Even though he owns an $8.5 million Beverly Hills villa acquired barely a year ago, famously ambitious Pritzker family scion Adam Pritzker and his wife Sophie are already looking to expand their real estate holdings. To that end, the eldest son of billionaire John Pritzker — and grandson of Hyatt Hotels cofounder Jay Pritzker — has just paid $15.8 million for an idiosyncratic French Country-style compound in Montecito.
But Pritzker, 36, is more than just another pampered billionaire heir. The San Francisco native cofounded General Assembly, a for-profit professional development school for adults that’s reputedly trained more than one million students since its inception; in 2018, Pritzker and his partners sold the company to the Adecco Group for $400 million. Pritzker is currently CEO of holding company Assembled Brands, and the Columbia Law grad was recently appointed a Columbia trustee.
Pritzker’s 4.5-acre Montecito estate is located along one of the community’s very best streets, and it happens to sit right next door to an even larger residential complex that was custom-built for media personality Dennis Miller and sold last year for a whopping $49 million to Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. Built in 2005 by retired healthcare CEO-turned-filmmaker Jeff Barbakow, Pritzker’s property consists of several structures with an approximate total of 12,000 square feet of living space.
While most Montecito estates are interpretations of coastal Mediterranean or Spanish Revival architecture, the Pritzker palace is unique in its own right, diving head-on down more frilly French route, with unabashedly effusive stylistic displays of grandeur. The listing describes the house as a “majestic manor” in a “rarefied setting,” from whence a lucky owner can enjoy the “joie de vivre of the indoor-outdoor lifestyle,” and the “magic manifest … on this singular estate.”