Rumors ran rampant last year that Formula One Racing heiress Petra Ecclestone Stunt had allowed a number of high-profile brokers to secretly shop her gargantuan mansion in L.A.’s Holmby Hills ’hood at $150 million. Indeed, prominent broker Will Sellyerhouse swore he could show the super-sized spread at that price. Alas, in the interim, it seems Ecclestone Stunt may have shifted gears, because exceptionally well-connected tattletale Peter Propertyseller says word has begun to make its way down the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine that the twentysomething jet-setting mother of three actually turned down a Chinese media magnate and film producer who met her gasp-worthy price on the 4.5-acre estate.
Custom built in the early 1990s by Aaron and Candy Spelling, the immodestly proportioned 56,500-square-foot faux-chateau was purchased by Ecclestone Stunt in July 2011 for $85 million — in cash — and decoratively overhauled in just over two months at a reported cost of $20 million. The result, featured in W magazine, includes a foyer the size of a hotel lobby, with black-and-white striped marble floor and a basement worked over like the VIP room of a nightclub, with movie theater, bar and two-lane bowling alley. In the space that once housed Candy Spelling’s kinda-creepy doll museum is now a spa area with multiple hair and makeup stations and a couple of mani-pedi chairs. At around 7,000 square feet — nearly three times the size of the average American home — the master suite has dual bathrooms and a two-story dressing room fitted like an elite boutique.
The famously profligate heiress and her husband, James Stunt, also keep an equally grandiose and historic 14-bedroom mansion in London’s Chelsea neighborhood bought in early 2012 at a cost of around $87 million.
