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A luxury home owned by a former mining magnate and rich lister on one of Noosa’s most prestigious residential streets has been gutted by fire.
Thick plumes of black smoke filled the air over Noosa on Monday morning as families descended on the Sunshine Coast hotspot on the first day of the school holidays.
A passerby reportedly raised the alarm after seeing smoke coming from the two-storey house on Noosa Parade, less than five kilometres from Hastings Street.
Fire engulfed the home about 10.30am.
It took seven firefighters, who arrived at the multimillion-dollar home at 10.40am, two hours to extinguish the blaze.
“By 11.40am, they had contained the fire to the ceiling void, and by 12.45pm it was extinguished,” a Queensland Fire Department spokesman said.
“It appears everyone was accounted for.”
Fire crews remained at the scene on Monday afternoon dampening down hotspots as they waited for the arrival of a fire investigator to determine the cause of the blaze.
According to title documents, the Noosa Parade home was purchased by former mining magnate and rich lister Paul Darrouzet in 2009.
The house was bought for $6.6 million, but property prices in Noosa have doubled in the past five years.
Darrouzet, a wealthy entrepreneur, Liberal Party donor and superyacht enthusiast, did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
He made his fortune selling a stake in the Foxleigh coal mine in central Queensland to global giant Anglo American for $712 million at the height of the coal boom in 2007.
Darrouzet at the time he acquired the former Abell Point Marina after it went into receivership.Credit: Russ Benning
He stunned the tourism market in early 2013 when he bought the decaying Abell Point Marina at Airlie Beach for $27 million after it went into receivership, with ambitions to turn it into “the Monaco of the southern hemisphere”.
Darrouzet – owner of an Italian-built superyacht called Norseman – spent $35 million expanding and rebuilding the marina, which he renamed Coral Sea Marina. It is now home to the most superyachts (any vessel longer than 24 metres) in Australia.
Darrouzet has also traded retail assets across Brisbane. In 2013, the same year he bought the marina, he sold Redbank Plains Shopping Village and adjoining land to Alceon and Capital Transactions.
Two years later, he sold his Woolworths Marketplace Albany Creek in Brisbane’s north for $26.1 million to a private Melbourne investor.
In 2019, Darrouzet bought the fading Coral Sea Resort for $14.5 million, which he has since refurbished and renamed Coral Sea Marina Resort.
He was also an early backer and chairman of Brisbane-based diagnostics company Ellume, the once soaring biotechnology star supplying COVID-19 tests before it fell into liquidation.
Last year, Darrouzet put his family’s Bridgeman Downs home of more than 20 years on the market. The sprawling estate on Beams Road, called The Bridge Estate, features two swimming pools, a tennis court, games room, golfing green and an indoor half basketball court.
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