
The once unsung if always relatively upscale L.A. neighborhood of Encino has come a long way since it was described as “like, so bitchin’” in the 1982 hit song “Valley Girl” that Frank Zappa made with his then 14-year-old daughter Moon Zappa.
At the convenient if frequently traffic-choked crossroads of the 101 and 405 freeways, the enclave has only grown in popularity in recent decades, particularly the rolling foothills south of Ventura Boulevard, and is known today as a high-priced residential nexus for scads of famous folk. Notable past and present residents include Kelly Clarkson, Michael B. Jordan, Jimmy Rollins, Wiz Khalifa, and Machine Gun Kelly.
And now, despite a slow-down in the high-end market in Los Angeles and across the country, the $18 million off-market sale of a spectacular mansion in Encino illustrates the suburb’s continued desirability to the well-heeled and indeed makes it the ever-more-expensive neighborhood’s second highest price ever paid for a single family home.
The buyers, Annah Bach and Georg F. Hesselbach, certainly aren’t as well-known as some of their neighbors, but they are notable additions to the nabe. (They’re also already Encino residents; they own an $8.6 million contemporary home about two miles to the west.) A couture collecting former fashion model who bills herself as a “Poetic Voice for Fashion,” Bach’s a neophyte filmmaker who starred and showcased fashions from her extensive archive in the “Bladerunner” inspired 2022 fashion short “Visitor,” while Hesselbach is a European businessman and entrepreneur who, back in the early 1970s, “revolutionized the world of flat glass with the invention of coated insulating glass.”
More recently, together, the May-December couple founded the Aalto Hyperbaric Medical Group, an outfit with two L.A. locations where people can be sealed into a tube filled with 100% pure oxygen to “find relief and resolution from a wide range of conditions” and to, among other things, improve one’s natural immune system, enhance neurological functions, and encourage anti-aging characteristics. It seems that, like Encino, hyperbaric chambers have come a long way since Michael Jackson was lambasted in the 1990s for buying and occasionally napping in his own oxygen-filled tube.
The Hesselbachs’ not-quite-record setting new residence weighs in at a sizable 19,500 square feet. Set high above the street on a 1.3-acre parcel but all but invisible behind imposing driveway gates and sky-high hedging, there are eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms between the main house and guest cottage. And for the cars, there are two three-car garages. TV watchers (and DIRT readers) may recognize the house as the home of Gretchen Mol’s character on the Showtime series “American Gigolo.”