SELLER: Petra Ecclestone (and James Blunt)
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: In excess of $102,000,000
SIZE: 56,500 square feet
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Buckle your real estate safety belts, butter beans, because it’s about to get nine kinds of crazy up in here. Three years go British Formula One Racing heiress Petra Ecclestone packed her designer bags and made her way from London to Los Angeles where she famously paid a bone-chilling and – for then — record busting $85 million in cash for “The Manor,” Hollywood widow Candy Spelling’s 56,500-square-foot pile in L.A.’s hoity-toity Holmby Hills ‘hood.
The ludicrously pampered Miss Ecclestone — then just in her early 20s and now in her mid-20s, married and making babies with some guy named James Stunt — went on to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million on a renovations, alterations and upgrades that took place over a nine week period and utilized, so the stories go, upward of 500 workers. Such are, children, the wacky and wildly profligate ways of the world’s most financially privileged.
According to “W” magazine (March, 2012), the ridiculously large and liberally bedazzled residence — It’s well over 20 times the size of an average American home — now includes a hotel lobby-sized foyer with double staircase and black and white striped marble floor, a white-on-white formal living room and a huge fish tank in Mister Stunt’s study for puffer fish and other such swimming rarities. Miz Spelling much booed and ballyhooed gift wrapping room was converted to an office for Miz Ecclestone’s assistant and the behemoth basement level was did up and done over like a nightclub with a movie theater, lounge, bar and a two-lane bowling alley. There are at least half a dozen guest bedrooms plus a 7,000-square-foot master suite with dual bathrooms and a two-story boutique-style dressing room and, in the space that once housed Miz Spelling’s extensive (and kinda creepy) doll collection, a full spa facility with massage area, three hair and make-up stations and two mani-pedi chairs.
Anyhoodles, poodles, this weekend rumors began to circulate that Miz Ecclestone (and Mister Stunt) engaged the services of new fewer than five of L.A.’s top real estate agents to shop the pompously proportioned 27-bathroom mega-manse as a pocket listing. So the scuttlebutt goes the status conscious global jet setter brazenly slapped a $150 million asking price on the 4.7-acre estate and will not take a penny less than $102 million. That’s certainly a sky-high but hardly random figure as that’s the record-breaking amount couture-clad socialite Suzanne Saperstein (allegedly) sold “Fleur de Lys,” her not quite as large but equally if not even more palatial château in the Holmby Hills in March,* and, apparently, Miz Ecclestone will not be out done Miz Saperstein.
Could you die?
Natch, as soon as we heard word on the sitch from celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ (via the kids at Curbed) Your Mama ki-kied with several big league players we know in the Platinum Triangle real estate game. Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air quickly sent word that, “Everyone is showing the property,” and Will Sellyerhouse confirmed that “Yes. We can show it.” We contacted one of the high-powered agents who Your Mama was told is authorized to show The Manor but, not surprisingly, we’ve yet to receive a response.
Stay tuned…
*For the record, the Los Angeles Tax Man shows the sale price of Miz Saperstein’s “Fleur de Lys” at $88.3 and not $102 million. The higher number, if accurate, would likely represent the total paid for the property and any additional items such as furnishings and/or artworks. The buyer of “Fleur de Lys” remains a bit of a mystery but — and even though his spokespeople have denied it — Yolanda Yakketyyak swears it’s financier Michael Milken.
Aerial image: Google
