Hedge Fund Manager Pays $58 Million for All-New Bel Air Contemporary

Earlier this year, as stock markets began nosediving, famed financier Adam Levinson told Bloomberg that he was crafting an “anti-portfolio” of developed-market bonds as a hedge against inflation. That bearish bet goes starkly against conventional market wisdom of the past decade, which saw American tech stocks outperform almost everything else to create vast and easy wealth for many people.

But be that as it may, it seems Levinson remains bullish on American luxury real estate. Records reveal the Singapore-based Graticule Asset Management founder and his wife Brittany have paid a whopping $58.5 million for an estate in Los Angeles, marking the city’s fourth-biggest deal of the year.

Located in the ultra-posh East Gate Bel Air neighborhood, Levinson’s new digs are surrounded by some of the priciest homes in all of California. The one-acre property last sold for $18.2 million in 2016, when it was acquired as vacant land by the Woodbridge Group, a now-defunct $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme run by real estate developer Robert Shapiro. While Woodbridge went bankrupt in 2017, the process of liquidating the company’s vast holdings has taken years; this particular house is one of the final assets to be sold.

The vacant lot was developed by Viewpoint Collection in collaboration with Plus Development and BULLI design-build firms, and sold on behalf of Woodbridge’s creditors. Completed this year, the house never had a chance to officially list before Levinson scooped it up, though it had been marketed as a not-so-quiet, $75 million pocket listing.

Astute real estate watchers will know that Levinson is not new to Bel Air. Back in 2019, he dropped nearly $40 million on a vacant estate lot that remains vacant today. He then paid Tom Ford exactly $20 million to buy the designer’s longtime Bel Air house — a Richard Neutra-designed modernist structure known as the Brown-Sidney house. With his new $58 million home, Levinson’s Bel Air portfolio value has swollen to a princely $116 million.

As for his latest acquisition, the terraced estate consists of a three-story main house and guesthouse that together span approximately 30,000 square feet of living space. In all, there are 9 bedrooms and 15 bathrooms, plus two separate garages with space for a dozen (or more) cars. Naturally, the spaces is wrapped in swoopy architecture hewn from a mix of glass, steel and exotic stone.

Because the mansion’s finishing touches are still being applied, the property was marketed with digital renderings as opposed to real-life photographs, and further details are scant. But the many-layered house has walls of glass overlooking spectacular views of the city. There’s an infinity-edged swimming pool, plus lush gardens with palm trees, colorful splashes of bougainvillea and formal manicured hedges.

Levinson, 51, was born and raised in Detroit. The Cornell grad spent ten years working for Goldman Sachs on Wall Street and in Asia, eventually departing Goldman in 2002 to join Fortress Investment Group, where he earned a reputation as a superstar trader. Fortress’ Asia arm eventually became Graticule, which has some $3 billion in assets under management. In addition to his three Bel Air properties, Levinson also maintains homes in Singapore and Tokyo, and he’s long owned an oceanfront estate in the Hamptons.