SELLER: Jenny Craig
LOCATION: Del Mar, CA
PRICE: $39,500,000
SIZE: 8,000 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Thanks to a kindly snitch we’ll call May B. Lean, it’s come to Your Mama’s real estate attentions that octogenarian diet magnate Jenny Craig has slapped a downright obese $39,500,000 price tag on her big, bulky and arguably unattractive beach house in the exceptionally wealthy seaside community of Del Mar. (In case any of y’all didn’t know, Del Mar regularly ranks among the most expensive zip codes in all of the U.S. of A. as per calculations by the fine folk at Forbes.)
Just for a quick comparison: A smaller compound immediately next door to Miz Craig’s beach house is also up for sale but with a substantially lower $20 million price tag and a few doors to the north another beach front house — half the size on a much smaller lot than Miz Craig’s — is currently listed for just under $13 million after being reduced from $15.9 million. A couple of doors to the south of Miz Craig’s not so humble Del Mar abode, a 6,500-plus-square foot ocean front home sold in June 2012 for $16.25 million and, as far as Your Mama’s thoroughly unscientific research reveals, the most expensive ocean front house in Del Mar to have sold in the last three years appears to be a 4,000-ish-square-foot contemporary about half a mile down the beach that was listed for $22.95 million and sold last October (2013) for $18.75 million. But anyways…
Property records suggest (but aren’t entirely conclusive) that Miz Craig and her deceased husband, Sidney, have owned the ocean front property since 1986 when it was acquired for $3.25 million. Current listing details and other digitally accessible resources show the brutally boxy manse was built in 1980 on nearly three-quarters of an acre with 80 feet of hotly coveted sandy beach frontage. There are five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms that include separate staff and guest quarters, two kitchens — at least one of which has commercial-grade appliances and looks like it got stuck style-wise in the late 1980s — and garage space for four cars plus gated, off-street parking for 20 (or so) more.
A tiled colonnade so long it exhausts Your Mama out just to think about walking the length of it with armfuls of groceries stretches deep in to the property alongside a super-sized central courtyard with a three-lane swimmer’s pool and more rhythmically placed potted plants than should probably been in one place at one time. Two of the beachside bedrooms on the upper level open to a slender balcony that spans the entire width of the house and wide glass walls on the lower level connect to a broad, tiled terrace that also extends the full width of the residence and has long views up and down the beach as well as on to the decks of the neighboring residences.
Some of the children who have been cattin’ around the celebrity real estate world for a while may recall that late 2010 Miz Craig hoisted her 3.37-acre spread in notoriously high-priced community of Rancho Santa Fe, CA, on the market with an asking price of $8.995 million. When the weight loss tycoon finally unloaded the 10,000-plus-square-foot Mediterranean it was for $6.1 million to a couple named Michelle and Duayne Weinger who happen to be her daughter and son-in-law.
At the same time Miz Craig had her Rancho Santa Fe mansion on the market for nearly nine million she also had “Rancho Paseano” — her now-shuttered 200-plus-acre thoroughbred racehorse farm and stable in Rancho Santa Fe — listed first for $30 million and then for $25 million. There were reports last spring and summer (2013) that Miz Craig was in negotiations for the horse property to be sold for an unknown amount to an unrevealed buyer but various property records data bases Your Mama perused don’t indicate a transfer of ownership.
Listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
