From Dirt, June 21:
Telecom Pioneer Puts Quarter Billion Dollar Price on Legendary L.A. Estate
It blows the $195 million Michael Eisner wants for his massive Malibu compound out of the water, and it makes the $155 million price tag on Candy Spelling’s former behemoth in Holmby Hills seem like a downright bargain! One of L.A.’s mack-daddiest legacy estates, Bel Air’s legendary Casa Encantada, has just been heaved on the market with an announcement in The Wall Street Journal for a record-seeking $250 million.
Owned for nearly 25 years by billionaire fiber-optic telecommunications pioneer Gary Winnick and his artist-author wife, Karen Winnick, the epic spread occupies an 8.4-acre peninsula that juts into the manicured greens of the Bel Air Country Club. The property has no neighbors on either side, and there’s a tunnel that runs under the property, connecting two holes of the exclusive golf course.
The estate came into being in the mid-1930s. Hilda Boldt Weber, a former New York City nurse, inherited a fortune when her patient-turned-husband, Cincinnati-based glass manufacturing magnate Charles Boldt, died in 1929. The wealthy widow soon relocated to Los Angeles, and in 1934 she plunked down $100,000 for the Bel Air land on which she had architect James A. Dolena design a gigantic mansion in a Moderne-meets-Georgian style. Completed in 1938, the main house weighed in at about 30,000 square feet with another 10,000 square feet of outbuildings.....
....MUCH MORE
