Richard Gere Asks $28 Million for Bucolic Compound

Out with the old and in with the new.

As often happens when a rich and famous man has children with a new wife, he sells the house he once shared with the former wife and buys another one in which to settle down and raise a new family. Case in point: movie star Richard Gere, who after more than 20 years in residence is selling up his vast compound in pastoral Pound Ridge, N.Y., asking $28 million for the picturesque multi-residence property. Listed with Muffin Dowdle of Ginnel Real Estate, the multi-parcel spread’s taxes tally up to $220,000 per year, per marketing materials.

In early 2018, after several years of courtship, the uncommonly handsome actor, now 72 and probably best known for his leading man roles in iconic 1980s and ‘90s films like “American Gigolo” and “Pretty Woman,” as well as the 2000 film “Dr. T & the Women,” married for the third time. (The notorious ladies’ man, who over the years has been linked to a slew of high-profile women including Diane von Furstenberg, Barbra Streisand, and Padma Lakshmi, was married for a few years in the early 1990s to Cindy Crawford and to actress Carey Lowell from 2002 to 2016.)

His new wife, Spanish publicist and political activist Alejandra Silva, is the daughter of businessman Ignacio Silva, a former vice president of Real Madrid Football Club, and was previously married to geologist Govind Friedland, heir to a great mining fortune. (Fun fact: Friedland’s Singapore-based father, billionaire Robert Friedland, plunked down $26 million for an L.A. pied-a-terre in 2020.)

Gere and Silva each have a son from their previous marriages — his son with Lowell is now 21 years old and hers with Friedland just nine — and they produced their first child together in early 2019 and then a second one in 2020. That’s right folks, Mr. Gere, a devout Buddhist who pals around with the Dalai Lama, will be in his 90s before either of his younger children graduate college.

Purchased in a series of transactions over about a ten year period, hidden down a leafy country lane and enveloped in a beautifully maintained idyll, the almost fifty-acre estate lies about fifty miles and, on a good day, just an hour’s drive to Manhattan. The extraordinary sense of pastoral seclusion is only enhanced by the more than 4,300 acres of protected land it borders. The bucolic compound’s five structures are sprinkled around the property and represent an understated New England aesthetic that is familiar, inviting and somewhat rustic, while the interior spaces are luxurious though low-key and comfortably appointed.

The three-story, 19-room main residence measures in at more than 11,600 square feet, with a total of eight bedrooms, nine fireplaces, and nine bathrooms, plus a couple of powder rooms. There are also a couple of amply proportioned secondary residences (one of them serves as the compound’s office), a charming shed, and a tri-cupula-ed six-stall barn.

Along with fenced paddocks, meandering gardens, rolling hills laced with riding trails, and thick stands of ancient specimen trees, the compound’s numerous outdoor amenities include a postcard-perfect private pond with sandy beach and shoreline pavilion, a swimming pool surrounded by lush lawns, and a full-size soccer pitch.

Gere and Silva appear to have already packed up the babies and decamped Pound Ridge for the nearby, equally affluent, and as gorgeously arcadian community of North Salem, N.Y., where they’ve settled into an aristocratic red-brick Georgian mansion built in the 1930s for an heir to one of America’s great family fortunes. The May-December couple quietly acquired the 9,000-square-foot beauty about a year ago for $9.8 million and soon dropped another $700,000 on a vacant neighboring parcel that brought the size of their new estate to about 35 acres.

No stranger to the property gossip columns, Gere, who has not appeared on the silver screen since the not particularly well regarded 2017 drama “Three Christs,” once owned a well-known waterfront compound in the North Haven area of the Hamptons that he initially tried to sell with a pie-in-the-sky price of $65 million and eventually sold to disgraced former morning chat show host Matt Lauer in 2016 for $33.75 million. With his career in tatters since his 2017 firing, Lauer has had the place on and off the market several times, most recently last year, at $44 million.