As billionaire corporate raider Nelson Peltz ratchets up his pressure on struggling global conglomerate Unilever and expands his real estate holdings in Palm Beach, where’s he’s just thrown down $23 million to acquire the office building in which his New York-based Trian Partners is located, he’s also looking to thin his property portfolio in New York’s tony and picturesquely rural community of Bedford. And good thing he presides over a fortune estimate at around $1.7 billion because he’s all set up to take a huge loss on the deal.
Once the site of an extravagant mansion built by Mariah Carey and her now ex-husband Tommy Mottola, the almost 52-acre and now mansion-less spread is available at an even-steven $10 million. Without question, that’s a ton of money for a piece of property without a proper house but it’s nonetheless just under half the $20.55 million Peltz and his former fashion model wife Claudia Heffner Peltz paid for the country estate in the spring of 1998, shortly after Mottola and Mimi went their separate ways.
The Peltzes, who have six children — he also has two older children from his first marriage — and already owned a 106-acre neighboring compound, soon embarked on a massive overhaul of the old Mottola/Carey mansion so that it would more comfortably house their large family. (Among their now adult children are “Bates Motel” actress Nicola Peltz, who scooped up a $10.5 million house in Beverly Hills last year with her soccer/pop music scion fiancée, Brooklyn Beckham.)
The Peltzes never moved into the mansion, or even completed renovations; in December 1999, a fire burned it to the ground. Though they “poured a lot of their thinking and emotion and energy into that house,” a spokesperson for the couple told the New York Times at the time of the fire, rather than rebuild, the couple instead doubled down on High Winds, their neighboring estate, where they still live, and for the last 20+ years held on to the former Mottola/Carey property without building another house.
