Though she bought it less than four years ago for exactly $25 million, deeds and tax records confirm Kimora Lee Simmons and her legally-embattled ex-banker husband Tim Leissner have quite unexpectedly sold their titanic mansion in Beverly Park for a paltry $15.7 million. The 3.8-acre estate and its rambling compound of buildings were never officially on the market.
Records reveal the discount-minded new owner is an opaque LLC. Behind the entity, according to neighborhood locals, is Jordana Reuben Yechiel — the daughter of English billionaire David Reuben. Yechiel’s father and uncle are two of Britain’s wealthiest men, with a combined net worth estimated at well north of $15 billion.
Behind iron gates and an epically long driveway that snakes up and around to the knoll-top house, there’s a substantial motorcourt and garage parking for at least four cars. The park-like grounds include mature olive and ficus trees, plus sculpted boxwoods. The Mediterranean villa-style mansion weighs in at well over 15,000 square feet, and there are two additional ancillary buildings that bring the complex’s total living square footage to more than 20,000.
Photos from the time of Simmons’ 2017 purchase show the main house included a double-height foyer with twin curved staircases. The foyer is flanked by massive formal living and dining rooms, the former with an geometric patterned marble floor, the latter with mahogany wainscoting and a gold wallpaper.
There’s also a catering kitchen with a trove of commercial-grade appliances, a wet bar-equipped family room with a stone fireplace, and a library with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves. The screening room comfortably seats 12, and the adjoining conservatory opens via a wall of glass-and-steel framed windows to a private courtyard filled with tropical plantings, including banana plants and various palms.
The estate’s acres of park-like grounds include vast lawns and dozens of mature trees, plus manmade amenities like loggias for al fresco dining, and patios for sunbathing. There’s also a mosaic-tiled swimming pool with inset spa, plus a full-size sunken tennis court.
Simmons and Leissner have not yet moved out of Beverly Park. But they still own another home elsewhere in the 90210, this one a smaller Mediterranean-style mansion that was purchased by Simmons in 2006 for $8.5 million and is currently leased out. They also once owned a lavish Manhattan apartment, purchased in 2014 for $19 million and sold three years later at a $750,000 loss to Goldman Sachs trader Stacy Bash-Polley.
As for the Reuben brothers, they are hardly new to Los Angeles. The pair, who control one of the world’s largest portfolios of international real estate, recently funded a loan for the $2.5 billion redevelopment of L.A.’s Century Plaza site. Jordana Reuben Yechiel, for her part, also owns a snazzy West London home that she bought from an Arab sheikh and remodeled into a glamorous, California-inspired residential resort. Post-renovation, Yechiel’s mansion was photographed for a 2012 feature in London’s The Times newspaper.