Your Mama Hears...

For now this ain't nuthin' but a juicy morsel of high end real estate scuttlebutt but Your Mama hears from the impeccably informed Charlie Chitchatter* that the colossal, hilltop contemporary compound in the hoity toity hills of Bel Air that Robb Report named as their Ultimate Home in 2011 is very quietly being shopped around with a blistering $150,000,000 price tag by—somewhat curiously—a Montecito, CA-based real estate broker well known in real estate circles to work with a very well-heeled clientele.

The village-like residence—an interconnected collection of structures designed by Richard Landry and composed mostly of glass, steel, smooth stucco and rough-cut sandstone—sits high and tight tight tight on just over 1.5 acres and surrounds a fully-enclosed, piazza-like central motor court. Combined, the civic center-sized behemoth measures in at around 40,000 square feet and contains a staggering number of bedrooms—28—and God only knows how many bathrooms. It's gotta be several dozen, right?

A few of the interior features include: numerous rooms for formal and informal entertaining; a zebra wood lined library; a home theater and separate recording studio; and a mini-mansion sized master suite with dual dressing areas and at least one bathroom sheathed almost entirely in white onyx; a complete spa facility with gym and private massage rooms.

Outdoor amenities include: a roof terrace with views from downtown to the Pacific Ocean; a deep and heated loggia for comfortable outdoor living even on cool winter evenings; a resort style negative edge swimming pool with tanning shelf; terraced fruit orchards. Below the pool there's a titanic terrace with outdoor kitchen and sand stone fireplace perched atop a roomy recreation room outfitted with media lounge area, billiards table and a built-in leather-clad bar.

For more delicious pictures and more detailed information about the house, we suggest you stop in with the Robb Report.

The current owner—we've been told it's one Saudi prince or another, but we're not sure—purchased the property back in November 1993 though a corporate entity for $1,875,000 from legendary pop music composer and producer Burt Bacharach who—irrelevantly to the topic—worked with two of Your Mama's favorite ladies: Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry.

We don't know what the property taxes were back in 1993, but the peeps at Blockshopper reveal that in 2010 the current owner was ranked as the 21st highest residential real estate property tax payer in Los Angeles with a bill that came to a mouth drying $359,432 and eighty damn cents. A few quick and unscientific tabulations on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that—based on a standard 40-hour work week at the current $8.00 per hour minimum wage rate in California—it would take 21.6 years for a minimum wage worker in California to earn the equivalent amount of money. Whatever your politics, children, that's a staggering statistic.

photo: Erhard Pfeiffer for Robb Report

*We've since also heard it from a second and also impeccably-placed source, let's call him Ben A. Fisshel, a real estate mover and shaker who operates deep inside the cut throat Platinum Triangle real estate game.