Price: $8.95 million<\/p>\n
In its heyday, this California wine country estate was a hub for celebrities, including Hollywood luminaries Mary Pickford and John Barrymore.<\/p>\n
It was once a section of the summer estate of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels and his art-patron wife, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. The property, which is across from the Spreckels Mansion, is in the historic Sobre Vista Estates neighborhood and includes the tennis court where Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby and even Ronald Reagan once played.<\/p>\n
The house was built in the late 1800s by the Spreckels family as a recreation and entertainment center. This is the first time in a quarter-century that it has been for sale.<\/p>\n
MORE: \u2018Boulder\u2019 Home Designs: Houses Are Taking the Rocky Topography Inside<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like a mini-Four Seasons resort,\u201d said Thomas Henthorne of Golden Gate Sotheby\u2019s International Realty. \u201cThe house was gut renovated, and the grounds have been relandscaped.\u201d<\/p>\n The 6-foot-tall de Bretteville Spreckels, who was known as Big Alma and the Great-Grandmother of San Francisco, was a scandalous socialite\u2014in her younger years, she was a nude model.<\/p>\n She assembled an important art collection, and donated her museum, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, to the City of San Francisco in 1924.<\/p>\n In the 1940s, she sold the summer home, which has been restored, and this separate parcel was created. Spreckels\u2014and her philanthropy\u2014outlasted the estate and her much older first husband: She died in 1968 at age 87; (he died, at age 67, in 1924.)<\/p>\n Stats<\/p>\n The 6,420-square-foot house, built in 1968 and gut-renovated in 2019, has seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and two half baths. It\u2019s set on 2.26 acres.<\/p>\n Amenities<\/p>\n Each bedroom has a private garden terrace. Other amenities include a billiards lounge, four fireplaces, a great room with a bar, a fitness studio and a whole-house audio system. The grounds, which were designed by Penney Magrane in 2019, have gardens and an orchard. There also is a 60-foot saltwater pool with custom lighting and a fire feature; a kitchen, a dining pavilion; tennis, bocce, croquet and volleyball courts; a spa pavilion; and a geothermal bath pavilion with Japanese-style copper soaking tubs.<\/p>\n