…from Kenny Kissintell, Peterpropertyseller and Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air that private investor and Houston Dynamo soccer team owner Gabriel Brener’s deluxe mega-manse in L.A.’s hoity-toity Holmby Hills has been sold for right about $75 million to a clearly crazy-rich but otherwise not-famous couple from Mainland China. (A fourth source, let’s call him A. Chester Field, swears the transaction closed closed yesterday for $74 million.)
Some of the children may recall that Your Mama (uncharacteristically) briefly dished on this property back in December, 2011, when it was being surreptitiously shopped around for — so the scuttlebutt went — more than $80 million. Nearly a year later the lady property gossip at the L.A. Times revealed the official asking price was set at a spine-straightening $90 million.
Mister Brener bought the 3.5-ish acre estate in 1998 for $8.45 million from the estate of Walt and Lillian Disney. The Disneys, bless their whimsy-loving hearts, bought the property in 1949 and custom-built an estate that — so reported the folks at Forbes last year — included a one-eighth scale steam railroad that passed over a 46-foot long trestle and through an s-shaped tunnel. (Of course it did, right? Anyhoo…)
Mister Brener, disinclined toward residential whimsicality, it seems, razed all but everything; The s-shaped tunnel is about all that remains of the Disney’s personal fantasia. What replaced the old Disney homestead is a walled, gated, high-hedged and downright decadent, 35,000 square foot behemoth — Let’s just call it a neo-Georgian Euro Villa and leave it at that, okay? — with eight bedrooms and 17 bathrooms. Seventeen bathrooms! Have mercy on that poor minimum wage domestic whose sole job is to keep all those porcelain bowls minty fresh and sparkling clean.
Other features noted in online marketing materials show the three-story, limestone-faced mansion includes a double-height foyer, baronial entertainment spaces, a library, a home theater, not one — booze hounds take note — but three bars plus a wine cellar, a full gym and a pair of panic rooms. The gated and heavily fortified estate’s fully landscaped grounds surely require a hefty clutch of gardeners to maintain and include well-watered lawns, broad terraces, a lagoon-sized swimming pool with adjacent pool house, a lighted tennis court and a putting green.
For the record, property records don’t yet reflect a transfer of ownership but all three of our well-connected informants told us word on the Platinum Triangle real estate street is that the big deal is otherwise signed, sealed and delivered. Plus, if only still circumstantially, the online listing seems to have vanished from The Agency’s digital portal. All just rumor and gossip, kids, just some juicy high-octane real estate rumor and gossip.
Listing photos: The Agency via Forbes
