Record price set for a mansion in San Francisco by Yahoo! chief
San Francisco’s Pacific Heights is best known for its extremely expensive properties and as home to the likes of novelist Danielle Steele, SKYY vodka tycoon Maurice Kanbar and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. With the sale of 2950 Broadway for the record breaking price of $35 million (£22.5 million) to Marissa Mayer, president of Yahoo!, however, a new benchmark has been set.
Lutheran Mayer, who previously lived in a penthouse in the city’s Four Seasons Residences, once stated that her priorities were: “God, family and Yahoo!; in that order”. She and her venture capitalist Data Collective founder husband Zack Brogue supposedly bought the 11,000 square foot “Tudor Revival” house in April 2013 through a trust named Trania. News of their being the purchasers, however, has only just broken now as previously observers had mistakenly assumed that the name Trania referred to Trevor Trania, who also happens to be a technology entrepreneur, and his wife Alexis.
The four-floor house sits on one third of an acre and unusually for San Francisco has a heated outdoor pool. It includes 6 reception rooms, 6 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, a 3,000 bottle wine cellar and an underground garage for four vehicles.
Last sold for $29,500,000 in 2011 by Peter Baumann of the German electronica group Tangerine Dream, 2950 Broadway was originally built for an engineer named Stetson George Hindes who commissioned the architect Frederick H. Meyer (1876 – 1971) to build him a “Tudor Revival” mansion in 1922. Hindes, whose firm constructed the Pearl Harbour dry dock and the Alameda shipyard, was a “railroad and photography buff” and had rooms set aside for electric model trains, a dark room and a photography gallery.
2950 Broadway was subsequently home to “The King of Torts” Melvin Belli (1907 – 1996) and his fourth wife, Lia Georgia Triff, between 1978 and 1992. The six times married lawyer and actor, best known for having represented Jack Ruby for free after he shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, was said to have led a “colourful existence” whilst living there and during the couple’s acrimonious divorce negotiations in 1988, it was alleged that Belli ran naked through the house on occasions waving a loaded pistol at his wife and that she threw his pet dog off the Golden Gate Bridge. Belli was ultimately compelled to pay her a settlement of $15 million.
2950 Broadway’s certainly got a fascinating “search history”. We bet Marissa Meyer logged it prior to putting in her colossal bid.
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