On Jonson Street, Byron Bay's main drag, moulders an old Woolworths. The supermarket giant opened up next door in 2019, following the completion of the town's first shopping mall, Mercato. The old site now operates as Haven Gallery, where visitors can enter a "multisensory playground of art". Inside, they'll wander through a mock-up of Hong Kong's Kowloon laneway – the closest this beach enclave will ever get to experiencing high-density living.
There was a time when plans for the old Woolies were grander. In December 2018, Gold Coast developer Robert Badalotti, who built Mercato, and his long-term partner, private credit firm Wingate, lodged a $39.9 million proposal for "Essence of Byron": a three-storey, 146-room hotel, complete with a rooftop pool and cocktail lounge.
But Byron did what Byron does. Over 400 public submissions opposed the hotel. The local anti-development brigade rallied against the project, bemoaning the height exceedances and a "bulk and scale" that would be incongruent with the town's village vibe. The NSW Government's Northern Regional Planning Panel binned the proposal in September 2020.
Former Greens mayor Jan Barham told local paper The Byron Shire Echo the developer would no doubt return with another version. She was wrong.
Badalotti and Wingate decided to sell Mercato as well as the old Woolies.
Commercial agency JLL was hired in December 2020 to find prospective buyers, either as a package or as two separate sites. Among those circling was bar tsar Justin Hemmes. The Merivale boss was in the middle of a $200 million-plus property binge, including The Whale Inn and Quarterdeck tiki bar in the sleepy oyster-shucking hamlet of Narooma.
Hemmes wanted the site to clone his Coogee Pavilion.[[Hemmes later took a shine to the opposite side of Jonson Street, paying a reported $13.5 million to transform the shuttered club, Cheeky Monkey's.]] However, he was gazumped by a group of investors fronted by financier Jason Meares, the brother of model Jodhi Meares (James Packer's ex-wife) in May 2021.[[Meares' LinkedIn profile says he is the chief executive of Option Group, a property financier and developer and China Investment Options, which offers investments to wealthy foreigners seeking Australian residency. Meares was busted in 2008 for assaulting an undercover police officer outside the Bada Bing strip club in Kings Cross. He chivalrously claimed to have mistaken the officer for "drug dealers or a guy pimping his prostitute". Earlier in the noughties, Meares' business partner, Brendan McMahon, was unmasked as Sydney's "Bunny Killer." McMahon was convicted of mutilating 17 rabbits and a guinea pig. He scattered the carcasses in and around his York Street office, including the women's toilets. A magistrate called it one of the worst cases of animal cruelty in Australia. Court-tendered psychiatric reports said McMahon was suffering from extreme methamphetamine psychosis, communicating with the rabbits via his "third eye". The conviction was overturned on appeal on mental health grounds. McMahon moved to New Zealand, but was later sentenced in Auckland for stealing… rabbits.]]
