‘King’s’ Queen Selling Getaway
PRISCILLA PRESLEY has put her Montecito home on the market at $2.6 million.
She bought the wooded, 2-acre property, with a Country French house on it, in 1981, eight years after she divorced rock ‘n’ roll king Elvis and four years after he died.
Although she has owned the property for several years, Presley rarely went there, said Linda Fareed, who has the listing through Alexander Velto Real Estate, a Fred Sands company.
“She’s been so busy on ‘Dallas’ and doing other things,” Fareed explained.
Presley launched “Moments,” her own line of perfume, in late March. She is co-executive producer of ABC-TV’s “Elvis” series, which premiered in February and was just canceled. She starred as Jenna Wade during the 1987-88 season of CBS-TV’s “Dallas.”
She has also been busy with her son, born in 1987, and her granddaughter, born last June to Elvis’s daughter, 22-year-old Lisa Marie.
Presley is known to be looking for a vacation home in the San Bernardino Mountains, where the children can experience snow and winter. Her main residence is in the Beverly Hills area.
Her Montecito home was built in 1964 in what is known as the “Golden Quadrangle,” the most exclusive part of the community.
The main house has three bedrooms and three baths in about 2,600 square feet. It also has a barn that was converted into a guest cottage with a large stone fireplace.
DAVID GEFFEN’S $47.5-million cash deal for late movie mogul JACK L. WARNER’S Beverly Hills estate has closed escrow, making it the highest price known to have been paid for a private home in the United States.
Geffen also acquired all the furnishings in the purchase price, sources said.
Christie’s had a dozen or so staffers ticketing the porcelains, antique furniture and Impressionist paintings for an auction when Geffen, who sold his record company earlier this year for $545 million in MCA stock, decided to buy everything, the sources explained. That included a portrait by Salvador Dali of Warner’s wife, Ann.
The home, designed in the ‘30s by architect Roland Coate, has a room with wood paneling that was hand-carved by a son of Chippendale and a floor taken from a palace in France on which Napoleon proposed to Josephine, sources added.
The main house has five bedrooms, a card room and a 50-foot-long bar in 15,000 to 17,000 square feet, and there is a separate house with seven to 10 bedrooms for the staff.
“But it’s not a big mansion by today’s standards,” a local broker remarked. “The bathrooms and closets are minuscule, and the upstairs of the main house is completely inadequate.”
Even so, Geffen got a good buy, the broker said, largely because of the 9-acre grounds, which have a pool, large lawn where there was a four- or five-hole golf course; a 300-foot long, 200-foot-wide entry lined with trees; a waterfall, fern gardens and an esplanade of statues, fountains and greenery. “It looks like Versailles,” he said.
A $3.5-million Beverly Hills house also owned by Geffen and described as “David’s tear-down” was on a brokers’ caravan last week of seven houses valued at a total of $54.7 million. Jana Jones of Alvarez, Hyland & Young arranged the tour.
PRINCESS MARIA CHRISTINE, half-sister of King Baudouin of Belgium, and her husband, Jean Paul Gourguesm, have opened a restaurant in Dana Point known as Napoleon, featuring French cuisine.
“It’s a small, chic restaurant--one-story with a gazebo,” said Pat Hug, who handled the lease with Linda Taglianetti of George Elkins Co.--Newport. The restaurant, which seats 65, was completely redecorated in what Taglianetti described as “a Napoleon theme, with everything in blue and gold.”
The princess moved to Orange County about a year ago and married Gourguesm earlier this year. The newlyweds have been leasing a home in San Juan Capistrano.
Gourguesm was formerly in the restaurant business in Toronto, Canada.
JOSEPH SIROLA, who co-starred on the recently canceled CBS series “Wolf” and has made a career of doing voice-overs in commercials for national advertisers, has sold 648 acres in the Yucca Valley to an investment syndicate from Des Moines, Iowa.
The New York City-based actor, who has a posh co-op in Manhattan and a bachelor pad in Brentwood, bought the acreage in 1980 for less than half a million dollars. He sold it for $1.7 million.
A Bel-Air home built in 1966 by car dealer FLETCHER JONES and later owned by Sylmar pacemaker manufacturer Alfred E. Mann is on the market for $14 million.
The 11,000-square-foot residence, with a pool and tennis court, was built on the 4-acre site of a home that burned to the ground during the 1961 Bel-Air fire. That home was owned, at the time, by the late JUSTIN DART, an adviser to President Reagan.
The house built by Jones, on one of the highest peaks in Bel-Air, has been the home for nearly 10 years of German industrialist Carl E. Press, who owns radio stations and vineyards in West Germany and prawn and alligator farms in Australia.
“His son graduated a year ago from (nearby) Harvard School, and now Mr. Press is only spending four to six weeks out of the year here, so he’s selling,” explained Cecelia Waeschle, who shares the listing with Joyce Rey at Rodeo/Prudential Realty.
