With $75 million burning a hole in is real estate pockets from the surprise sale of his Beverly Hills Post Office mansion to Drake, British pop star and property gossip regular Robbie Williams has plunked down $49.5 million for an impressively pedigreed estate in Holmby Hills, one of L.A.’s most prestigious (and convenient) neighborhoods.
The home was sold by Lauren King, wife of late television syndication tycoon Richard King, founding partner at King World Productions. The syndication powerhouse, which owned money-minting rights to “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy,” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” was acquired by CBS in 1999 for $2.5 billion in stock.
Williams’ purchase price, first revealed in the Wall Street Journal, represents a vast sum of money by just about any standard. It is, however, a hefty discount on the final asking price of $58 million and a small fortune below the almost $70 million price tag the estate was saddled with back in 2018 and ’19.
The Kings purchased the nearly two-acre estate in 2001 for $15 million; they were hardly the first entertainment industry heavy hitters to own the property. They bought the place from rags-to-riches advertising mogul Dennis Holt and his wife Brooks, who acquired the property in 1998 for about $11 million from recently deceased Hollywood scion and studio exec Alan Ladd Jr. The home that then stood on the property, a 1938 country English manor house, had previously been owned by powerhouse music exec Jerry Moss and his now ex-wife Sandra Moss, and originally by legendary vaudevillian and comedienne Fanny Brice. That, folks, is some serious showbiz pedigree.
