Foxconn Heir Bought the $75 Million Bird Streets Compound, Smashing Neighborhood Record
By James McClain
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – 2020’s real estate story kicked off with a record bang last week, when two side-by-side mansions in L.A.’s posh Bird Streets neighborhood were sold to the same buyer in a single transaction worth about $75.5 million — $75,508,888, to be precise. And the mega-deal appears to have been consummated all in cash, with no sign of a mortgage on either property.
The transaction is the biggest ever inked in the Hollywood Hills by far, utterly obliterating the $39 million that Malaysian fugitive Jho Low spent on his own home , a longstanding high water mark deal that had remained uncontested since late 2012.
Although rumors abounded , curious minds have wondered who officially bought the two huge homes, one of which — a T-shaped monster manse with a showstopping boomerang-shaped pool — commanded a breakneck $42.5 million. The other house, a more conventionally styled affair with a rectangular infinity pool, went for $33 million.
Property records have now cleared and reveal the two contemporary mansions were technically acquired by two different LLCs. The listed “sole manager” of both entities is a Taipei-based woman named Joan Huang, a freelance writer and noted food blogger.
Huang is also the longtime wife of 44-year-old film producer Jeffrey Gou, founder of the Glendale-based Cherry Sky Films production company and firstborn child of Terry Gou , the high-profile Taiwanese tech tycoon who — with a listed net worth of $6.3 billion — is currently ranked by Forbes as Taiwan’s fourth-richest living person. Gou is founder and CEO of Foxconn, the international consumer electronics juggernaut that is now one of the world’s largest companies.
Foxconn is the globe’s top manufacturer of iPhones and iPads by volume and has more than 800,000 employees. By some estimates, the company accounts for nearly half of all consumer electronics produced worldwide.
It remains unclear what exactly Gou and Huang plan to do with their new compound or why they purchased not one but two outrageously high-maintenance mansions, which have about 33,000 square feet of living space between them, including 12 bedrooms and a whopping 18 baths. The homes are not currently connected and bear little architectural resemblance, beyond the fact they are both blocky contemporary structures. Both were commissioned by two different developers on speculation, the pricier by Canadian businessman Francesco Aquilini and the other by Iranian-born investor Farzin Aghaipour, and designed by two different architects.
But Gou and Huang have owned a part-time residence in L.A. since at least 2004, when they purchased a spacious but otherwise unremarkable condo on L.A.’s Westside, a property they continue to own. Presumably they also keep an inordinately expensive residence somewhere in Taipei, although specific details on that are scant.
Brandon & Rayni Williams of Hilton & Hyland exclusively held the listing on the $42.5 million house and jointly held the listing on the $33 million house with Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency. Kurt Rappaport represented the buyer of both properties.
