Mansion Built for Shah of Iran for Sale
A mansion purportedly built for the Shah of Iran in Cuernavaca, Mex., is on the market for a measly $800,000.
We say “measly,” because a house like this would undoubtedly cost lots more in the United States.
It’s not just a matter of house size (seven bedrooms, 8 1/2 baths) but also of room dimensions, types and features.
The three-story fortress, surrounded by towering walls, has a 55-x-27.5-foot living room, 27.5-x-41-foot kitchen, breakfast area with warming oven and bay windows overlooking gardens, and a 22-x-22-foot banquet room, separated from the kitchen by a butler’s pantry.
The house also has a 41-x-14-foot terrace with a bath, dressing area and spa, leading to an outdoor pool; seven fireplaces, and two 27.5-x-22-foot bedrooms, each with a 22-x-14-foot bath.
The mansion was completed in 1981, reportedly to the Shah’s specifications, by a woman contractor who owned the land. A businesswoman with dual American and Mexican citizenship, she became friends, she said, with the Shah after he fled Iran in 1979 and settled for four months in Mexico.
While leasing a house then from the woman, he asked her to build the mansion, said Alexis Nassif with Jerry Berns & Associates in Sherman Oaks, who has the listing.
The Shah apparently intended to return to Mexico when he left the country for medical treatment in October, 1979, but the Mexican government refused to approve his re-entry. He died in Egypt in July, 1980.
When Harold Farb, a Texas realty tycoon whose fortune has been calculated to be around the $500-million mark, telephoned Mike Silverman, a Beverly Hills real estate broker, to find a mansion, Farb had no idea that Silverman would provide Farb with a wife.
Silverman had no notion of that, either, but when Farb went with Silverman to view a house that was for sale, Farb met and fell in love with former actress Julie York, one of Silverman’s top sales agents. They married recently, and York moved to Farb’s home in Houston.
“I should sue for alienation of income or something,” Silverman joked, remembering sales York handled for such celebrities as Jerry Perenchio, Mike Douglas, Mac Davis and Cher.
Silverman didn’t even sell Farb a Beverly Hills home but remains, nonetheless, optimistic. “I’m hoping she will talk him into it,” he said.
Filmation Studios, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Corp. and the animation studio that does the most work in this country, sold its Reseda office building and consolidated its operations in a 60,000-square-foot facility in Woodland Hills.
The investment firm, Charles L. Frandson, bought the Reseda building for $1.2 million, said Seth Dudley and Richard Abbitt, of Julien J. Studley Inc., who represented the studio.
. . . Speaking of studios, what is reported to be the only sound-stage film studio in Santa Monica is for sale at $1.29 million through Peter Fleming of Merrill Lynch’s Pacific Palisades office. “An independent company could use it for interiors and go on location for outdoor shots,” Fleming said. And if the script calls for a shot of the ocean, the Pacific is only 11 blocks away.
A little delegation from the Republic of Guinea, West Africa, was in Los Angeles last week, soliciting investors to help diversify and expand the country’s economy.
Headed by Ousmane Sylla, minister of natural resources, energy and environment, the delegation was introduced to a group of business leaders by L. A. lawyer Donley Brady, who is also chairman of Brady Mines, a large mining investor in Guinea.
A. J. (Tony) Vukoty of Fontana was among those in the audience. Vukoty just finished building a soft-drink bottling plant in Guinea that has been purchased by Coca-Cola.
The Terraces at the Vintage Club in Indian Wells might be billed as “condos for the rich and famous,” judging from the asking prices ($500,000-$1.7 million plus $700-a-month homeowners fee) and sizes (2,300-4,600 square feet).
A dozen or so of the 45 units have been sold at these prices, and nearby lots, in the Vintage Club, have been going for about $1 million apiece--not bad, considering the recent outcry over the overbuilt Coachella Valley market.
Joel Singer--vice president of planning, research and economics for the California Assn. of Realtors--said there has been a “dramatic improvement in that marketplace, though there is still an adequate supply (of housing), but it has become “much more balanced in the past six to 12 months.”
So where do people go who want to get a loan on a $1-million or more piece of real estate?
George Smith Financial Services of Newport Beach, a subsidiary of Grubb & Ellis Co., has a new jumbo residential loan program for single-family, first and second homes in the $1 million-to-$5 million range.
Terms are: a minimum loan of $250,000-$5 million; initial interest rate of 7.75% with a 25-year amortization; a loan fee of 1.5 points; interest rate adjustment once every 12 months based on a spread of 2.375% over the weekly average yield on U. S. Treasury Securities; a maximum rate change of 2% in any one year, and a maximum rate of 12.75% over the life of the loan.
Charles B. Norris Co., a Brentwood mortgage-banking firm, was one of the first to recognize the need for the so-called “jumbo loan,” which Norris says he helped introduce to the market in the mid-’70s. “A lot of lenders won’t make second-home loans, so we call second homes ‘co-primary residences,’ and that works,” he noted. His firm can get loans, he said, for more than $5 million.
Most of his clients are referrals from commercial banks specializing in the entertainment field and from accountant/business managers who seek Norris’ services for their clients.
