"Mick Fanning's house balances elegance with excess, often hinting at the underlying tragedy of unattainable dreams."

If you ever lived on the southern end of the Gold Coast before the big developers moved in and prices went through the sky, two mill and up for a box at Rainbow Bay, you’d realise the absurdity of a buyer throwing almost twenty mill at a house across the road from noisy ol’ Coolangatta airport. 

But here we are, Australia, the lucky country. 

A joint so rich in  natural resources but so dumb politically, we ship our ore, our gas, overseas for peanuts while keeping the economy superficially bouncing along with the mass importation of people.

A house used to be the Australian dream, then a little apartment, now it’s earning enough in the gig economy to keep up with rents that soar twenty percent every year. 

Still, there’s big money out there.

And, Mick Fanning, the forty-four-year-old three-time champ, has just sold his sprawling beachfront estate called Rolling Seas at Bilinga pre-auction for $16.5 mill. It’s a record price for a joint between Coolangatta and Currumbin. 

Fanning bought the land in 2011 for $3.25 and built the Great Gatsby-inspired house, which he lived in briefly. It’s where Fanning’s mysterious strawberry blonde stalker busted into a few years back.

“I occasionally want to kill you … to end our occasional miserable bullshit,” the woman told Fanning in a letter prior to her unannounced visit.

Celebrity stylists Three Birds Renovation did a number on the joint a couple of years back that turned the place into the sorta Palm Springs themed place André Balazs had in mind when he redeveloped the old Golden Crest Hotel Retirement Home on 8300 Sunset, West Hollywood.

(RIP The Standard West Hollywood) 

As one outlet reported,

“Mick Fanning’s house is sophistication, rebellion, and indulgence. It balances elegance with excess, often hinting at the underlying tragedy of unattainable dreams.”

The stretch of sand along Bilinga is as ordinary as they come, rarely, like, never, delivering a day worth even a pinch of shit, as they say.

So you got your big ol beachfront joint and you still have to jump in the truck to go surfing, either at nearby D-Bah, Kirra, Snapper in the south or the better beachies just north in Currumbin and Palm Beach.