Rumour: Kelly Slater creates “super compound” at Pipeline after buying beachfront house of neighbour, a wildly sexy former bikini model and ex-wife of controversial Australian billionaire!

The ultimate home for the man who has owned Pipe since 1992, winning seven Pipeline Masters, a Billabong Pro Pipeline and two Volcom Pros.

This rumour is a little old, a year maybe, only ‘cause the source, a real good one, asked me to leave a gap from hearing it to it hitting the streets. 

Jodhi Meares, who is fifty-one, is the wildly sexy former bikini model who married the Australian billionaire James Packer in 1999 (“Wedding of the decade”, 750 guests. Elton John twinkling the keys at the reception), divorced him three years later, came out of it significantly wealthier and rolled it into two successful fashion brands, first, Tiger Lily, then The Upside. 

She ain’t dumb. Billabong bought Tiger Lily for somewhere ‘tween three and five mill and The Upside has turned into an Australian version of Lululemon. 

In 2009, Meares, who surfs, scooped up a beachfront house at Pipe, next to Kelly Slater.

And, now, we’re told, Slater has bought Meares’ redundant holiday house and combined the two properties into one super beachfront compound, the ultimate home for a man who has owned Pipeline, at least competitively, since 1992, winning the Pipe Masters seven times, eight if you count this year’s Billabong Pipe Pro, and the Volcom Pipe Pro twice.

The Meares House forms only a small part of Slater’s formidable Hawaiian property portfolio.

Keen readers will remember two months ago, Slater renting his five-bed, six-bathroom Laniakea mansion, which he bought in 2017, at $46,000 per month.

Architectural Digest sure likes it.

“(It) is infused with Asian and Hawaiian design elements, made especially apparent by the serene boardwalk over an outdoor pond with a Buddha statue sitting in the midst of tropical plant life.”

Slater’s got joints across the world, of course. Who can forget the two-million dollar whole floor beachfront apartment he keeps at Palm Beach, what you would call a recovering suburb, at least if you wanted to be kind, on Queensland’s Gold Coast?

It ain’t Frank Lloyd Wright, architecture wise, though there are notes of Mies van der Rohe, at least in spirit, but what is on the Gold Coast?

Y’got plenty of room and, best of all, it faces due north-east, which means the stiff summer heat is tempered by a sea breeze.

It isn’t Kelly’s only Gold Coast crib. Seventeen years ago, he bought a little apartment, with no views, in Tugun, just south of Palm Beach, for $445,000.