Pharrell Seeks Buyer for Glassy Mansion Bought From Tyler Perry
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Mononymic multi-hypenate music dynamo, fashion designer and occasional film producer Pharrell has decided to part with a glassy mansion that presides over a high and private hilltop in the Beverly Hills Post Office area of Los Angeles, Calif., hanging an almost $17 million price tag on the humongous architectural extravaganza after he bought it not even two years ago for $15.6 million from entertainment industry powerhouse Tyler Perry . For the uninitiated, the is a huge Beverly Hills adjacent area that’s actually part of the City of , rather than Beverly Hills, but nonetheless falls under the world-renown 90210 zip code. Anyhoo, prior to Perry, who acquired the nearly 4.25-acre spread as an investment in 2017 for $14.5 million, the lavish estate was long owned by late billionaire aerospace entrepreneur and philanthropist Alfred E. Mann.
Behind gates at the end of a 200-foot-long driveway and motor court capable of parking several dozen cars, the more than 17,000-square-foot mansion, with its geometric roof design and enormous walls of green-tinted glass, more than just a little resembles a suburban office building and, with 10 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, is larger than a small boutique hotel.
Frameless glass doors much like might be found at the entrance of an office building open to an extraordinarily voluminous, triple-height atrium with floating staircases that crisscross over a series of waterfalls and koi ponds. The hangar-sized living room has polished marble floors, a multi-planed, origami-like ceiling and towering walls of glass, while the unconventionally shaped dining room, which arguably resembles a luxury corporate boardroom, features a massive chandelier crafted from craggy chunks of raw crystals. There are a couple additional, less formal dining areas, including in the kitchen, a glitzy space with a golden grid of lights on the ceiling and a shimmering accouterment of commercial-style stainless steel appliances. An airy office has a fireplace, one of five in the house, and a cavernous, skylight topped media/games room spills out to yard through angled walls of floor-to-ceiling windows.
Guest bedrooms are ample and interestingly shaped with vaulted ceilings and wedge-shaped expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows, while the master bedroom’s wall-to-wall carpeting extends into the much-mirrored bathroom where a sunken bathtub and shower are wrapped in floor to ceiling windows that provide a panoramic view of the fastidiously groomed, park-like gardens.
In the center of the resort-worthy backyard, trees shade a sunken outdoor kitchen and bar area, and outside the backside of the media/games room, a prairie-sized terrace atop the five-car garage overlooks a lighted and discreetly situated sunken tennis court. Waterfalls pour over mountainous tumbles of boulders into several swimming pools and lagoon-like ponds that rival the Playboy Mansion with a swooping slide and spa grotto.
Listings held by Kurt Rappaport and Drew Meyers at Westside Estate Agency softy suggest the unquestionably unconventional mansion could benefit from a gussy up, stating there is “Endless potential here to fix it up, and make one of the most unique mansion in Los Angeles.”
The 13-time Grammy winner, also the recipient of two Oscar nominations, most recently in 2017 as one of the producers on the biopic “Hidden Figures,” for which he also wrote music, once owned an art-filled Miami Beach , Fla., penthouse that was sold in 2015 for more than $3 million less than the just over $12.5 million he’d paid about eight years earlier. Around the time he sold the triplex penthouse in Miami he set his real estate sights west where he ponied up $7.14 million for an ultra-modern residence designed by iconoclast architect Hazy Belzberg and perched on a high ridge above L.A.’s Laurel Canyon. Tax records indicate the entrepreneurial hip-hop honcho also owns several residential properties in Virginia Beach, Va., including a more than 9,000-square-foot waterfront home picked up in 2001 for $1.85 million. The stately gated estate includes a waterside swimming pool and private marina.
