William Paul “Billy” Getty, grandson of late oil baron J. Paul Getty Sr., acquired two adjacent apartments perched atop the 24-story Royal Towers co-op in San Francisco‘s tony Russian Hill community in the mid-1990s. Over the next three years, he worked with designers Stephen Weaver and Craig Leavitt to combine the units into an industrial-chic showpiece dubbed “The Cyber Palace” by Harper’s Bazaar in March 1998.
Later that same year, without ever having lived in it, Getty sold the finished spread fully furnished to retired broadcasting tycoon Charlton Buckley for $15 million. The transaction set a record for the most expensive home sale in San Francisco, easily dwarfing the reported $5 million to $6 million romance author Danielle Steel paid in 1990 for the Spreckels Mansion in Pacific Heights.
Walls of glass overlook the San Francisco Bay, Coit Tower, and Alcatraz.
Lunghi Studio
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Preserved by the Buckley family for nearly three decades, the two-bedroom, four-bath residence has now surfaced on the market at $19.98 million with Kristin Cashin and Jenn Davis of Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno. The open, roughly 6,000-square-foot layout showcases hand-tinted concrete slab floors, mohair-covered walls, retractable fiberglass shoji panels, and 24-karat gold leaf accents. Vast walls of glass and over 2,000 square feet of wraparound terraces capture panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the downtown skyline.
A gilded 18-foot foyer off two key-secured elevators leads to a large living room warmed by a fireplace. Other highlights include a dining area with an integrated wet bar and a built-in tufted leather banquette, as well as a small kitchen with access to a service elevator and a laundry/storage room. A corner primary suite, meanwhile, features a walk-in closet and a bath spotlighted by a vanity built from repurposed steel mesh screens originally designed to keep fish from swimming into dams.
A dining space features a wet bar and plush built-in banquette seating.
Lunghi Studio
The apartment’s $10,690-per-month HOA charge covers the 24-hour attended lobby, on-site management, a newly remodeled fitness center, and a glass-enclosed heated pool with a retractable roof.
The $15 million price record for Getty’s penthouse has been eclipsed several times, most recently by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’s off-market purchase of a $70 million mansion in Pacific Heights, while Getty paid $20 million for a home in the Highland Park area of Dallas earlier this summer.
Click here for more photos of the Russian Hill residence.
Alvin Johnson/EMG
Authors
Wendy Bowman
Wendy Bowman is a real estate writer at Robb Report. Before that, she was a freelancer for Modern Luxury and several other media outlets, where she primarily covered luxury properties for…