Like Mansions Across the Country, LA’s The Manor Gets an Epic Price Cut

It wasn’t too long ago that just about any ol’ millionaire or billionaire could slap just about any high price on one of his or her lavish homes and other millionaires and billionaires would come a-runnin’ in chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce droves, waving fistfuls of cash and driving up prices in multiple offers.

Those days are gone, at least for now. It’s not that the ultra-high-end market has come to a screeching halt. It hasn’t. Though Redfin reported the luxury market shrank by a whopping 38% last year, many extraordinarily big deals went down in 2022. Though it once had a $100 million price tag, Kim Kardashian threw down $70-plus million for a blufftop Malibu estate, a pair of co-ops owned by late Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen, on New York’s Fifth Avenue, went to a Julia Koch, widow of billionaire David Koch, for $101 million (Peter Marino is doing the interiors), and Larry Ellison shoveled out $173 million for a 16-acre spread in Manalapan, Florida.

Nonetheless, in tandem with and increasing number of homes priced above $10 million languishing on the market in wealthy enclaves across the country, multimillion-dollar price cuts have become increasingly common and, well, remarkably huge.

In San Francisco’s prestigious Presidio Heights, a grand-scale 1930s mansion initially listed at $45 million was repriced in December at just under $40 million; to be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust,” Alec Baldwin’s longtime home in the Hamptons recently had its $29 million price hacked down to just below $26 million; in fancy-pants Palm Beach, an ocean front estate that sold in early 2022 for $23.5 million was flipped back on the market last summer at $25 million but has since had the price dropped to a money-losing $19.9 million; and out in L.A.’s hoity-toity Holmby Hills, The Manor, one of the city’s largest and most extravagant mansions, has just had its asking price chopped by a whopping $10 million, from a stratospheric $165 million to a still planetary $155 million.

Originally built in 1990 by late primetime television titan Aaron Spelling, who died in 2006, the fastidiously manicured 4.68-acre estate was sold by his widow, Candy Spelling, in 2011 for $85 million to pampered British Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone, just in her early 20s at the time.

The famously profligate heiress and her then husband, James Stunt, spent a reported $20 million more on a lickety-split three-month renovation spearheaded by designer-builder Gavin Brodin, during which Spelling’s matronly décor was replaced with a much more in-your-face sort of glamour and decadence, as evidenced by the Chevy-sized crystal chandelier and black-and-white striped marble floor in the cavernous foyer. (Ms. Ecclestone’s silver-spooned taste for decadence at The Manor was on display in a cheeky W Magazine article some years ago.)

Stunt and Ecclestone divorced in 2017, the year after The Manor was made available with a far-too-optimistic $200 million price. The price dropped to $160 million before a mystery buyer came along in the summer of 2019 and bargained the price down to just under $120 million.

At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a home in California, though that record has since been superseded several times. Initially it was rumored and reported Canadian multi-billionaire Daryl Katz. He’s denied it and indeed, unconfirmed but well-connected word on the Platinum Triangle’s ultra-high-end real estate gossip grapevine is that the owner is a Middle Eastern sheikh.

Whomever it is, they didn’t seem to cotton to the place all that much because it was only about a year and a half before they flipped the shopping mall-sized mansion back on the market, in early 2022 at $165 million.