MasterChef star Andy Allen and wife Alexandra purchase stunning Melbourne showcase home
MasterChef judge Andy Allen has purchased a show-stopping designer home in Melbourne's inner north after relocating back to Victoria's capital city from Sydney.
Allen, 36, and his wife Alexandra reportedly dished up an eye-watering $3.85 million for the contemporary four-bedroom home in the trendy suburb of Northcote.
According to a listing from agency Nelson Alexander, the 'landmark' home features soaring ceilings at the back and a sumptuous open plan living zone.
The home is also complete with glass stacker doors perfect for resort-style alfresco entertaining, as well as a deluxe undercover deck and solar-heated in-ground pool.
Other amenities include a two-zoned powder room, ducted reverse cycle air conditioning, video intercom, solid American oak floors and cabinetry, heated bathroom floors, and an oversized lock up garage with a 22kW car charger ideal for EV vehicles.
Unsurprisingly, one of the home's main focal points is the airy kitchen complete with Smeg fixtures and stone surfaces, perfect for whipping up MasterChef-worthy meals.
'Dressed in Dolomite stone, the stunning gourmet kitchen has Smeg fixtures including two ovens, a double fridge/freezer, coffee machine, dishwasher, induction cooking and wine storage, plus a huge island with a breakfast bar and impressive butler's pantry,' the agency said.
It is understood the Allens purchased the home in late December 2024.
The celebrity chef first found fame as a contestant on MasterChef Australia in 2012, eventually winning the competition and launching a successful career as a restaurateur and host.
He returned to the franchise in 2020 as a judge after Ten infamously axed Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan in favour of Allen, Jock Zonfrillo and food critic Melissa Leong.
Zonfrillo tragically died in 2023 shortly after completing production on the fifteenth series of the reality juggernaut, while Leong departed from the program later the same year.
Allen is now preparing for his sixth season on the panel, with MasterChef: Back to Win returning to Channel 10 on April 28.
The fan favourite will be joined by Poh Ling Yeow, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Sofia Levin on the judging panel.
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The Age
6 hours ago
- The Age
‘Height, weight, job, lifestyle': How a matchmaker's shopping list spawned a star-studded romcom
For about 10 years, Celine Song struggled to make a living in New York as a playwright. At one point, she realised she had better get a day job if she was going to pay her rent. The usual thing, she thought, was to make coffee or pull beers, but she soon discovered that a lot of other struggling artists had nabbed those hospo side-hustles before she got to town. 'To be a barista you need like 10 years of experience,' she says. 'To be a bartender you need 15 years.' It was then that someone at a party told her about matchmaking, which seemed to require no experience whatsoever. She applied to a dating agency; she got the job. She stayed just six months but, by the time she left, she knew she would one day write about it. Materialists is the second feature by the 36-year-old filmmaker; Past Lives (2023), which was nominated for two Oscars, including best film, also drew on an aspect of her own experience. Its heroine, Nora (Greta Lee), was a playwright, born in Korea but now living in New York and married to an American screenwriter (John Magaro). The pull of cultures within her comes to the surface when her primary school sweetheart (Teo Yoo), left behind when her family emigrated, finds her on social media. The film is a poignant meditation on missed chances and blocked choices. For many of us, it was the film of the year. Her new film, billed as a romcom, is a much starrier affair. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy the matchmaker, albeit one with many more runs on the board than Song achieved: nine marriages concluded, as she tells her agency colleagues with a simpering giggle. Lucy's winning MO is to become soulmate to her clients, who pay big bucks (anywhere from $US2000 to $US200,000 in real life, according to Google) for access to the right kind of prospect. The clients come with shopping lists. One man in his 40s insists he couldn't consider a woman over 25. Women stipulate that they're not considering anyone under six feet. At these prices, they want deluxe goods. Lucy herself is single. It is five years since her painful breakup with John (Chris Evans – yes, Captain America!), a struggling off-off-Broadway actor who was passionate about her but poor. Money, or the lack of it, destroyed their relationship; when she meets suave, witty and supremely well-heeled Harry (Pedro Pascal), he seems to be a dream come true. As they sink for the first time beneath his satin sheets, she asks how much his apartment is worth. The question doesn't faze him: $US12 million, he tells her. Bliss! What's not to love? All this accumulation of telling detail comes from Song's experience. 'I think I learned more about people in that six months [at the dating agency] than at any other period of my life, because people are very honest – more honest, I always think, than with a therapist,' she says. 'They would start describing the boyfriend they want and it was amazing the extent to which the language was like the language in the film: height, weight, job, lifestyle. Like at the morgue or the insurance company, everything was in numbers.' It didn't seem to have much to do with love. 'I knew love doesn't happen that way,' says Song, a professed romantic. She was already married, to screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who wrote the scripts for Challengers and Queer). 'For me, the gap between this game we were playing and what love really is seemed too vast,' Song says. 'There's no amount of doing the math, being smart or playing the game correctly that is going to get you to this very ancient, mysterious thing. All you can hope for is that it walks into your life one day and you know how to recognise it. That tension was something I was facing as a matchmaker.' Having invested in access to potential partners, clients would ready themselves for market with self-improvements, ranging from the ostensibly benign – going to the gym – to an excruciating and hugely expensive operation, undertaken by one character in the film, to increase his height by breaking and remaking his leg bones. 'So much of this has to do with trying to enhance the value of this material thing you have, which is your body,' says Song. 'I do think it's a very scary thing. It is part of this commodification of the self, trying to turn yourself into the most valuable object possible. And at the end of that journey you're like: 'Why wouldn't you get a surgery to get a little taller? Why wouldn't you get Botox to look a little younger?' You start to get no sense of why you wouldn't do any of these things, just following that logic that you are an asset.' One of the characters in Materialists, after her umpteenth rejection, protests that she is a person, not a piece of merchandise. This comes to her as a revelation. Loading Materialists is billed as a romcom but, while it is often funny, it has a much sharper edge than the marketing suggests. I observe that the actors she has cast – the famously charming Pascal, the Fifty Shades ingenue Johnson – bring associations with them that are, in themselves, a kind of asset. Song bridles. She chooses her actors for their talent, she says, and their awareness of the subject. ''I'm a person and not merchandise' is part of the philosophical part of being an actor,' she says. 'Because, of course, so many actors and models, people who are seen on screen, are often treated like merchandise. Every actor in my movie completely understood the film – and they understood it very deeply in their souls.' So I wonder, given such serious intent, why she chose the vehicle of romantic comedy? 'Well, the romcom is one of my favourite genres,' she says. 'And I think it is a genre with a beautiful accessibility to every single person on Earth. What is amazing about the romcom is that you get to walk into a movie theatre and get to talk about love, relationships, feelings and marriage and dating for two hours – what an amazing gift!' From the cast to the studio executives, she says, everyone who sees the film wants to talk to her afterwards about their own love lives. 'So I think of Materialists as the start of a conversation.' Romcoms are, of course, routinely dismissed as fluff. 'To which my answer is I wonder what happened to our culture, that love started to be considered not to be a serious subject?' says Song. 'I am concerned about that, because love is the most dramatic thing that everybody does. Everybody contends with love, dating, relationships – whether there are any, there being a lack, there being a lot, everything.' The genre has been downgraded over time, she believes, as mere 'girl shit'. The usual formation – as in her film – consists of a woman choosing between two men. 'It's a genre where a woman has so much power and gets to make a lot of decisions – and where, traditionally, a woman is the lead character,' she says. Compared with fighting the Entity while climbing around the wings of a light plane in mid-air, as Tom Cruise does in the latest Mission: Impossible, it's seen as small potatoes. Loading 'But I think: what a powerful thing, that we get to see a woman make a choice in her life, right? I think that is completely worthy of cinema.'
Sydney Morning Herald
6 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Height, weight, job, lifestyle': How a matchmaker's shopping list spawned a star-studded romcom
For about 10 years, Celine Song struggled to make a living in New York as a playwright. At one point, she realised she had better get a day job if she was going to pay her rent. The usual thing, she thought, was to make coffee or pull beers, but she soon discovered that a lot of other struggling artists had nabbed those hospo side-hustles before she got to town. 'To be a barista you need like 10 years of experience,' she says. 'To be a bartender you need 15 years.' It was then that someone at a party told her about matchmaking, which seemed to require no experience whatsoever. She applied to a dating agency; she got the job. She stayed just six months but, by the time she left, she knew she would one day write about it. Materialists is the second feature by the 36-year-old filmmaker; Past Lives (2023), which was nominated for two Oscars, including best film, also drew on an aspect of her own experience. Its heroine, Nora (Greta Lee), was a playwright, born in Korea but now living in New York and married to an American screenwriter (John Magaro). The pull of cultures within her comes to the surface when her primary school sweetheart (Teo Yoo), left behind when her family emigrated, finds her on social media. The film is a poignant meditation on missed chances and blocked choices. For many of us, it was the film of the year. Her new film, billed as a romcom, is a much starrier affair. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy the matchmaker, albeit one with many more runs on the board than Song achieved: nine marriages concluded, as she tells her agency colleagues with a simpering giggle. Lucy's winning MO is to become soulmate to her clients, who pay big bucks (anywhere from $US2000 to $US200,000 in real life, according to Google) for access to the right kind of prospect. The clients come with shopping lists. One man in his 40s insists he couldn't consider a woman over 25. Women stipulate that they're not considering anyone under six feet. At these prices, they want deluxe goods. Lucy herself is single. It is five years since her painful breakup with John (Chris Evans – yes, Captain America!), a struggling off-off-Broadway actor who was passionate about her but poor. Money, or the lack of it, destroyed their relationship; when she meets suave, witty and supremely well-heeled Harry (Pedro Pascal), he seems to be a dream come true. As they sink for the first time beneath his satin sheets, she asks how much his apartment is worth. The question doesn't faze him: $US12 million, he tells her. Bliss! What's not to love? All this accumulation of telling detail comes from Song's experience. 'I think I learned more about people in that six months [at the dating agency] than at any other period of my life, because people are very honest – more honest, I always think, than with a therapist,' she says. 'They would start describing the boyfriend they want and it was amazing the extent to which the language was like the language in the film: height, weight, job, lifestyle. Like at the morgue or the insurance company, everything was in numbers.' It didn't seem to have much to do with love. 'I knew love doesn't happen that way,' says Song, a professed romantic. She was already married, to screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who wrote the scripts for Challengers and Queer). 'For me, the gap between this game we were playing and what love really is seemed too vast,' Song says. 'There's no amount of doing the math, being smart or playing the game correctly that is going to get you to this very ancient, mysterious thing. All you can hope for is that it walks into your life one day and you know how to recognise it. That tension was something I was facing as a matchmaker.' Having invested in access to potential partners, clients would ready themselves for market with self-improvements, ranging from the ostensibly benign – going to the gym – to an excruciating and hugely expensive operation, undertaken by one character in the film, to increase his height by breaking and remaking his leg bones. 'So much of this has to do with trying to enhance the value of this material thing you have, which is your body,' says Song. 'I do think it's a very scary thing. It is part of this commodification of the self, trying to turn yourself into the most valuable object possible. And at the end of that journey you're like: 'Why wouldn't you get a surgery to get a little taller? Why wouldn't you get Botox to look a little younger?' You start to get no sense of why you wouldn't do any of these things, just following that logic that you are an asset.' One of the characters in Materialists, after her umpteenth rejection, protests that she is a person, not a piece of merchandise. This comes to her as a revelation. Loading Materialists is billed as a romcom but, while it is often funny, it has a much sharper edge than the marketing suggests. I observe that the actors she has cast – the famously charming Pascal, the Fifty Shades ingenue Johnson – bring associations with them that are, in themselves, a kind of asset. Song bridles. She chooses her actors for their talent, she says, and their awareness of the subject. ''I'm a person and not merchandise' is part of the philosophical part of being an actor,' she says. 'Because, of course, so many actors and models, people who are seen on screen, are often treated like merchandise. Every actor in my movie completely understood the film – and they understood it very deeply in their souls.' So I wonder, given such serious intent, why she chose the vehicle of romantic comedy? 'Well, the romcom is one of my favourite genres,' she says. 'And I think it is a genre with a beautiful accessibility to every single person on Earth. What is amazing about the romcom is that you get to walk into a movie theatre and get to talk about love, relationships, feelings and marriage and dating for two hours – what an amazing gift!' From the cast to the studio executives, she says, everyone who sees the film wants to talk to her afterwards about their own love lives. 'So I think of Materialists as the start of a conversation.' Romcoms are, of course, routinely dismissed as fluff. 'To which my answer is I wonder what happened to our culture, that love started to be considered not to be a serious subject?' says Song. 'I am concerned about that, because love is the most dramatic thing that everybody does. Everybody contends with love, dating, relationships – whether there are any, there being a lack, there being a lot, everything.' The genre has been downgraded over time, she believes, as mere 'girl shit'. The usual formation – as in her film – consists of a woman choosing between two men. 'It's a genre where a woman has so much power and gets to make a lot of decisions – and where, traditionally, a woman is the lead character,' she says. Compared with fighting the Entity while climbing around the wings of a light plane in mid-air, as Tom Cruise does in the latest Mission: Impossible, it's seen as small potatoes. Loading 'But I think: what a powerful thing, that we get to see a woman make a choice in her life, right? I think that is completely worthy of cinema.'
Sky News AU
6 hours ago
- Sky News AU
'I don't know what I'll do': The Project stars appear heartbroken in first reactions to Channel 10 axing their embattled current affairs show after 16 years
The Project panelists have reacted after Channel 10 confirmed the embattled current affairs program would be gone from the air within weeks. A Ten spokesperson confirmed to that The Project would end its run after 'almost 16 years and more than 4,500 episodes'. "The Project will air for the last time on Friday, June 27, ending an incredible run of almost 16 years and more than 4,500 episodes,' the network said in a statement. "The impact that The Project has had on the media and entertainment industry, countless careers, as well as on Australian society and culture, cannot be overstated.' On Monday evening's episode, the series' high-profile hosts—Waleed Aly, Sarah Harris, Steve Price, and Sam Taunton—appeared heartbroken during their first show since the news broke. "16 years is an incredibly long period of time for a TV show. It's a huge success to pull that off, and so many people have contributed to that," Aly said. "They all do a fantastic job, for example, Kim, who is operating Camera Three right now and look, it is a great shot. She's doing a wonderful job. "This is the way things work. A huge shout-out, though, to our viewers as well." 'This isn't goodbye, we will see you again more over the next few weeks, but I know and everyone who has worked on the show know these are the best viewers in Australia. It has been a privilege to serve you.' Channel 10 veteran Sarah Harris, visibly emotional, said she was "so grateful" to have contributed to The Project since 2022. "My first appearance on this show was as a Dave Hughes funny; I fell over during a media scrum outside court," she said. "But I am so grateful that I got to sit on this desk and play TV with all of you; it's been such a fun thing to do." "It's the people that make a show, and The Project isn't just the people on this desk; it is the cast and crew behind the scenes." Price, who is a guest on Monday evenings, said he doesn't know what he will do without his role. 'This is the best crew of people I worked with. I was 55 when I started here. I'm now 70, that's 15 years. How an old fat guy like me can survive that long? I have no idea. But I'm still here," he said. "I'm really sad today; Melbourne has lost an incredible investment in its culture with the people who work on this show. "People who come out with music bands and have written books and were actors will lose the opportunity to be able to talk about their products. "It won't be able to be done anywhere else. I'll miss it. I don't know what I'll do on Monday nights.' It is unclear whether the hosts will be deployed to other projects at Ten or leave the network entirely. The Melbourne-based program features a rotating lineup of regular presenters, including Georgie Tunny, from Sunday through Friday. The series' original panel consisted of Carrie Bickmore, Charlie Pickering, and Dave Hughes. And its most well-known lineup was arguably Bickmore, Peter Helliar, Waleed Aly, and Hamish McDonald. It was during this era The Project and its hosts picked up a trophy case of Logie wins, including Gold Logies for Bickmore in 2015 and Aly in 2016. Bickmore and Helliar left the show in 2022 amid reported budget cuts and declining viewership at the free-to-air broadcaster. Ten also faced mounting challenges as The Project's ratings dwindled due to criticism over its "woke" left-wing bias. A new program called Behind the Lines, hosted by high-profile journalist Denholm Hitchcock, is set to air in July or August. Ten's new materials describe Behind the Lines as an investigative series that exposes "hidden" stories which matter to Australians. 'Go behind the headlines with 10 News First as our reporters dig deep to uncover the facts, follow every lead, and expose stories that others try to keep hidden," a synopsis reads. 'Hosted by Denham Hitchcock, this investigation series shines a light on issues that matter to Australians – holding the powerful to account with fearless journalism.' 'Real stories. Real impact. The truth told straight.' Senior journalist Dan Sutton will executive produce the show alongside a fresh high-profile team from rival Network Seven. This includes journalist Amelia Brace, former Seven Spotlight presenter Denham Hitchcock and former Seven senior producer Bill Hogan.
