NOTE: for more photos of Mr. Marciano’s new house, please see Yolanda’s other post on the subject.
Once upon a time, GUESS was the envy of the fashion industry. They transformed the once-staid and deeply unsexy pair of blue jeans into a major and majorly sultry accessory. Their innovative – some might say risqué – marketing campaigns, most notably featuring their late muse Anna Nicole Smith, created a phenomenon and buoyed the company to well over $1 billion in revenue in 2006. Along the way, they also made the company’s founding brothers (Armand, Georges, Maurice, and Paul Marciano) very, very rich.
Sadly, all good things come to an end. The GUESS brand has rather spectacularly collapsed in recent years. And though each of the brothers once owned a 20,000+ square foot mansion in the Beverly Hills area, their lavish lifestyles seem to have shrunk commensurately with the company’s dwindling fortunes.
All but one of these mega-monsters you see above have been sold off. Only Paul’s house, lower right corner, remains in the Marciano family. And when we randomly wrote about Paul’s house a couple weeks ago, we vaguely implied that we wouldn’t be hearing much from the Marciano brothers anymore, at least on the real estate front. Their days as big property ballers seemed over for good.
But wait! Don’t count them all out just yet. Maurice Marciano wants you to know he’s still got it and he ain’t afraid to flaunt it. To that end, he just slammed down an unexpected $20,800,000 – through a shell company called “Beverly Financial Holdings LLC” – for a brand-new mansion in the fiendishly trendy “Trousdale Estates” neighborhood of Beverly Hills.
The new house was never officially on the market, and we weren’t able to locate any photos online, so all we can tell you is that it’s a spec-built ultra-modern crib on the same street where Jennifer Aniston sold her house to Bill Gross for $35 million several years ago. And just up and and around the corner is the much-larger behemoth that Markus Persson paid Bruce Makowsky a stupefying $70 million (in cash) for back in 2014. But it’s similar to a lot of other spec mansions in this area, recently. Take Lynda Weinman’s house and the Winklevoss twins’ houses in the Bird Streets and imagine if those two houses mated and had a baby. Then picture that new house in your head and squint your brain’s eyes, and voilà! That’s what Mr. Marciano’s new house looks like.
But anyway, we were a little surprised to see Mr. Marciano spend so much money. We didn’t know he had that kinda dough anymore. But then he did sell his old monster mansion to Steve Wynn for $47,851,350.
Anyway, property records reveal this is not the only 8-figure Beverly Hills estate Mr. Marciano currently owns. Back in 2010, he forked out an even-steven $10,000,000 for another, smaller modern place that’s basically just down the street from the $20 million house he just bought.
For a hot minute, Yolanda couldn’t fathom why Mr. Marciano would need two expensive properties in the same neighborhood. But then we remembered that the $10 million house has always been occupied by his ex-wife, part-time film producer Nathalie Marciano. Apparently Mr. Marciano doesn’t mind living two minutes away from his ex. He’s a mature fellow, this Mr. Marciano.
For those who don’t know, in addition to his $30 million in Beverly Hills real estate, Mr. Marciano also owns a massive winery up in Napa-area village of Saint Helena, CA. With a leg up from our gurl Your Mama over at Variety, we sorted out that the compound in question is 56 acres with an 8,653 square foot main house that dates all the way back to the 1880s and was once a “religious retreat center”. The 1880s?! Well, dayum! That’s old as dirt.
Yolanda doesn’t know how much Mr. Marciano paid for his Napa pad, but he picked it up in June 2006 and then initiated a complete overhaul of the estate that included adding a brand-new 21,000 square foot state-of-the-art winery. And there’s also two side-by-side tennis courts. Last year’s property taxes came to a throat-tightening $324,186. And that’s just that one property! Clearly, though his GUESS fortunes have considerably dwindled in recent years, Mr. Marciano won’t be packing his designer bags for the poorhouse anytime soon.
If you’d like to read more about the Marciano Estate winery or perhaps plan a visit, visit its website here.
Lest we forget, Maurice and his younger brother Paul also own the huge former Masonic temple down on Wilshire in LA. The pair bought the historic property for $8,000,000 as a place to store their obviously-gigantic personal art collections.
Now let’s get back to our boy’s new $20 million Beverly Hills mansion, right quick. An interesting point to note is that the developers originally purchased this property and the decrepit old house it contained way back in 2010 for a bargain-basement $2,600,000. Even with the exorbitant costs of constructing a new modern mansion like this from scratch, we’d bet they still walked away with many millions in their pockets. Probably like $10 million or so. That’s huge.
So have all those reports about the sagging high-end real estate market been overblown, or did the developers just get really lucky off Mr. Marciano? You decide.
But we digress. What’s money, anyway? Mazel Tov on your new house, Mr. Marciano. Just remember that Trousdale is a steep and unforgiving neighborhood for driving. You’ve gotta have control over your vehicle at all times. And given your track record, you might want to invest in a personal chauffeur. We’re just saying!
Finally, before we jet off, we’d like to give a fond farewell to one of our favorite performers. Here’s one of his best performances of one of Yolanda’s all-time favorite songs.
