David and Victoria Beckham Make Bank on Secret Sale in Beverly Hills
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Though they need an extra $15 million about as much as an 18-pound house cat needs a nuclear submarine, fantastically rich David and Victoria Beckham none-the-less got hit with the real estate lucky stick and nearly doubled their money on the $33 million, off-market sale of a lavish Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion.
Together reported to be worth around $900 million , the unfairly photogenic couple paid $18.2 million for the 1.28-acre spread in 2007, when the now retired soccer superstar shielded and screened for the L.A. Galaxy. The seller of the property, conveniently less than a mile up Benedict Canyon from the ungodly expensive Beverly Hills Hotel , where a burger in the Polo Lounge costs $43, was businessman Kent Kresa. And, as noted by the eagle-eyed property gossips at Mansion Global , it was pretty much an open secret in Platinum Triangle real estate circles that the posh property had been available on the down low over the last few years if you knew which brokers to ask. No word yet on the identity of the buyers who are shielded behind a newly created, Delaware-based corporate entity.
Die-hard celebrity real estate watchers will recall that almost from the moment the globetrotting Brits acquired the stateside estate rumors ran rife they’d caught a severe case of The Real Estate Fickle and unconfirmed scuttlebutt in 2009 was Tom Cruise and his now third ex-wife Katie Cruise had a serious eye on the place. They didn’t. And, in the end, the Beckhams hung on to the high-maintenance spread for more than 11 years.
First lined with rigidly clipped hedges and then romantically canopied by trees, a discreet, slender and easily missed driveway passes through secured gates as it winds its lengthy way to a spacious motor court that spreads out in front of the sprawling, Tuscan-inspired Mediterranean villa. Tax records show the house spans 11,497-square-feet with six bedrooms and ten bathrooms. However, for what it’s worth, marketing materials from the time of the 2007 transaction indicate the house comprised six bedrooms and nine bathrooms in 13,149-square-feet. Whatever the case, the H-shaped villa opens on its north side to a quiet courtyard patio and on its sunnier south side to a broad terrace shaded by a towering pair of palms and, beyond that, a swimming pool surrounded by what appears in publicly accessible aerial imagery to be a lush swathe of liberally irrigated lawn.
The fashion-savvy couple, he retired as a player since 2013 and currently a co-owner of the Inter Miami professional soccer expansion team in Miami, Fla., due to begin Major League Soccer play in 2020, and she the founder of an eponymous, fearsomely pricy fashion line, maintain an aristocratic mansion in West London’s haughty Holland Park they snapped up in 2013 for a reported £31.5 million . Coming up on two years ago, having sold so-called Beckingham Palace , their longtime country estate in Herefordshire, the couple shelled out a reported £6.15 million for an idiosyncratic, E-shaped converted barn compound near the tiny rural village of Great Tew in the uncommonly spectacular Cotswolds area, about two hours by car west and north of Central London. As is the wont of those with the resources to do so, the Beckhams quickly embarked on an extensive renovation and customization of their multimillion-dollar weekend getaway that included a huge treehouse structure they built without local planning permissions and that caused considerable concern and kerfuffle with at least one neighbor before they were granted the necessary approvals.
