Jeff Bezos, the Amazon leader, reached a deal with David Geffen for the purchase of the Warner Estate in Beverly Hills. The deal set a new price record for a property in California. The home is considered one of the premier mansions built during Hollywood’s golden era.
The property
Jack Warner, the founder brother of the Warner Bros. film studio, bought this mansion in 1937 after his marriage with Ann Page. Ann demanded to tear down the original home and replace it with a new one. Warner spent over a decade building the mansion.
Jack Warner started constructing the property beginning with three acres of what used to be farmland in Beverly Hills, California. Slowly, Warner started adding parcels of adjacent land and building out the grounds of the estate, adding a golf course and two ponds. Once finished he named it after himself: the Jack Warner Estate.
The Georgian Revival-style estate was designed for hosting the Warners’ elaborate parties from the 1930s through ‘60s, with guests like Albert Einstein and Howard Hughes.
After Jack Warner’s death in 1978, Ann, his widow, kept the estate largely intact and lived there until 1990, when David Geffen paid $47.5 million for it. Today, the mansion rests in a 9-acre lot, has approximately 14,000 square feet, has two guest houses, a pool, and a tennis court.
The Sale
Bezos has marked his return to Beverly Hills by purchasing the iconic Jack Warner Estate. The estate never officially hit the market. David Geffen, the media mogul and co-founder of DreamWorks, was thinking of selling it at $225 million. It looks like the “Dream didn’t Workout”. This is considered a private transaction.
David Geffen is expected to make approximately a $120 million dollar profit from when he purchased the house 30 years ago. Not bad for a real estate investment. David Geffen recently bought a $30 million lot in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, where he plans to build a new house, according to a source familiar with that deal.
Other million-dollar transactions
The Jack Warner Estate sale price breaks the previous record for Los Angeles County three months ago when Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, paid $150 million for Chartwell, the Bel-Air estate that appeared in “The Beverly Hillbillies”.
In a different transaction, Petra Ecclestone, the heiress to the Formula One racing empire built by her father Bernie Ecclestone, sold the Manor at $119.75 million last July. The television producer Aaron Spelling had built the mansion, in the city’s Holmby Hills neighborhood, in 1988.
In a separate transaction, Bezos Expeditions, which oversees The Washington Post and Mr. Bezos’ charitable foundation, is buying 120 undeveloped acres in Beverly Hills for $90 million. That land was put on the market for $150 million in 2018, by the estate of Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, who died that year. Most recently, the asking price was $110 million.
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Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/business/bezos-geffen-warner-estate.html
https://ussanews.com/News1/2020/02/14/jeff-bezos-sets-new-real-estate-record-with-165m-beverly-hills-buy
https://www.businessinsider.com/warner-estate-jeff-bezos-beverly-hills-mansion-pictures-details-2020