Gary Winnick Asks $250 million for Legendary L.A. Mansion
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.
Set on a high plateau at the end of a long, winding drive and fronted by an elegant neoclassical portico, some of the mansion’s 40 professionally decorated rooms were paneled in black walnut and English sycamore. (There were another 20 or so rooms, according to the WSJ, if the extensive staff quarters, silver vaults and other storage rooms were counted.) Amply proportioned and graciously appointed main floor rooms flowed out to broad terraces and great expanses of lawn that sloped down to the swimming pool, backed by a spacious pool house.
Weber hoped Casa Encantada would secure her place within Los Angeles society. And it did, for a while anyway. By the late 1940s, a gambling problem and spendthrift ways—19th-century silver tea sets made for the czar of Russia don’t come cheap, after all—left Weber all but destitute. (She died by suicide at her home in Santa Barbara in 1951.)
Source: DIRT
