Haute Property : O.C. Celebs Selling Their Estates Find a Name Alone Won’t Do the Job
“Washington slept here.”
--common untruth
“The rich are different.”
--common truth
Is there such a thing in Orange County today as a recession-proof house? Someplace you can sell with no sweat without budging an inch on the asking price? The sort of casa very grande that people will come sprinting out of the blocks to post offers on?
“Sure,” you might say. “What about those behemoth custom joints with amenities such as indoor polo fields and freight elevators? The kind of places you don’t describe as ‘that big house’ but as ‘The (your name here) Estate’?”
You’d be half right. As the recession grinds on and the real estate market exhibits an ever-starker yin-and-yang personality (great time to buy, rotten time to sell), the Orange County chateau of the well-heeled and well-known may or may not be turning over at the same sluggish rate as your basic tract house.
Also, a former tenant with a familiar name may lend a certain cachet to the place, but in the current economic crunch it may not be enough to swing a deal on its own.
Still, when they’re up on the block the houses of Orange County’s luminaries continue to be a fine sight, occupied or not.
Take the Harbor Ridge home of auto dealer Jim Slemons. Perched on the highest point on the ridge, with views of Newport Beach and the harbor from nearly every room, it has been up for sale for nearly five months, most recently at a marked-down $3,699,000 (from the original $4,250,000). In pre-recession days the house--it has been advertised as “The Slemons Estate”--probably would have fetched the original asking price, said real estate agent Ann Peters, who is handling the property. But in hard economic times, “I don’t think there’s any distinction (among potential buyers of high-ticket and lower-priced properties). All buyers seem to be shaky confidence-wise.”
Offers have not exactly been winging in. Peters said that, as of about three weeks ago, only two offers were made (neither panned out) and two other potential buyers were showing interest. And the house remains unoccupied.
But magnificently so. The house, only about 18 months old, comes fully furnished, as is, except for a white grand piano in the living room and a collection of slot machines in the downstairs game room. Those will go with Slemons to his new home in Hawaii.
Otherwise, the 9,500-square-foot, three-bedroom Mediterranean-style house is fully furnished--filled with designer furniture, state-of-the-art built-in electronics and such amenities as a downstairs maid’s quarters, a wine cellar, a separate staircase to the guest quarters, a full bar, a white marble-and-granite entry hall and hearth, a custom spa and pool, a fully equipped exercise room, a library, a five-car garage that can accommodate a limousine and a storage room to be used, according to the agent’s brochure, “for all the extras that one tends to collect.”
“At night,” said Peters, “it’s Disneyland.”
Somewhere down the hill in that fantasyland of night lights is another pricey yet empty house: the former Linda Isle home of author Joseph Wambaugh, and for $3,495,000 it can be yours. The problem so far: No one seems to want it badly enough to pay the price. The house was put on the market two years ago, then removed for a time and rented. It has been available for sale for the past eight months.
Not that there is anything wrong with the looks of the place. Perched over a dock that can accommodate a pair of 60-foot yachts, the house boasts a commanding view of Harbor Island and its adjacent channel and much of Newport Harbor. It is bright, large (almost 4,000 square feet), done almost exclusively in tans and light-colored wood, has an interior brick patio with a pool and spa, and various marble floors. And a few steps away is the home of Orange County’s only billionaire, Don Bren.
Still, said real estate agent Bill Cote, there have been “a lot of serious people looking at it, but no serious offers.” The recession, he said, tends to hit the high-ticket real estate community last, but that community also tends to be the last to recover from it.
Some of the lookers, he said, “are very taken with the fact that it belonged to Joseph Wambaugh,” but that doesn’t mean that he’ll be able to ask for more money as a result.
“The people are too shrewd as buyers in this market,” said Cote. “There’s a curiosity, and certainly I’ve advertised the house as belonging to Joseph Wambaugh, but people who can afford this kind of property come with more business acumen. They come with their advisers or attorneys.”
Cote said that Wambaugh, who now lives in Rancho Santa Fe, isn’t desperate to sell and actually may not have to wait too much longer to do it.
“The market’s starting to come back,” he said. “People are starting to come out of the woodwork now. For a while, I was lucky to show this place once a week. Now I show it about five times a week.”
There are properties in Orange County, however, to which such economic swings and fiscal rules simply don’t apply, houses that are so staggeringly vast and expensive that the shibboleth “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” need hardly be mentioned.
The D’Angelo estate on Easter Hill in North Tustin is such a place. Built six years ago for Michael D’Angelo, the man who founded the Clothestime clothing store empire, the estate (the agent’s brochure calls it a villa) sits on about 26 acres of hilltop land and 30,000 square feet are contained in the colonnaded building that surrounds an 11,000-square-foot courtyard landscaped with palm trees, koi-filled pools and one swimming pool specifically made for water volleyball.
Within this world is an array of features and amenities that would never--but never-- appear in your local condo complex: two separate bathrooms in the master bedroom suite, six separate bedroom suites with sitting rooms and baths in each, a staff wing with three bedrooms with baths and kitchen, an outdoor kitchen and barbecue, an elevator, a terraced-seating media room with a wall filled with audio and video components and a surround-sound system, a wine cellar with tasting room, nine fireplaces, a hair salon, seven garages, a separate building to house two RVs, a sauna with television, men’s and women’s locker rooms with shower bathrooms, a gym with 20 exercise stations, a lighted tennis court, two swimming pools, two spas, three waterfalls, a game room, glass ceilings that open to the sky, a pair of indoor racquetball courts and a discotheque with video cameras and monitors and laser lights and smoke machine.
The asking price: $13,950,000, unfurnished.
If you think you absolutely can’t consider it without furniture in it, however, Carole Geronsin, one of the agents representing the property, said a deal might be worked out for a higher price. The place was actually offered furnished near the end of 1990 by a Beverly Hills real estate firm for a cool $22 million, but that price, said Marcia Saunders, another agent currently handling the property, reflected not so much the addition of furniture as the price the Beverly Hills market was more accustomed to.
“This is literally a self-contained resort here,” said real estate agent Carole Geronsin. “And the only reason anyone would want to leave the compound would be to procure food.”
Well, not exactly. D’Angelo, she said, decided to sell it to move his family onto “a very large yacht and a smaller house.”
In this real estate stratosphere, said Geronsin, the winds of a shifting economy barely ruffle the palm fronds. The person who buys the estate--it has been up for sale for 13 months--will not have to wait for another house to sell to obtain the money. It will simply be available. The buyer, she said, might be a movie star, an oil tycoon, “someone who wants it all, wants seclusion, wants privacy and wants to be surrounded by elegance and style. You don’t show this house to every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along.”
A couple of miles to the north, and back to earth both literally and economically, is the former house of Jack Youngblood, the Rams’ celebrated defensive tackle during the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Located in the horsing community of Orange Park Acres, the 3,400-square-foot house looks the part: it resembles an elongated red barn.
Unlike multimillion-dollar properties (it’s listed for $799,000), the recession does have an effect on its appeal in the market, said agent Jack Tucker.
“In an economy like this,” said Tucker, “there’s a kind of chain that’s broken. If people can’t buy a $300,000 home then there’s no one at that level who can move up to a $500,000 home and so on. Newport Beach is a different market, but this market (in Orange Park Acres) has slowed down, no question about it.”
And the Youngblood name doesn’t seem to help, he said.
“I think there’s star value, personally,” said Tucker. “There are a lot of wealthy people out here who like to be associated with celebrities. But I’ve had people call up and want to see the house just because it’s Jack Youngblood’s house and not necessarily because they want to buy.”
Youngblood, now living near Sacramento as the marketing director for the Sacramento Surge of the World Football League, said he wasn’t surprised that the house hasn’t sold since being put on the market last August.
“The right person has to come through,” he said. “It’s not suited for everybody. It has to fit. It’s one of those cases where sports has enabled an athlete to buy a nicer place than he normally would have and enabled him to do things with it, to put in unique things like a 10-foot ceiling to accommodate him because he’s tall, or to put in larger mirrors that don’t cut you off at the nose.”
Star value won’t carry the day, said Youngblood.
“A person can say, ‘I bought Jack Youngblood’s house,’ but that and a dollar will get him a cup of coffee,” he said.
It will also get him or her four bedrooms, four baths, a sunken living room with a river rock fireplace, a formal dining room with floor-to ceiling mirror, two other river rock fireplaces in the family room and master suite, a free-form pool and spa, a three-car garage and a large adjacent grass field.
“None of this is froufrou stuff,” said Tucker. “This house is what Jack Youngblood is.”
Tucker said that for a time he had advertised the 12-year-old property as “the Youngblood house” but decided to drop the appellation when it didn’t seem to make a difference in attracting serious buyers. But, he said, a serious offer is pending, from a man waiting on the sale of his home in Newport Beach’s pricey Big Canyon Country Club.
But he shakes his head a bit when asked if he thinks the sale will go through, as if not wanting to jinx the deal. In a recession, even the rich and famous have to hedge occasionally.
JIM SLEMONS ESTATE 31 Ridgeline Drive, Newport Beach Square footage: 9,500 On market: Five months Original listing: $4,250,000 (furnished) Current listing: $3,699,000 (furnished) JOSEPH WAMBAUGH ESTATE 30 Linda Isle, Newport Beach Square footage: 4,000 On market: On and off for two years Original (current) listing: $3,495,000 (unfurnished) JACK YOUNGBLOOD ESTATE 7202 Amapola Ave., Orange Park Acres Square footage: 3,400 On market: Six months Original (current) listing: $799,000 (unfurnished) MICHAEL D’ANGELO ESTATE 10252 Sunrise Lane, North Tustin Square footage: 30,000 On market: 13 months Original listing: $22,000,000 (furnished) Current listing: $ 13,950,000 (unfurnished)
