No concrete, no grid, and a mattress made of hemp. Most Hollywood real-estate stories follow a familiar route: a gated estate in the hills, a pool with a view, a record price and a quick resale. The house Zac Efron has been planning since 2020 takes a very different road, and it starts on a dirt track in northern New South Wales.
During the pandemic, Efron spent months in Australia while filming Down to Earth with Zac Efron: Down Under, and, according to Home Beautiful and The Nightly, he bought a 128-hectare block of bushland in the Tweed Valley in 2020. The land sits about an hour from Byron Bay, off the grid and surrounded by rainforest. Six years later, it is finally becoming a home, and it will reportedly be the first house the actor has ever owned.
The Designer Behind “Futurecave”
To build it, Efron turned to Joost Bakker, a Dutch-Australian designer known for zero-waste buildings and his Future Food System project. Bakker announced on Instagram in November 2025 that he had been asked to design the house, which he calls “Futurecave.” Tweed Shire Council approved the project in May 2026, and Bakker posted soon after: “Excited to get started on Zac’s house!”
According to Bakker, Efron’s brief was simple to say and hard to deliver: he wanted “the most healthy home on the planet,” one that sits lightly on the land and helps regenerate it. Australian reports put the budget at more than $2 million, with Home Beautiful citing a build cost of $2.65 million.
What a Hemp House Actually Is
The main material is hemp, used almost everywhere concrete or timber would normally go. The bricks are hemp blocks bonded with oyster shell, a mix Bakker’s team spent about a year developing. More than 80 tonnes of Australian-grown hemp and straw are going into the build, with Efron reportedly meeting the farmers in Hillston, New South Wales, himself.
Bakker describes the blocks as a material that “naturally breathes, is anti mould, naturally fire resistant,” a serious advantage in a bushfire-prone region. Inside, hemp continues into the insulation, internal walls, joinery, curtains and rugs. Kitchen and bathroom cabinetry will use plant-based boards made from crop waste. Even the bed follows the rule. “The mattresses that Zac will sleep on, they’ll be completely plant-based, natural hemp-based mattresses,” Bakker told Home Beautiful.
The roof is flat and will carry roughly 100 tonnes of soil, turning it into a living base for plants and insects rather than a sheet of metal.
Why It Took Six Years
The gap between the purchase and the build was not indecision. Between 2021 and 2025, Bakker’s team tested materials and refined the design, and construction only got underway in 2026. In the meantime, Efron sold his Los Angeles home in 2021 for around $6.85 million, after listing it at $7.8 million, and has reportedly been living near Byron Bay while the work continues.
That slow pace is part of the point. A conventional celebrity home is designed to impress visitors. This one is designed to disappear into the landscape, last for decades and keep the air inside as clean as the forest outside.
The New Kind of Luxury
There is no marble lobby here, no ten-car garage and no infinity pool facing a city skyline. The luxury is in the things you cannot photograph: walls that regulate humidity, a roof that feeds the soil and a bedroom built from hemp grown in the same state.
Efron’s career has been defined by reinvention, from teen idol to wellness documentarian. His home is the most permanent version of that shift so far. In 2020, he bought a patch of bushland. In 2026, he is turning it into a house that asks almost nothing of the land it stands on.