Live like a Beverly Hillbilly in chateau style
A hilltop mansion in Bel-Air could become the most expensive home in the United States after going on the market for US$245 million (NZ$375m).
Chartwell, a 4ha estate with formal gardens and an immense main house in the French neoclassical style, belonged to Jerrold Perenchio, a Hollywood TV executive who died last year.
The main residence was built in 1933 and featured in the 1960s comedy series The Beverly Hillbillies, about a poor family who strike oil and move to California. Perenchio bought it, along with three adjacent parcels of land, in 1986 and restyled it to evoke an 18th-century chateau.
Henry Cisneros, of Univision, described him as the walking embodiment of Tinseltown. He represented artists including Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Glen Campbell, and promoted the ‘‘Fight of the Century’’ between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971.
He made some of the most successful television shows of the 1970s, and helped to finance films such as This is Spinal Tap, Blade Runner and Driving Miss Daisy . He became chairman and chief executive of Univision, a Spanishlanguage media empire, turning his initial US$33 million investment in 1992 into US$1.1 billion when he sold the company 15 years later.
He died of lung cancer aged 86 in the house in May last year, but not before bequeathing an art collection valued at US$500m and including works by Degas, Monet, Picasso, Manet, Magritte and Cezanne to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
His estate is one of eight homes publicly listed for US$100m or more in a region that is grappling with a homelessness crisis that has driven an estimated 23,000 people to camp each night in Los Angeles’ streets, canyons and riverbeds, the most of any city in the United States.
The new palaces are aimed at homegrown technology tycoons, Middle Eastern princes, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires and anyone else with a fortune to dispose of and a hankering for the outdoor Californian lifestyle, so long as it is within easy reach of Rodeo Drive’s exclusive designer boutiques and Hollywood parties.
Chartwell was on offer last year for US$350m but did not find a buyer.
The record sum spent on a house in or near Los Angeles was set this year when the natural gas tycoon Michael Smith and his wife, Iris, agreed a US$110 million deal for a seven-bedroom beachfront villa in Malibu.