SELLER: Steve Wynn
LOCATION: Los Angeles, Calif.
PRICE: $17.45 million
SIZE: 11,027 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Multibillionaire casino tycoon and deep-pocketed blue chip art collector Steve Wynn seems to have come down with an extreme case of the Real Estate Fickle and has flipped a Bel Air mansion on the market at $17.45 million after he bought it, according to multiple sources and via corporate entity, just six months ago for $16.25 million. Current listing details, which appear to make use of the exact same photographs used to market the property at the time of Mister Wynn’s purchase, show the mock-Med manse was built in 1991 and backs directly up to the pristine, well-watered greens of the high-nosed Bel-Air Country Club. The 11,027-square-foot residence stands three stories tall at the back and contains a total of five bedrooms and eight bathrooms.
Main-floor living spaces include a voluminous double-height entry with twin staircases, spacious formal living and dining rooms, a paneled library, an oversized kitchen and a bifurcated family room with fireplace and wet bar. Upstairs, a generous pair of en-suite guest/family bedrooms are joined by an expansive master suite with windowed walk-in closet/dressing room, dual marble bathrooms and long views over the golf course towards the UCLA campus. There’s an additional guest suite on the lowest level along with a screening room and gym plus a staff bedroom and bathroom tucked into the service wing on the main floor. Glass pocket doors open the living spaces on the main floor to a charity event-sized semi-circular terrace that overlooks the swimming pool and spa that, in turn, all but hover over the golf course. The gated, 0.9-acre grounds also include a koi pond, tropically landscaped waterfall, a putting green, a motor court the size of a 7-11 parking lot and attached three-car garage.
No word on why Mister Wynn wants to unload his Bel Air mansion so soon after he bought it, but plugged-in Platinum Triangle real estate watchers well know this is hardly the first time the Las Vegas-based mogul has experienced a change of real estate heart when it comes to the selection of a Los Angeles residence. The scuttlebutt is that he gave serious eye to financier Howard Marks’ Brentwood estate — it was sold eventually sold for $33.7 million to Marks’ Oaktree Capital partner Bruce Karsh — before, multiple sources snitched to this property gossip, he initiated but bailed out of escrow on a 24,000-plus-square foot mansion in Beverly Hills then listed at $43 million and owned by apparel mogul Armand. (Some of the children may recall that the dish on the celebrity real estate street was that Kimora Lee Simmons and her Goldman Sachs banker hubby Tim Leissner later opened escrow on the Marciano estate but, for whatever reasons, didn’t move forward with the transaction. It’s now listed at $42.5 million.) In the fall of 2014 the legally blind Mister Wynn next set his sights — so to speak and according to a number of sources— on Liongate, a renown estate in Bel Air once owned by Kenny Rogers and later owned by Tinseltown scioness and philanthropist Nancy Davis, who sold it in 2010 for $12.2 million to a European fitness center magnate who gave the place a complete overhaul and massive expansion before it was put it up for sale in March 2014 at $65 million. Alas, Mister Wynn decided against the purchase of Liongate — it was eventually sold to low-key but clearly very rich rivet tycoon Jim Randall for $46.25 million — and finally settled on the Bel Air mansion he now no longer wants. Has Mister Wynn, in his mid-70s, decided he simply doesn’t want or need such a large, high-maintenance mansion in L.A. or does he want something more grandiose, after all? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone, Bueller?
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, until the end of February, Mister Wynn — who was granted citizenship in Monaco in 2010 even though he never officially established residency there — held leases on three contiguous villas at his eponymous gambling emporium Wynn Las Vegas at a reported $43,750 per month. We really have no idea if Mister Wynn and his wife, Andrea Hissom, reupped their lease and remain in residence at the Wynn, but we do know that in New York City the pampered pair keep a nearly 11,000-square-foot penthouse pied-a-terre at the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South that was acquired in 2012 from real estate developer Christopher Jeffries for a mouth-drying $70 million. The Wynns had the whole place redecorated to showcase their jaw-dropping trove of world-class artworks — think de Kooning, Warhol, Matisse and a museum’s worth of Picassos — and photographed for the March 2014 issue of Architectural Digest. Incidentally, the Wynns’ downstairs neighbor at the Ritz Carlton is none other than Howard Marks, who has his smaller but equally luxurious spread for sale at $50 million because he and his wife decamped to the über-posh 740 Park Avenue, where in May of 2012, they shelled out $52.5 million for a sprawling, 30-ish-room duplex sold by philanthropist Courtney Sale Ross.
Listing photos: Westside Estate Agency
