San Diego’s Sandcastle mansion just had $15.5 million knocked off its listing price.
The waterfront spread in La Jolla came to the market in October 2024 for $108 million, and after Thursday’s price cut, it’s now asking $92.5 million. Still, it’s far and away the most expensive home for sale in San Diego, where the city sale record was just set in September with a $47 million deal in La Jolla.
San Diego didn’t have much of a trophy-home market until a couple of years ago, when La Jolla recorded two $35 million sales. But now, ultra-wealthy buyers from San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as the East Coast, are looking to the Southern California city because of its quality of life, relaxed lifestyle and “more reasonable” luxury prices, said listing agent Brett Dickinson of Compass, who shares the listing with his business partner Ross Clark.
“You can be very wealthy and fly under the radar,” he said.
Countywide, there have been two sales over $50 million—one a beach home in nearby Del Mar and the other a 1,400-acre ranch farther inland—making a $100 million-plus asking price tougher for buyers to take in.
“Buyers are very conscious of being the first person to buy a property in San Diego over $100 million—that would be a very big deal,” Dickinson said. “So when you’re trying to break that barrier, sometimes $100 million is too high psychologically for the first person to do that. Now if we’re below $100 million, we all of a sudden become accessible.”
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Billionaire Darwin Deason bought the property and gut renovated the existing home, completing the French-inspired mansion—which gets its name from its resemblance of an elaborate sandcastle rising above the ocean—was completed in 2015. He paid about $26 million for the home plus a neighboring parcel, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Deason, who founded the IT company Affiliated Computer Services and sold it to Xerox in 2009 for $6.4 billion, died in December at age 85.
Sited directly on the coastline with a grandfathered-in, 162-foot sea wall, the nearly 13,000-square-foot house was designed to take in the ocean views like one would from a yacht.
“As you walk into the property, you can’t see the beach below. It looks like you’re actually on the water,” Dickinson said.
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The main house has seven bedrooms, while the 3,500-square-foot guest house—which Deason had built from scratch and overlooks the pool—has three bedrooms. Across the entire property, there are 17 bathrooms, according to the listing.
Staircases lead to an oceanfront patio and a private beach elevated above the water that’s made up of the same sand that’s used at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.
“Nobody [in San Diego] has their own private beach on their own property that I’m aware of,” Dickinson said.
The property also has its own direct access to the public beach, which, like the sea wall, would not be permitted today because of the California Coastal Act of 1976.