SELLER: David Geffen
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $100 million
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES (UPDATED: Feb 3, 2016): Buckle your property porn safety belts, butter beans, because even though a spokesperson for Mister Geffen says it ain’t so, we’ve heard from two separate sources — high-powered Platinum Triangle real estate insider Rod Iron and inexhaustible real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak — that David Geffen’s ocean front residence along Malibu’s much-coveted Carbon Beach is in escrow with an unidentified buyer for somewhere in the gasp-worthy neighborhood of $85 million. (Rumor and gossip, just rumor and gossip.) The children will recall that last summer, in June 2015, no fewer than three well-connected informants including Ben Arnold and Peter Propertyseller sent covert communiqués to let us know that the 72-year-old multibillionaire had quietly engaged the services of one or more of Los Angeles’s preeminent property brokers to surreptitiously shop the multi-structure compound to qualified buyers who don’t fall dead with flabbergast at what we were repeatedly told is a nice, round $100 million asking price.
As previously discussed, the Carbon beach compound spreads out over what was originally five side-by-side parcels — at least one of which was once owned by Doris Day — and, as far as we can tell, were acquired by the Mister Geffen in two transactions two decades apart. The first of the compound’s now two parcels was picked up in the mid ‘70s for an unknown sum and the second in June 1999, also for an unknown amount, from Larry Welk, the son of polka-loving bandleader Lawrence Welk. The walled, gated and always guarded compound comprises: a two-story grey-shingled main residence with several ocean-side verandas plus an outdoor living room with fireplace; a separate and also grey-shingled guesthouse with wrap around porch; and a petite pool house. Some of the sand-side estate’s other features and recreational creature comforts include — so we’ve been told by someone in a position to know — a professional-grade screening room, a couple of well-watered expanses of tree-shaded lawns, a picturesque lily pond, and a beachside swimming pool and spa. Nine garage bays front frequently busy and not uncommonly traffic-choked Pacific Coast Highway but at least four of them are reported to be false facades complete with curb cuts and slate driveway aprons. So the story goes, the fake garages were installed to keep Average Joe Beachgoer from parking in front of Mister Geffens beach house after a years-long court battle resulted in the mogul’s legal obligation to open and maintain an easement along the western edge of the property that allows the general public access to the sand and surf, at least during certain hours of the day.
Commensurate with a man of his financial prowess, Mister Geffen maintains a baller-style property portfolio that, in addition to a couple of yachts that both measure in at more than a football field in length, includes: a second, smaller cottage on Carbon Beach — bought in February 2008 for $9.8 million from restaurateur and investor Peter Morton; a fairly modest residence in the Beverly Crest neighborhood in the 90210 that he’s owned since the early 1970s; and an entirely landscaped 10-acre spread in Beverly Hills with a nearly 14,000-square-foot neoclassical manse originally built for movie industry pioneer Jack L. Warner and bought in 1990 for a reported $47.5 million. The bicoastal mogul’s East Coast holdings include an almost six-acre, pond-front spread in East Hampton, NY, purchased in 2014 for $52.1 million and a 5,000-square-foot condo in along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue — acquired in February 2010 for $14.17 million from Robert Daly and Carole Bayer Sanger — along with a suburban mansion-sized 12,000-square-foot duplex penthouse directly upstairs that was snatched up November 2012 from songwriter/socialite Denise Rich for a mouth-drying $54 million.
Aerial image: Bing
