A £120,000 wall of sweets, 2,500-bottle and fully stocked wine cellar and Fendi furniture are just a few of the notable features of this LA home.
The mansion is on sale at £52million ($85million) and everything you see in the home, except the cars, come as part of the sale.
So perhaps it’s hardly surprising that Jay-Z and Beyonce are rumoured to have looked at the house three times already.
The ostentatious abode is the work of Bruce Makowsky, who’s splashed out millions of his own fortune to build and – hopefully – make millions more selling the home.
Yahoo Homes recently had the chance to speak at length with the man who designed the home. He says that the richest people don’t have enough luxury to choose from; it’s a gap that he’s hoping to plug.
The candy wall. Click any photo for a slideshow.We haven’t any use for old things here
There are “a lot of nice homes” out there, “but they’re tired,” he said. “Nothing brand-new.”
“They want to feel like they’re the first person in that house. … They want to feel like it’s theirs,” he said.
That’s why he hasn’t held any open houses, or even one of the parties that’s become more common for high-end LA real estate.
He wants to preserve its untouchability.
Makowsky enunciates it for us: “People. Want. New.”
The natural conclusion might seem that they should build their own dream house, tailored to their tastes and desires.
Remember to think like a billionaire, though: money time.
“They’d have to scout out the perfect lot — and in Los Angeles, promontories with downtown-to-ocean views are so coveted that a nearby family reportedly refused an offer of $75 million for their house (which developers would have razed). Then they’d have to get all the necessary local permissions and build the place. It takes “four to six years to do what we did here,” Makowsky said.
Not only that, they’d have to devote time and attention to all the hundreds of details that accumulate as luxury.
At the Top of Hillcrest, it’s mirrors placed so that wherever you are in the master bath, you can see downtown Los Angeles behind you, right down to the mirror backing within the medicine cabinet; it’s the drawers you open to discover they’re lined with crocodile; it’s “the most beautiful hangers” dangling in the closet.
His idea, in other words, is to “bring mega-yachts to land.”
Which is an interesting proposition, because if billionaires are willing to spend $200 million on a boat they use just a few weeks a year, what’s their limit for the right house?
Promontory lots are priceless because they’re all gone, listing agent Ben Bacal says. Here you can see downtown …
… all the way to the Pacific Ocean (in the background, behind Century City).
How big could the billionaire market be?
The particular audacity of Makowsky’s venture is that this $85 million spec house represents only Phase 1.
Two more estates are already in the works, and they’ll be even more expensive. “I want to be like the Four Seasons of residential building,” he tells us.
We think it’d take nerves of steel to build one spec house priced so high. How many billionaire prospects could there be?
Makowsky commissioned this replica of James Dean’s motorcycle.
“The air is absolutely thin up there,” he acknowledges, but he says 4,000 people worldwide are worth at least $500 million. Forbes counts a record 1,645 billionaires on the planet.
Meanwhile, brand-new, ultra-high-end houses like his are scarce. “Other than Donald Trump building something down in Palm Beach, this is the second-highest[-cost] spec house ever built in the United States.”
We checked with our friends at Zillow, who told us that only 33 homes nationwide are publicly listed at more than $50 million, of which 12 are more than $75 million and three are more than $100 million. (Important caveat: This doesn’t include so-called “pocket” or “whisper” listings, or any other kind of off-market listing.
Zillow’s best guess is that maybe a dozen $50 million-plus homes are for sale privately and exclusively at high-end brokerages.)
So maybe Makowsky is onto something. Listing agent Ben Bacal told Yahoo Homes that they already have a “couple” of offers — “a little lower than we want, but still amazing.”
Who knows? Maybe a billionaire will buy two of Makowsky’s mansions.
And here’s a video tour:
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