Before he forked over a mind-melding $39 million for a 17,000-square-foot mansion in L.A.’s hoity-toity Holmby Hills, always-name-changing hip-hop mogul and businessman Sean “Diddy” Combs, who’s legally changed his middle name from John to Love, rented a curvaceous, city-view contemporary home perched high on a steep slope above Beverly Hills, Calif., that’s just hit the market at $14.5 million.
Though he’s not occupied the property for many years, at least on a full-time basis, the pristinely maintained glass-walled three-story extravaganza is owned by Greek shipping heir turned film producer Paris Kassidokostas-Latsis, who acquired the cliffside contemporary in 2006 for $9.2 million. Briefly engaged in 2005 to recently married socialite Paris Hilton, and long coupled with Georgian-Greek pop singer Tamta, Kassidokostas-Latsis came by his wealth the old-fashioned way, he inherited it when his shipping tycoon grandfather died in 2003 and left a family fortune then estimated at nearly $5.5 billion.
Veteran L.A. property watchers will recall this is not, by far, the first time the low-key trust fund billionaire, who’s film financing company, Hercules Film Fund, was involved with Tom Cruise’s “American Made,” Brie Larson’s “Unicorn Store,” Justin Timberlake’s “Palmer,” and Chloë Grace Moretz’s “Shadow in the Cloud,” has tried to sell the slightly-more-than 7,000-square-foot home. Indeed, he’s wanted to sell it almost as long as he’s owned it; The five-bedroom and six-bath spread first popped up for sale in 2008 with a price of $15 million and then again in 2010 at $13.75 million. After Diddy moved out, it reappeared for sale in the spring of 2015 at a hair under $15 million and the price plummeted to $10.95 million before it was taken off the market in early 2019.
Described in listings held by Aaron Kirman, Aleks Lepovic and Holland Ashrafnia of the Aaron Kirman Group at Compass as “the Crown Jewel of Beverly Crest,” the newly, snazzily updated home is entered through a quiet, walled courtyard that leads to a top-floor foyer bathed in natural light thanks to a wall of glass that pivots open to a small terrace with sweeping views over the city. More light pours in through a massive semi-circular skylight over the floating staircase that curves down to the open-plan living and entertaining spaces that sprawl across the middle level.
The spacious, penthouse-like main bedroom sits privately on the top floor with curving walls of glass, a couple of decadently appointed dressing rooms, and a lavish marble bathroom where an egg-shaped soaking tub is positioned to take in the city, mountain, and ocean views through a curved wall of windows.
There are four more guest bedrooms on the lower levels, along with a bottom-floor family room that spills out through a wall of windows to the gravity-defying backyard. Decked out with a stone-paved built-in grill and bar area, a patch of artificial grass, and a swimming pool and spa floating in the treetops above the steep wooded bluff that falls away below the house, the backyard offers spectacular views no matter which way one turns.
Besides his Holmby Hills palace, Diddy Love Combs, who presides over a fortune that by most estimates exceeds three-quarters of a billion bucks, owns another home in L.A.’s Toluca Lake — it was bought for and occupied by his ex, Kim Porter, who died of pneumonia in 2018, but it’s currently in escrow to be sold with a not-quite $7 million asking price, and earlier this year he paid Gloria and Emilio Estefan $35 million to acquire a nearly 1.5-acre estate on Miami’s exclusive Star Island that’s right next door to another estate he’s owned since 2003 when he picked it up for $14.5 million.
As for Latsis, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Athens, where his mother Marianna Latsis presides over a massive villa in the sprawling city’s leafy northern suburbs, he once owned a glitzy mansion in a gated enclave near the top of Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills that he bought from Keyshawn Johnson in 2004 for $10.5 million and sold just over a year later for $11 million, and last year he quietly unloaded an ocean-view penthouse condo in Santa Monica for $4.1 million, twice the $2.2 million paid about 17 years earlier.