Stonehouse Wealth Management

Stonehouse Wealth Management

Stonehouse Wealth Management formed in March 2005 through the amalgamation of two family-run financial advisory practices, creating a firm with a collective heritage stretching back over 50 years. Founding Partner Andrew Stewart and a partnership group that grew to include Ben Hancock, Kane Livingstone, Jeremy Chiel and Declan Baker built the business on a privately owned structure with no investment- or insurance-provider ownership. That independence is reinforced by the firm’s own Australian Financial Services Licence (No. 520339), granted by ASIC, which allows it to operate as a non-institutionally aligned advice house. Stonehouse deploys client capital across a blend of asset classes anchored by Australian equities, direct property, fixed-income and listed infrastructure, with supplementary exposure to private credit and hedge-fund strategies where appropriate for individual mandates. The firm manages both direct portfolios and self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) assets, using a value-based, actively managed approach that prioritises capital preservation. Its gearing strategies aim to enhance accumulation-phase returns without materially increasing portfolio volatility. Geographic focus concentrates on Australia, with advisers in Brisbane, Sydney, Noosa and the Gold Coast advising on assets held domestically and, where suitable, opportunistically offshore. While Stonehouse does not disclose total assets under advice or management, the partnership construct signals a boutique rather than institutional scale. The team spans advisory, compliance, implementation and client engagement functions, with a leadership layer that includes General Manager Cath Perry and Head of Advice and Operations Kyle Perry. Adjacent to its wealth-management core, the firm maintains a credit-advisory function, led by Partner Steven Kellaway, and a client-engagement platform named Wealth Report for integrated financial modelling and reporting. May 2024: The firm highlighted its active investment and capital-preservation framework in its Autumn 2026 client newsletter, reiterating a post-budget posture of defensive diversification. Stonehouse’s structural differentiator lies in its vertically integrated licensing model — holding its own AFSL rather than operating as a representative of a larger bank or dealer group. That architecture removes institutional product-pushing incentives, a compliance posture that should appeal to allocators seeking advice uncomplicated by internal sales targets. The firm then layers on a partnership model rather than a pure founder-led hierarchy, which provides a degree of succession redundancy unusual for a boutique private-wealth firm.