Former Vogue editor-in-chief Juliet Ashworth buys Byron building project
Former Vogue editor-in-chief Juliet Ashworth and her business partner Rick Whalley have bought a tin shack high in the Byron Bay hinterland.
The couple, who run the Sydney-based hotel interior design practice CHADA, snapped up the building opportunity at Eureka for $860,000.
The 1.7 hectare property was on the market for the first time in three decades through Scott Harvey Real Estate Brooklet agent Sonia Jervis.
Set adjacent to the picturesque Eureka Anglican Church, the property has views over the hinterland including the Nightcap Ranges and Minyon Falls.
Jervis, who had an $895,000 asking price, advised in the sale marketing that it had tourist development potential.
Ashworth would know plenty on that front as she’s an award-winning hotel designer.
She has also been the judge on Channel 7’s Instant Hotel, starring alongside interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.
The show, hosted by Luke Jacobz, puts the spotlight on the growing worldwide trend of homeowners renting out their properties as holiday accommodation.
Its second series is set to be aired on Netflix later this month, although one television critic suggested that Instant Hotel presented a fairly banal look at B&Bs.
“It’s basically the televisual equivalent of a three-star Tripadvisor review,” the lounge-chair critic said.
Founded in 2000, Ashworth’s interior architecture practice specialising in luxury hotels has undertaken 110 projects, most recently the Bangladesh Intercontinental.
Locally the Chippendale-based firm has done Crown Group’s Skye Suites at Infinity, Green Square and the Williams Inglis Hotel at Warwick Farm.
Ashworth has also managed to renovate her Darling Point garden apartment in the Clooncorrick, the 1880s Victorian Gothic mansion that was designed by architect John Horbury Hunt.
She paid $2.7 million for the three-bedroom unit in 2014 followed by a $150,000 renovation when the floor plan was reconfigured, turning it into a two-bedroom apartment.
It was 1998 when publishing executive Peter Gaunt appointed the Brighton, UK-born Ashworth to the top job at Conde Nast’s Vogue, replacing Marion Hume.
Ashworth departed just nine months later when Gaunt’s replacement, Robyn Holt, appointed Kirstie Clements, in the week prior to the magazine’s 40th birthday party.
This article was first published in the Sunday Telegraph.