BUYER: Steve Wynn
SELLER: Maurice Marciano
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, Calif.
PRICE: (allegedly) $47.5 million
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: We don’t know if any of y’all have been following Steve Wynn’s wild real estate ride in Los Angeles the last year or so, but we certainly have and — buckle your safety belts, butter beans — we hear from Platinum Triangle real estate mover and shaker Peter Propertyseller that the multi-billionaire gambling magnate has, in a covert off-market deal, plunked down somewhere in the neighborhood of $47.5 million for the Beverly Hills estate of alliteratively monikered Guess jeans co-founder Maurice Marciano. (According to Peter, the hush-hush asking price was $50 million.)
Property records we peeped at don’t yet reflect a transfer of ownership — making this all some juicy rumor and gossip for now — but do indicate Mister Marciano purchased the 2.69-acre spread in lower Benedict Canyon in April 1989 for $2.825 million and subsequently custom-built the existing residence. Various online resources that include the L.A. County Tax Man’s records suggest the three-story European villa measures in at an abundant 19,299 square feet with eight bedrooms and — for the superstitious — a potentially portentous 13 bathrooms. Since Mister Marciano, like Mister Wynn, is a ravenous and deep-pocketed collector of top-shelf contemporary artworks, we just assume the no-doubt super-luxe interiors have been optimized and secured to showcase and protect a world-class collection that we can all be certain is worth many times the (alleged) $47.5-ish million sale price. Privately situated down a private lane shared only by a couple of other residences — one of them an historic, Tinseltown-pedigreed home owned by super-producer Brett Ratner — the gated grounds include a sweeping driveway, front and rear motor courts, park-sized lawns ringed and shaded by mature foliage and specimen trees, a swimming pool and a poolside cabana.
Of course, the unrepentant cynic in this property gossip wonders just how long the Marciano spread will hold Mister Wynn’s famously fickle real estate interests. So the scuttlebutt goes, the seventysomething gaming mogul initiated but bailed out of at least two Platinum Triangle purchases including — oddly enough — that of Maurice’s brother Armand’s lavish, 15-acre-plus estate in Beverly Hills, originally listed at $63 million and still available at the hugely reduced price of $37.9 million. Some of the children may recall that we also heard word that Kimora Lee Simmons got serious about but didn’t complete the purchase of the estate as well. Anyhoo, so we’ve been told by several in-the-know insiders, Mister Wynn later moved forward with but again backed out of the purchase of the illustrious Liongate estate, a freshly rehabbed and hugely expanded mansion in Bel Air once owned by country music mandarin Kenny Rogers and eventually bought for $46.25 million by low-profile but clearly very rich rivet manufacturer Jim Randall. Finally, after at least two fits and starts, in November 2014 Mister Wynn bit the bullet and completed the $16.25 million purchase of an 11,000-square-foot, early 1990s villa of indeterminate architectural vernacular that backs up to the fairways at the highbrow Bel-Air Country Club. Alas, the casino kingpin quickly caught a classic case of the Real Esate Fickle and just six months later, in June 2015, the property popped back up for sale at $17.45 million. A month later the price inexplicably rose to $20 million and just a month after that it dropped back town to its original and current $17.45 million.
Mister Wynn and his second wife, Andrea Hissom, reportedly held the lease on a trio of contiguous villas at the eponymous Wynn resort in Las Vegas until earlier this year but, in truth, we have no idea if they continue to lease them or not. They do, however, continue to own a mansion-sized duplex penthouse at the southern edge of Central Park in New York City that they picked up in 2012 for a staggering $70 million, filled to the gills with a museum’s trove of major-league artworks and photographed for the March 2014 issue of Architectural Digest.
Aerial image: Bing
