Pharrell is officially no longer a California homeowner. Eighteen months ago, the Grammy Award collector sold a rather bulbous glass mansion in the mountains above Sherman Oaks for $14 million to a non-famous married couple, and now he’s finally unloaded his other Tinseltown home — an equally idiosyncratic but far leaner and sleeker residential affair situated atop a narrow promontory deep in the Hollywood Hills. That place first popped up for sale nearly two years ago, asking $12 million; while the $9.2 million sale price represents a steep discount, it’s also still significantly more than the $7.1 million Pharrell paid in 2015.
The home’s moneyed new owner is Francis Davidson, the CEO and founder of Sonder, the short-term rental managing firm that is arguably Airbnb’s biggest tech rival. Davidson founded Sonder from his Montreal college apartment in 2012 as a way to manage renting out the empty apartments of fellow students. The business steadily grew and Davidson dropped out of college, following Sonder’s lead to Silicon Valley. Today, the company is worth a reported $1.3 billion after raising $550 million from venture capital funds backed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
As for Davidson’s new Los Angeles home, it’s not clear if he plans to list the place on Sonder, though it would certainly bring in a very pretty penny. Lording far above Laurel Canyon and flaunting incredible jetliner views of the city, the vaguely boomerang-shaped architectural tour de force was designed by the acclaimed Hagy Belzberg and completed in 2007. Belzberg and his wife sold the place just two years later for $5.9 million to a semi-mysterious Russian businessman named Denis Mikhaylov. It was Mikhaylov who flipped the house to Pharrell a few years later.
And if you’re a Ryan Gosling fan and this hilltop home — known locally as Skyline Residence — looks vaguely familiar, it could be because the place played Gosling’s bachelor pad in the 2011 hit romcom “Crazy, Stupid, Love.”
In any case, Pharrell and his family have traded Los Angeles for Miami. Back in 2020, he plunked down $30 million on a lavish estate in the Coral Gables community; the Virginia native has also long owned a 9,000-square-foot mansion in his hometown of Virginia Beach.
Branden and Rayni Williams of The Beverly Hills Estates held the listing; Sally Forster Jones of Compass repped the buyer.