SELLER: Joel Silver
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $57,500,000
SIZE: 5,859 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Almost two months ago, this property gossip passed along covert intel provided by trusted snitch Rod Iron that swashbuckling super-producer Joel Silver had engaged the services of at least one prominent real estate agent to shop his Malibu beach house on the down low with an asking price somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million. Alas, the property failed to secure an off-market buyer and, as we first heard from Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air, has now come available on the open market with an official asking price of $57,500,000. Mister Silver, who brought to the silver screen a slew of blockbusters including the “Lethal Weapon” and “Matrix” series, purchased the property from late “Rocky” franchise producer Robert Chartoff in September 2003 for $14.4 million.
Situated on nearly three-quarters of an acre with 137-feet of bulk-headed frontage along Carbon Beach, the property has, according to online marketing materials, a total of seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms. There are five bedrooms and six bathrooms in the 5,859-square-foot main house plus another two bedrooms and two bathrooms in a detached guesthouse. Other features noted include a walled entrance courtyard, open living spaces, a “chef’s kitchen,” and a fitness room. Dark-tinted glass doors open the two-story house to a massive brick terrace, swimming pool, and tennis court. Online marketing materials describe Mister Silver’s place as the “only tennis court property on the beachfront” but, in fact, there’s one other tennis court on Carbon Beach and it’s just two doors down from Silver’s place alongside a 17,000-square-foot, Richard Meier-designed extravaganza designed and built in the 1980s for late real estate developer Norman Ackerberg and still owned by Mister Ackerberg’s widow, Lisette. (See update, below.) In 2013, after decades of dispute and a whole lot of legal wrangling, Lisette agreed to pay a million dollar fine and bear the cost to construct a public beach access path alongside her property that she and her late husband were supposed to have provided in exchange for permission from the California Coastal Commission to build their house, pool and tennis court. The 10-foot wide path is now open for public passage an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunrise. Anyhoo…
Like many showbiz moguls and other Angelenos with the pecuniary power to do so, Mister Silver and his wife, Karyn, also maintain a substantial estate in Los Angeles. In the late 1980s, according to property records, the Silver’s shelled out $3.3 million for a 3.78-parcel at the tail end of a cul-de-sac just below The Getty in a particularly plummy section of Brentwood where they custom-built a brick-red contemporary mansion that L.A. County Tax records show has 8 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms in 22,308 square feet. A well-known enthusiast of maverick American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (F.L.W.), Mister Silver also owns Auldbrass, a spectacular, 330-some acre South Carolina Lowcountry plantation property along the snaking Combahee River near Yamassee, SC, where in the 1940s F.L.W. designed but never completed an extensive collection of structures for Michigan industrial consultant C. Leigh Stevens. Mister Silver acquired Auldbrass in 1986 and, in what was surely a terrifically spendy labor of love, painstakingly restored the sundry structures on the almost preposterously picturesque estate. Lloyd Wright buffs will appreciate that Mister Silver makes Auldbrass available one weekend every other November for reservations-only self-guided tours and will next be open in November 2017.
UPDATE (04-11-16): A kindly little birdie in a prime position to know got it touch to let us know that Mister Silver’s beach front spread is indeed the only property on Carbon Beach with a tennis court; The tennis court on the above mentioned Ackerberg property was removed and replaced with what our little birdie called a “beautiful garden.” We stand corrected.
Listing photo: Hilton & Hyland
