis, triple-filtered water. “People literally bring in buckets to fill up,” he said.
It was clear Gurner had poured his heart into these spaces, curating everything down to the scent blend (blood orange, wild lavender and Peru balsam). So he was devastated when Christopher Shao, a young man of inexplicable wealth and a penchant for Rolex watches, launched a campaign against Gurner (who he called “Mr Avocado”) and Saint Haven. Shao said he wanted to take a stand against “elitist racism” after he said his mother was racially vilified as a person of Asian background because she was singled out for using her phone in the “ancient bathhouse”. An unrelated screenshot from a Saint Haven staff chat was revealed on Shao’s social media, with an employee saying: “Can’t have a gym of Indians.” That person was stood down from their job. Then scathing Google reviews began to lob like mini-grenades. Gurner later told me the reviews, now gone, were being generated by a bot at 100 an hour. (He says the incident prompted an external policy audit, which came up clear. He rejects any racism allegation: “Our clubs are insanely diverse.”)
Gurner receiving IV vitamins: he says he has spent $1 million on his experimentation with anti-ageing and “bio-hacking”.
It’s in these public controversies that Gurner probably feels the narrative getting away from him. But behind the scenes – thanks to his ability to create lots of intrigue with multimillion-dollar display suites featuring secret doors and hidden bars, exclusive waiting lists and $30 million penthouses – he maintains a reputation for being one of Australia’s best sales minds. “If you ask anyone about Gurner they just say he’s a marketing genius, that’s the first sentence everybody tells you,” says David Hodge, the former head of the Victorian planning department.
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Others, however, are a little less sanguine. “Tim has the potential to make a significant mark on the Australian property industry and leave behind an unrivalled legacy,” says Catalano, a former journalist and Domain boss sometimes known as Mr Property. “But to do that, he needs to deliver what he promises. He needs to learn to under-promise and over-deliver.“
Born to be an entrepreneur
Gurner often tells a particular story from his childhood, when he was about eight. It involves the day some earth-movers arrived to landscape the garden at his family home in Kangaroo Ground, a semi-rural community just north of Melbourne’s urban boundary. Gurner says he was so struck by how these vehicles quickly reshaped the world outside his bedroom window that he faked an illness for three months to watch them.
But for my money, this is not the most interesting story about Gurner’s childhood. What’s more intriguing is that – for someone who coldly promoted the idea that hundreds of thousands of Australians should lose their jobs – his mother, the much respected Sandie de Wolf, devoted her life to helping poor, abused and neglected kids, serving 26 years as the head of the charity Berry Street (his late father Colin was a structural engineer and landscape architect who worked from home). But whatever trauma his mother was dealing with at work, Gurner says, she never brought it back to him and his big sister, Christie (now a lawyer). “When she walked in the door, she was there,” says Gurner of his “sheltered” and “perfect” middle-class childhood. (De Wolf says her son had always been an overthinker, “deep, introspective and thoughtful about life”, and showed entrepreneurial flair from age 12, with a free-range egg business called Gurner’s Googly Eggs).
Gurner’s mum Sandie de Wolf spent decades running a kids’ charity.
Gurner was sent to Carey Baptist Grammar, one of Melbourne’s best, most sport-obsessed private schools, where he met his best mate, Matt Campi. Campi describes the school-aged Gurner as a gifted sportsman, driven, self-disciplined and good at advanced maths. “Tim’s actually quite an introvert,” he says. “He’s fiercely loyal and generous and a beautiful guy when you’re that close to him.”
Gurner describes himself then as insecure, nervous and skinny. He was a “scrawny little bugger”, so in year 10 he started lifting weights. Thus began Gurner’s lifelong obsession with gyms, fitness and health (until De Wolf persuaded him to do a business degree at RMIT, his first choice was osteopathy). In 2003, while still studying, he found a part-time job with a suburban “dodgy real estate agent”. “I think I’ve just always had a passion for property,” he says. He was then taken under the wing of Tony Pride, from Wilson Pride, then a large real estate agency. Pride taught Gurner to understand what both sides of the real estate equation needed. But Gurner decided to leave real estate because he didn’t like its “ethics” and “lying”. “This is not about Tony Pride, but the industry,” he says. Before dummy bidding was stopped, he remembers 35 of the 40 bids at an auction would be from “trees and cars”.
As his first post-university move, Gurner decided he wanted to be a gym owner. He borrowed $130,000 from the bank (he suspects his parents put up their house as security) and his grandfather gave him $35,000 on a strict two-year loan at 8 per cent interest. In 2005, he opened a gym called My Wellbeing, a name years ahead of the “wellness” zeitgeist. Soon after, his grandfather died and he didn’t have to pay the money back.
With best mate from high school, Matt Campi.Credit: Courtesy of Tim Gurner
Gurner’s father also died, of multiple myeloma, soon after he opened the gym. He was 52. “I remember he was standing at the barbecue at Kangaroo Ground and he said to me that he wasn’t going to be here much longer. He said, ‘I need you to look after your sister and your mum.’ ” Tears gather in Gurner’s eyes as he talks about his father, whose initials are tattooed on his arm. He was, Gurner says, “literally perfection in a human being”.
After 20 months, Gurner sold the gym to a competitor and at the end of 2006 – still enamoured by that childhood inspiration of earth movers creating and building stuff – he offered to work for free for developer Morry Schwartz. Schwartz said yes but paid him (in 2010, Gurner and developer Danny Ciarma left Schwartz’s company and created Urban Inc together, finishing about 25 smaller apartment developments). Schwartz says property developers are sometimes thought of as being hard and ruthless, but Gurner is “very fair … I’m sure that’s the same kind of quality that exists in his mother, a kind of compassion. He is not brutal.”
In 2013, Gurner struck out on his own, establishing the Gurner Group and taking the unusual step of trademarking his own name (a brand decision, he says). He was 31. Gurner’s first big play was a 997-apartment complex in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. In what would become a signature move, he built a $5 million display suite where a concierge greeted buyers and offered champagne or a barista-made coffee. He says the project was the scariest thing he’s ever done. When the first tower was built, he stood under it and thought: “‘It’s really big. I’m glad I didn’t know it was that big when it was on the plan.’ ”
Strategic meetings are preceded with ‘meditation and contemplation to set our mindset in the right way’.
A few years later, he developed a whole inner-city block in Collingwood. Inspired by New York’s Meatpacking District, the Victoria & Vine development was widely admired. Gurner, says Melbourne’s lord mayor Nick Reece, is a “visionary” of inner-city living. “I have huge admiration for his commitment to design excellence. Too often, we see cookie-cutter developments that are nothing more than a spreadsheet in the sky and all about developer profit.” (Gurner’s model is slightly different to that of most developers: he always has a 50/50 joint venture partner, often with the landowner. Sometimes he’ll own a share of the land, sometimes not.)
These days Gurner has 28 apartment development sites across Australia, including an $800 million build in Sydney’s Kent Street in the CBD. Several sites are going to market soon, three are on hold and the rest are in planning and design. In the past two years, he’s brought in ex-Crown boss Peter Crinis to run his wellness division, and ex-NAB and Australia Post head Ahmed Fahour as CEO (“I needed an insanely strong character who would push against me,” Gurner says of Fahour).
Gurner hired ex-Australia Post head Ahmed Fahour (left) as his CEO.
When I speak to Fahour, he’s somewhat circumspect about the business – he says the funds management arm has $5 billion of “mostly offshore money”, but won’t reveal the sources – but I can’t shut him up about Gurner’s influence on his life. When Fahour arrived in 2023, Gurner drew up a health and wellbeing plan for him and asked about his HRV (heart-rate variability, which can highlight health problems). “I’m like, ‘Mate, I am used to people talking about KPIs and cashflows.’ ” Fahour has since lost 10 kilograms and 17 per cent of his body fat. Gurner Group’s strategic meetings are preceded with “meditation and contemplation to set our mindset in the right way”, says Fahour, with the conviction of the newly converted.
Penthouse peeves
In September 2023, when Gurner was white-knuckling through a global backlash about his “pain in the economy” comments, he received a call from Antony Catalano, who invited him to his place the next day at 7am. The businessmen were in the midst of a fierce battle over problems with Catalano’s Saint Moritz penthouse. Lawyers were involved and, at one point, things had become quite hostile after Gurner had made some disparaging comments in a meeting about Catalano’s ability to settle on the penthouse. “I left the room to avoid it becoming more heated,” Catalano tells me, with some understatement (Gurner denies making the comments). But when the viral storm erupted, something in Catalano softened. “I didn’t want to see a bloke destroyed over some words that, while lacking in empathy, were just poorly chosen,” he says.
Gurner arrived as arranged at Catalano’s penthouse, which has four living rooms, six bedrooms, seven bathrooms and eight car spaces. “I said, ‘Just stop talking. Why can’t you be a guy who does a project and when your kids drive by, you can say: Daddy built that. Prove yourself by what you do and not what you say.’ ” Catalano warned Gurner that Australians hate success and they particularly hate “bullshit success”. Afterwards, Catalano says, he walked Gurner to his car. They shook hands, embraced and pledged to pick up their friendship after their disagreement. Then the legal dispute continued.
Catalano and Gurner have signed non-disclosure agreements about their dispute, but Good Weekend understands that it ended up with Catalano receiving several million dollars in compensation from Gurner’s company. Catalano had two major issues. One was that he felt the vision lines from his apartment had been misrepresented by Gurner’s renders (the before-sale images of what it would look like). This included buildings that were moved and a general exaggeration of views (Gurner denies this). The second was an engineering deficiency with the living room’s six-metre floor-to-ceiling windows (Gurner says it was the builder’s problem but acknowledges it was a “real defect” now being addressed). Catalano, who moved to Byron Bay with seven of his nine children when COVID hit and never returned, is now selling the penthouse, asking for expressions of interest over $30 million. “What we’ve now got is better than I could have imagined; it is a spectacular apartment in an incredible building with the most luxurious amenities,” he says. “I couldn’t be happier.”
But Catalano, now on good terms with Gurner, says he was frustrated and annoyed that he was forced to push so hard to get Gurner to finally recognise his complaints. “When Tim finally acknowledged there was a problem, he leaned in and did everything in his power to fix it. But it should never have come to that. He’s fundamentally a good person and a great visionary but in my experience, refusing to take responsibility is a flaw in his DNA,” he says. “It’s also naive to think he wasn’t going to face significant legal challenges if he failed to deliver for people spending that kind of money.” Meanwhile, says Catalano, disgruntled off-the-plan buyers without the means to fight just walk away, something the development industry relies on. “The development industry needs a major clean-up.” (Another owner told me their defects were in the normal range, and they were happy with how Gurner and the builder addressed them.)
Rendering reality
When I enter Gurner’s $17 million Toorak home, the family dog, a Weimaraner called Nahla, greets me. Then I meet his wife Aimee, who Gurner calls his “golden girl”. He first saw Aimee, a fellow Carey alumnus, looking through photographs of her school formal. “This beautiful girl in a silver dress, I’ll never forget it,” he says. They got together at 25, he proposed at 27. They had two girls in quick succession, now 11 and 10. Then, after what Aimee describes as 10 years of “hounding” – Gurner specifically wanted three girls – they had another baby girl, now one. “From a family point of view, it’s a beautiful life to live with him,” Aimee tells me later, “He really puts his girls and me on a pedestal.”
With wife Aimee, who went to the same school as Gurner, and their Weimaraner Nahla.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
We sit at a round table near the kitchen to talk. Nearby are the slightly distracting bare butt cheeks of one of the family’s two life-sized ceramic sumo wrestlers. Gurner, wearing all black – apart from “linen pastels for holidays”, he owns only black or white clothes – looks luminous and refreshed. Before I arrive at 9.30am, he’s ticked off his morning routine: waking at 5.45am on a chilled bed after exactly seven hours and 45 minutes of sleep, meditating, writing in his gratitude journal, stretching, spending time with the kids – called a “family circle” – where they talk about their day, having a 7.45am ice bath, training, doing infra-red and PEMF therapy (electromagnetic pulses to reduce inflammation and repair joints) and breath work.
I ask about his concept called “render to reality”. When a building is finished, a render is put on an easel and Gurner gathers the builders and designers to make sure it matches what was built. Gurner gets out his laptop to show me. “Our team literally have to [match everything]. So, if it’s a 3.5-metre high palm tree [in the render], it will be a 3.5-metre high palm tree,” he says. He shows a render with white couch cushions, but the real-world picture has black. “I joke here that the interior designer who put the black cushions here no longer works for us.”
Researching this article, I had to keep checking the Gurner renders against Google Maps because his projects appear so real, you simply assume they exist. Take, for example, La Pélago, the $1.75 billion development in Surfers Paradise. The renders make it feel like you could walk up to its palm tree-fringed, four-jet fountain at reception and put your fingers in the water. But it’s actually just an empty corner block bordered by a white hoarding. The $850 million worth of proposed apartments that Gurner sold there in 2023 have not yet been built.
An artist’s render of Gurner’s $1.75 billion La Pélago resort in Surfers Paradise; Gurner says its penthouse has been sold off-the-plan for $40 million.
Gurner says the building quotes for La Pélago – a joint venture with landowner Wingate, an investment group – went from $280 million to $650 million, due to shortages in the Queensland construction market. Gurner says he lost $10 million, as he had to pay the real estate agents’ commission. Some purchasers had their money returned, others are still happy to wait for it to be built. This, he says, will happen next year, using a Melbourne builder (Good Weekend is unaware of any purchasers left out of pocket). Gurner then tells me he sold the penthouse for $40 million: “the most expensive home ever sold in the Gold Coast”. By the time he tells me this, in our second interview, I’ve also been told by one Victorian buyer of another premium apartment that Gurner made a large payment back to them – a rebate – so that the apartment sale price was officially higher, potentially driving up prices for the rest of the building. Gurner denies using rebates for this purpose. (Rebates are not illegal, says the Consumer Policy Research Centre’s Erin Turner, but make it “really hard for buyers to assess value”.)
Other renders on Gurner’s websites verge on science fiction. Take Elysium Fields, the proposed $1.75 billion apartment complex near Melbourne’s CBD, a co-investment with the wealthy Liberman family and Qualitas. Described by Gurner as an “innovative fusion of modern health, ancient wisdom and neuroscience”, and by Melbourne magazine The Paris End as a “megalomaniacal fantasia”, Elysium Fields is depicted all aglow under a giant snowdome, while the rest of the city has been leached of colour. Located in Docklands, a desolate, wind-swept blightscape widely considered one of the city’s worst planning disasters, the proposed development prompted The Paris End writer Cameron Hurst to ask, not unreasonably: “Would you want to live forever if you had to live here?”
An artist’s render of Gurner’s proposed Elysium Fields in Melbourne.
A few years back, angry residents turned the art of the render against Gurner. In 2016, he announced a hulking apartment building in the heritage Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy. Local objector Glen McCallum produced a render of how the development would look that went viral. Gurner’s lawyers sent McCallum a threatening letter, which was served on his children: “It was a highly unpleasant thing,” he tells me. Eventually, after a long battle and hundreds of objections, Gurner compromised. “He’s from that stable of developers who regard it as their right to do what they want,” says a former councillor who has battled with Gurner. “And he had zero interest in social and affordable housing.” (Gurner says he has 5000 rental-only apartments due in the next five years, “a significant portion” targeted towards “affordable and long-term living”, and some Melbourne-based projects aimed at first-home buyers, with properties starting at $475,000.)
At times, Gurner gets tangled up in his own spin. He originally tells me his business is “the only fully carbon-neutral business in real estate in Australia” and apartment construction is covered “100 per cent with offsets”. But he later acknowledges his carbon-neutral certification covers only his offices. “I obviously made a mistake,” he says, when I check with him. “We can’t deliver construction carbon-neutral.”
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Several property industry sources also questioned Gurner’s estimated wealth (the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List put it at $995 million; The Australian at $745 million). One real estate expert says many property industry figures estimate it at less than $100 million and doubt that his Saint Haven clubs add up to the claimed $150 million. One of the busiest days on the property industry WhatsApp groups, this person says, is when the Rich List is released: “His detractors spend endless hours sharing disparaging comments about his overstated wealth.” To be fair to Gurner, these are the media’s estimations. And to be fair to the media, it’s almost impossible to get a read on Gurner’s wealth as no financial reports are made public. Gurner says that while his people provide the rich-list journalists with a project list, he’s “never” spoken to them (it doesn’t take me long to find out that’s not true). “My wealth is in the value of the business. I have absolutely no idea what that is,” he says.
Gurner has had hits and misses. Sources told me he didn’t make much money on Saint Moritz, mostly built during COVID (he denies this). He’s lost money so far on La Pélago. He admits he only broke even on the third tower in FV, his marquee Brisbane project, and on the redevelopment of the building that held Fitzroy’s Spanish Club. And, like much of the development industry, he’s had a poor run in recent years. He tells me 2020 was good, 2021 “bad”, 2022 “terrible”, 2023 “horrendous” and the start of 2024 was “really difficult”.
Gurner-world tour
It’s early June, and I’m hanging out with Deborah Wiltshire, one of Gurner’s most experienced and talented sales people, at his apartment complex called Beach House, in St Kilda. The two towers, neither a house nor particularly near the beach, are the first stop on Wiltshire’s Gurner-world tour. “Here, renters can live their best life,” says Wiltshire as we enter the hotel-like foyer, two smiling employees behind the concierge desk. “It’s beyond a six-star hotel and it’s build-to-rent.” Build-to-rent is where the owner – in this case, Gurner and Qualitas, an ASX-listed real estate investment manager – doesn’t sell the building but leases the apartments. It’s a class of real estate big in America but in its infancy in Australia. (Some in the industry don’t think it will work here. “We’ve done the feasibilities over and over again, but we just can’t get our mind around the returns,” an analyst for a major superannuation fund tells me.)
But Gurner is backing it big time, and using it to shift his business from a private developer model to a property fund manager in order to create a more valuable and stable income stream. GIC, an investment fund owned by the government of Singapore, has given Gurner $4 billion to fund build-to-rent projects and in June he opened a 398-apartment tower in Melbourne’s Southbank called Madison Grand, spruiked as the southern hemisphere’s first apartment tower where residents “can literally live longer, better lives by design”. He’s also planning a 55-storey build-to-rent tower in western Sydney’s Parramatta, with construction expected to start next year.
Wiltshire passes the golf simulator and pulls on a statue of a man’s head. A secret door to another bar opens.
Back at Beach House, the first stop is Gurner’s in-house wellness centre, Samsara. It offers residents a sauna, cold plunge pool, spa, gym and private “VIP” spa spaces. “Everyone who lives here is a VIP to us,” Wiltshire says. We continue the tour past the “LA-inspired pool” and enter a bar where residents can hire a bartender or bring their own alcohol. There are low tables everywhere with little lamps, “to give the vibe of a New York bar”, Wiltshire says. Behind some couches, a single bowling alley appears. “People think a marble top is luxury. But this is luxury. It’s having fun. That’s what Tim wants.” It’s amazing, but I’m guessing the extra amenities are not cheap to install or run. And they certainly add a premium to your rent: it’s $715 a week for one bedroom, compared to the average St Kilda rent of $450 for the same.
We get in Wiltshire’s black Jaguar and drive a few minutes to Saint Moritz. We pass the 25-metre pool and head to the sports bar. Wiltshire passes the golf simulator and pulls on a statue of a man’s head. A secret door to another bar opens. In the reading room, apparently curated by a librarian who has worked for the British royal family, a man sits on a leather couch, bent over his phone.
The Saint Moritz development in St Kilda.Credit: Wayne Taylor
We then drive a few kilometres to Prahran, in Melbourne’s inner east. “There’s a huge nostalgic element in this,” says Wiltshire about the next tour stop: the Jam Factory, a $3.75 billion Gurner-Qualitas redevelopment of an old cinema and shopping complex behind a heritage brick façade (existing buildings will be demolished, except the front façade and a stretch of the Garden Street façade; the chimney will be dismantled and restored in the new public piazza). “When we spoke about this a few years ago around the boardroom table, every single person had … a memory of the Jam Factory.”
The site sits on Chapel Street, a once-buzzy hub of fashion and nightlife which has languished for years. Bring back the Jam Factory, Gurner’s theory goes, and you’ll bring back Chapel Street. Two of the three towers will be 30 storeys high, significantly taller than anything in the immediate vicinity, and in July, the local council approved a near doubling of the total number of apartments – from 448 to 886 (“Dodgy!” a member of the public gallery reportedly called out when the changes were passed).
‘If you’re invited, we will know who you are … and we will know what we think you should be buying.’
Tim Gurner
Passing through a set of dusty automatic glass doors, Wiltshire reaches across a black marble desk to press a button. Suddenly, enormous double doors open and Gurner’s $9.5 million Jam Factory display suite unfolds before us. (When in full sales mode, it is staffed with doormen, concierge and cocktail maker.)
It’s a posh New York apartment on steroids. The first thing you see are bookshelves: probably three storeys high. Then at our feet, extending up three levels, are marble steps leading to a bar modelled on the King Cole Bar at New York’s St Regis Hotel (there’s a lot of grey and white Calacatta marble in Gurner-world, possibly kilometres of it). Wiltshire walks over to the left side of the bar and waves her hand above another bust of a man’s head. The wall slides open and, behind that, a secret bar appears where the more well-to-do clients can discuss their purchase in private. (Later, Gurner tells me he thinks constantly about selling. He likes to release a development in stages – as a master at scarcity marketing, he ensures there’s always a waiting list – and target specific people. “If you’re invited to the display, we will know who you are, your spending capacity, where you live, and we will know what we think you should be buying.” It sounds slightly creepy, I say. “It’s not creepy,” he says.)
Wiltshire takes me back to the main room and then over to a bookcase, where she puts her finger on a green-spined book, the third from the left, and pulls it forward. As if by magic, the shelf becomes a door, swinging inwards. “We love a bit of a reveal!” she says. We walk down an “indicative gallery space” to a master bedroom with a Carrie Bradshaw-style dressing room and a walk-in vault, which has a black safe with blue numbers glowing in the dark. “You might want to put your Rolex collection in here.” Yes, I think, getting carried away. I just might do that.
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Wiltshire beeps another keypad, and we walk into a huge living room with a $50,000 bar made of onyx and a kitchen with a fridge chock-full of French champagne. I sit on the long, white couch in front of a coffee table covered in evenly set piles of glamorous books (The Watch: A Twentieth-Century Style History). What looks like a giant window – with a view back to the city – suddenly disappears and a movie begins.
The film, a romantic ode to the history of the Jam Factory, features a beautiful woman walking through the finished project. It’s voiced by a man who murmurs a string of disconnected sentences. “Summers stretched out like a long blue sky”; “Can you find me again?”; “Forever, JF” (as in Jam Factory). I’m a long-time and loyal Melburnian, but really, is this the result of having no sparkling harbour to eulogise? We romanticise a preserves factory? The credits roll with Gurner’s name front and centre as if he’s Steven Spielberg.
Wiltshire takes me through the Jam Factory renders. Drawing rooms, bird aviaries, a speakeasy. Pickleball courts and a private butler for penthouses above level 26. A penthouse for $30-40 million with a three-storey splashback. I ponder why anyone would need a three-storey splashback. It all feels so disconnected from reality and especially the housing and cost-of-living crises. (Gurner says the Jam Factory is unapologetically “an ultra-luxury precinct for downsizers and owner-occupiers”.) I start to feel physically discombobulated. Where was I, really? Suspended somewhere within the semi-demolished Jam Factory within an elaborately luxurious fake apartment. Later, Gurner confirms that most of the display suite will end up in landfill. “We recycle whatever we can, but no, you can’t recycle everything. It all goes.”
Longing for longevity
What does it mean, I’ve been wondering while talking to Gurner, if you have all the luxury in the world, the wellness, the bio-hacks, the belief that you’re living a better, longer life, yet you are incredibly stressed and struggling against the demons of control? Earlier this year, despite his best efforts to optimise his health, Gurner was forced into bed-rest for four weeks after a major operation (he won’t reveal specifics). During this time, he flew out Salim Najjar, an American businessman turned spiritual guide, to do some work at Saint Haven. Najjar became somewhat of a Yoda figure for Gurner, spending six to 10 hours a day by his bed talking about life, family, spirituality.
One day, Najjar asked one of Gurner’s daughters what she wanted to do when she grew up. Did she want to run a business, for example? Her response was an emphatic no, citing her dad’s “stress and pain and all the heartache”. Najjar called Gurner on that. “I want to be present for the kids and Aimee,” he tells me. And he’s slowly letting go of the desire to control. “I’m not there yet,” he says. “But it’s a work in progress.”
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