BUYER: George Lucas
SELLER: H. Ross Perot
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $33,900,000
SIZE: 8,932 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Just months after “Star Wars” creator George Lucas announced plans to build an aggressively amorphous Ma Yansong-designed architectural tour de force to house his billion dollar Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in downtown L.A.’s Exposition Park, the sci-fi royal surreptitiously shelled out $33.9 million in an off-market deal first sussed out by our tireless pal Yolanda Yakketyyak for an impressively pedigreed property in a covetously plummy pocket of Bel Air.
Known as Mi Patria, the .89-acre spread was acquired via a mysterious corporate entity from billionaire businessman and two-time presidential candidate H. Ross Perot who bought the estate in March 2013 for $18 million from music industry mandarin Freddy DeMann. A deep dive into property records shows Mister DeMann, founder of Maverick Records, acquired the property in 2001 from late philanthropist Nancy Daly who purchased the property with her first ex-husband, veteran entertainment executive Robert Daly, sometime before 1992. Since the deal went down outside the Multiple Listing Service there aren’t current descriptions of the property — at least not that we turned up — but archived marketing materials from the time Mister Perot purchased the property in 2013 indicate the approximately 10,000-square-foot Spanish villa was built in 1929 and renovated to “exacting standards” with five bedrooms and eight bathrooms.
Any number of changes may have been made to the house and grounds during Mister Perot’s ownership but at the time of its 2013 sale plushly appointed interior spaces included: a stately stone-walled double-height entrance hall with sweeping wrought iron railed staircase; a grand scale formal living room with Parquet de Versailles pattern wood floors and a fireplace flanked by arched display niches; and a formal dining room with French doors to a serene courtyard. The gourmet eat-in kitchen featured a marble-topped double wide center work island and a fireplace while a cozy library with antique mantelpiece converted to a 35mm screening room with a screen that dropped out of the ceiling at the punch of a button. Spacious enough to have a sitting area in front of a fireplace, the master suite also included two deluxely appointed bathrooms and custom-fitted walk-in closets lined in rare woods.
Public rooms on the main floor opened to a vast arched loggia and sun-splashed terrace surrounded by lush, tropical gardens. There were several colorfully tiled fountains, verdant rolling lawns, a small putting green and an azure mosaic tiled swimming pool backed by an ever-so-slightly curved open-air pool cabana with fireplace. Behind the pool cabana a detached two-car garage has additional living space above.
Some of the other estates in the immediate vicinity are owned by A&M Records co-founder Jerry Moss, former Yahoo chairman and CEO Terry Semel, former Walt Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner, and recently deceased Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey.
Mister Lucas, who presides over an elephantine fortune the bean counters at Forbes estimate at $5.2 billion, and his wife Mellody Hobson, president of a Chicago-based investment firm, maintain a baller-style portfolio of high maintenance properties that include the 4,700-acre Skywalker Ranch near the northern California community of Nicasio as well as a 15,000-square-foot mansion in the nearby town of San Anselmo. The couple additionally maintains a custom-built compound on 1.7 spectacular oceanfront acres in Carpinteria, CA, they snapped up in late 2010 for $19.5 million and a 65th floor condo in a swanky Chicago high-rise scooped up just over two years ago, in May 2015, for $18.75 million.
aerial image: Google
