The Big, the Bad and the Lovely
Biggest, baddest and best: For better or for worse, a handful of Southland houses will forever have a certain notoriety.
Even if a house has been torn down, ghosts linger. Consider the so-called “Tate house,” where Charles Manson’s followers murdered actress Sharon Tate and four of her friends Aug. 9, 1969. The 2,300-square-foot rental was finally sold in 1989. It was demolished about 1994, when construction began on a Mediterranean-style 18,000-square-foot villa, listed that year at $12.5 million. The Benedict Canyon property finally sold earlier this year in the $6-million range.
One reason it took the new house so long to sell, and at such a discount, was that it is overbuilt for the neighborhood. Of greater consequence, however, was the stigma of being the most notorious property in the Los Angeles area, said Randy Bell of Irvine-based Bell, Anderson & Sanders, which appraises environmentally and financially damaged real estate around the country.
Similarly, the 9,000-square-foot Rancho Santa Fe home where the 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists committed suicide in March 1997 was thoroughly cleaned and painted. But it still wound up in foreclosure and was sold to a developer, who bulldozed it a few months ago.
The developer paid in the high $600,000 range for the property, Bell said, “but under normal circumstances, it would have been worth $1.4 million.”
Fortunately, few other houses in the area have such pasts to live down. More fit in the “biggest” and “best” categories.
The biggest in size is the Holmby Hills house owned by TV producer Aaron Spelling and his wife, Candy. Completed in 1991, the house is 56,500 square feet--about the size of a football field.
House Is Just About as Big as a Football Field
The Spellings’ house is on six acres once occupied by Bing Crosby’s 15,000-square-foot house--one of the biggest tear-downs in the Southland.
One of the Largest
One L.A.-area house demolished during the past year was a 10,000-square-foot Wallace Neff-designed mansion built in 1923 for cowboy actor Fred Thomson and his wife, screenwriter Frances Marion. Though having architectural significance, the Beverly Hills house was demolished by billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, d who bought it from the widow of Paul Kollsman, inventor of the altimeter.
The 120-acre site the house sat on is one of the largest single-family home properties in the area in terms of acreage, while Ken Roberts’ Brentwood home on 112 acres, owned by actor Robert Taylor in the ‘60s, is now the largest estate in the L.A. area with a home on it.
A 157-acre parcel owned by the late Mark Hughes, founder of Herbalife, is the largest residential property without a house that will be for sale this year. Hughes bought the land in 1997 from entertainer Merv Griffin, but died in May before receiving a final go-ahead to build a 45,000-square-foot house.
Hughes also owned a house in Malibu that set a sales record for the beach city when he paid about $25 million for it in December 1999.
For the biggest price paid in the L.A. Basin, though, nobody comes close to producer David Geffen’s $47.5-million purchase in 1990 of the late movie mogul Jack Warner’s Beverly Hills estate.
Geffen, a partner at DreamWorks, also owns a home with the most beach frontage in Malibu, local Realtors say. His home fronts on about 400 feet of beach.
But Barbra Streisand, who bought the three houses in her compound in 1996 for a total of $12 million, is the queen of ocean-bluff frontage. Her 3.1 acres have 608 feet facing the ocean.
A Holmby Hills compound for sale has the biggest asking price in town: $58.9 million. It includes two houses: one owned in the ‘70s by Sonny and Cher and earlier by actor Tony Curtis; the other owned at one time by actress-swimmer Esther Williams. The conjoined parcels are at the end of a cul-de-sac and border the L.A. Country Club.
And Just in Case That’s Not Big Enough . . .
A third home on the cul-de-sac available in the $5-million range, could be purchased to further enlarge the compound. Belonging to singer Engelbert Humperdinck and built by singer Rudy Vallee in 1935, the house also was once owned by actress Jayne Mansfield.
Iris Cantor, widow of the late Wall Street veteran B. “Bernie” Gerald Cantor, also has her house on the market, at what could be the biggest asking price in the L.A. area for a single house: $45 million.
Built in 1997, the 34,000-square-foot house has a library, six bedrooms, 21 baths, a 10-car garage and a wine cellar.
The most expensive lease was for a 25,000-square-foot Beverly Hills house that is on the market at $18.9 million. It was leased for two months during the ‘90s to the Saudi royal family. The price: $125,000 a month.
And the best? The Los Angeles County Museum of Art describes Dawnridge, in the Beverly Hills post office area, as “the most exotic and extraordinary.”
It was built in 1949 by the late Tony Duquette, who created jewelry, costumes and movie sets but was mostly known for designing home interiors for the likes of Elizabeth Arden, the Duchess of Windsor and J. Paul Getty.
Duquette, who died in September 1999 at 85, rarely opened the house to visitors. But now dinner in Dawnridge, at $1,000 a person, is being offered through the museum’s Sept. 21-23 fund-raiser “The Art of the Palate Millennium Dinners.” Hutton and Ruth Wilkinson, Duquette’s business partners for the last 30 years, are the hosts.
Duquette’s interiors have been called “enchanting,” “magical” and “Shangri-La.” At his own house, Duquette created a botanical garden with Oriental pavilions.
“He was the king of recyclers,” Hutton Wilkinson said. “He made friezes out of skateboards, antlers, sea shells and bones.”
