Style is subjective, but this Malibu home certainly tries its best to impress everyone with its smorgasbord of looks. Fans of offbeat contemporary and Gothic architecture might love the monochromatically all-charcoal, vaguely Tudor-inspired exterior. Classic beach house aficionados will find solace in the soft neutral colors of the casually luxe interior. And everybody will love the huge grassy backyard, which is ringed by a stunning perimeter of eucalyptus trees.
Described in the listing as a “modern country farmhouse” and built in 2001, the 5,200-square-foot structure has been renovated several times over the past two decades. It’s second owner was Maura Kaplan, a daughter of actor Leslie Neilson, who sold the property in 2012 to Dave Mathews Band bassist Stefan Lessard. Less than a year later, Lessard flipped the property to apparel mogul James Perse, who gave the sprawling house a makeover in his signature minimalist style before oil heiress Aileen Getty bought it, in 2016, for $12.5 million.
Since 2017, Getty has been trying to unload the property, initially at a $14 million ask that dropped to $12 million. No one bit, and so Getty gave the place another decor makeover before successfully flipping it last week to Rob Eloff and Nicole Ross Eloff, the latter a New York society staple and heiress to the Time Warner media empire created by her father, the late Stephen Jay Ross.
The Ross family has a well-documented affinity for trophy real estate. Back in 2014, David Geffen famously paid Eloff’s mother Courtney Sale Ross more than $50 million for the so-called Cody House, her titanic Georgica Pond-fronting estate in the Hamptons. (Geffen sold that property just two years later to upgrade to an even grander Hamptons spread.) And in 2012, Sale Ross sold her titanic duplex apartment in Manhattan’s ultra-exclusive 740 Park Avenue building for $52.5 million to billionaire Howard Marks.