Due to the personal success of silver-spooned hotel heir turned real estate tycoon Rick Hilton, chairman and co-founder of the Platinum Triangle’s powerhouse brokerage Hilton & Hyland, the Hilton name is as synonymous, if not more, in the finer zip codes across Los Angeles with high-end real estate than it is for the international hotel chain that bears the family name.
While Hilton has negotiated for untold numbers of deep-pocketed buyers and sellers — he represented both buyer and seller in the landmark $85 million sale of the Spelling estate in Holmby Hills to Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone, who has since sold the house for $120 million — he’s also developed some choice tracts of land around town, including the guard-gated Brentwood Country Estates enclave where some of the homeowners include Arnold Schwarzenegger and sitcom producer Kevin Bright.
His most recent project, a gleaming, brand-new spec-built mansion that merges classic architecture with modern-day styling and state-of-the-art technologies in a particularly plum pocket of L.A.’s ultra-tony Bel Air neighborhood, has just hit the market at $55 million.
Tax records show the property was purchased by a corporate concern linked to Hilton in July 2016 for $9,262,500, well below the $11.5 million asking price, from apparel mogul Treivush Menachem. The house that then stood on the not-quite-two-third-acre parcel, a five-bedroom traditional designed by architect Ray J. Keiffer, was soon offered as a rental, at $55,000 per month, while Hilton and his team laid the groundwork, worked on the design, secured the necessary permits, and, per tax records, took out a $26 million loan to finance the construction of a new residence.
The architecture firm Harrison Design was engaged to create the glamorous mansion, while the interior design is a collaboration, per marketing materials, between Nicole Gordon Studio and Hilton’s delightfully daffy and preposterously pampered yet surprisingly down-to-earth wife Kathy. (Mrs. Hilton, who has long maintained a relatively low public profile despite the global fame of her daughters, Paris and Nicky, is hands down the breakout star on the currently airing season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and arguably, according to some aficionados of the series, the only reason to watch the show anymore.)
Now that the long-in-planning house is complete and completely furnished, Rick and Kathy’s first-born son, 31-year-old Barron Hilton II, and his wife, American-born German countess, Tessa Gräfin von Walderdorff Hilton, both agents at Hilton & Hyland, of course, have taken on the $55 million listing, keeping the whole shebang, including at least some of the sales commissions, in the family.
Bespoke craftsmanship and premium finishes can be found throughout the stately three-story home that contains a total of eight bedrooms — four family bedrooms, a two-bedroom guest wing, a staff suite, and a multi-room main suite — and a total of 16 bathrooms, at least four of them powder rooms.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland For about 60 years before his 2019 death at 91, Hilton’s father, billionaire businessman W. Barron Hilton, second son of Conrad Hilton and successor to the family’s eponymous hotel chain, presided over what’s known in some circles as the Jay Paley Residence, a 1930s white-brick Georgian manor house with a symmetrical front façade designed by Paul Revere Williams for the legendary founder of CBS. Situated on more than 2.5 acres in L.A.’s Holmby Hills neighborhood, the hilltop mansion was sold earlier this year by Hilton’s estate for $61.5 million to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
No doubt the elder Hilton’s Holmby Hills home looms large in the lives of the entire Hilton family. Indeed, the house served as the setting for Paris Hilton’s 2000 Vanity Fair photo shoot, which she’s referred to as “iconic” and key to the skyrocketing of her career. And, though he could have chosen any period style he wished, Hilton’s spec-built Bel Air mansion is remarkably similar to his late father’s, a handsome white-brick Georgian residence with a symmetrical arrangement of windows around the front door.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Unlike many mansions built today, the foyer eschews the pomposity of double-height ceilings and instead goes for a more subtle impression with it’s extraordinary length; it runs clear through to the back of the house with a soigné grey-and-white checkerboard floor.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Formal living and dining rooms showcase chevron-pattern honey-blond hardwood floors, high ceilings bedazzeled with eye-catching modern light fixtures, and custom steel-trimmed glass doors that lead to a huge terrace for al fresco entertaining.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland The main floor also includes a home office lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves as well as a walnut-paneled library with black marble fireplace and wet bar.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland The kitchen is monochromatically dressed in denim-blue, while the nearby family room is large enough to accomodate a spacious informal dining area.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland As carefully considered and meticulously crafted as the rest of the house, the main staircase lies discreetly off the main foyer.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland In a second-floor wing of its own, the main suite comprises a large bedroom with grey-flannel marble fireplace, two dressing rooms and two marble-sheathed bathrooms.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland The main suite also includes a secondary bedroom — promo materials suggest it’s suitable as a glam-room or nursery — as well as a study lined in lustrous French polish walnut paneling.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland A massive, 2,000-square-foot lower-level entertaining space is complete with custom bronze wet bar, an 850-plus-bottle wine room encased in glass, full catering kitchen, and a pair of powder rooms
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Accessible by stair or elevator, the lower level also includes a wood-paneled gym and a 4K screening room with tiered seating on boxy, deep-cushioned couches.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Twin staircases connect the upper level terrace to an even larger lower terrace where another set of twin staircases leads down to a somewhat plain looking pavilion alongside the simple rectangular swimming pool and spa.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Set against verdant clouds of foliage, the pool pavilion includes a lounge, kitchen and guest bedroom with bath.
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Image Credit: Hilton & Hyland Long-time residents of Bel Air, Rick and Kathy Hilton make their home in a gorgeous, 15,000-square-foot stone manor house that dates to the late 1920s. Dubbed West Haven, and hidden behind secured gates and a thick hedgerow with a swimming poool and tennis court, the one-acre estate was acquired by the couple in 2004 for somewhere in the neighborhood of its $9.9 million asking price.