Residents of this Malibu enclave include Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs and Beyoncé and Jay-Z
5 min
Driving north in Malibu, Calif., on the famed Pacific Coast Highway, there is a spot where the road veers away from the ocean, and the views are replaced by a hillside, thick foliage and, in some places, a man-made barrier. Many drivers have no idea they are driving past some of the world’s most expensive homes, including a recently-expanded compound owned by the widow of Apple visionary Steve Jobs.
Beyond that hillside sits a roughly 1-mile stretch of beach known as Paradise Cove, known to local realtors as “Billionaires’ Bluff.” It is so exclusive that, since 2020, three of the approximately 25 homes there have sold for $100 million or more, making up a third of the deals that closed at that price point in the Los Angeles area during the same period. Two have broken the record for the most expensive home ever sold in California at the time of each sale.
They include transactions by household names such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, as well as technology heavyweights such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen , WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum and Laurene Powell Jobs . Some buyers have gone to great lengths to piece together their blufftop Paradise Cove compounds over time.
“Rich people like to congregate and they’ve congregated here,” said local agent Leonard Rabinowitz. “It makes them feel safe and more comfortable.”
In some ways, the location, roughly 35 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, seems like an unlikely destination for the country’s wealthiest people. To the north is Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park, widely regarded as the most expensive trailer park in America. Dating to the 1950s, when the then-owners allowed commercial fishermen to park campers there, the park is a throwback to the days before Malibu was brimming with the super rich. Its roughly 250 trailers and manufactured homes have since drawn celebrities such as Stevie Nicks and Matthew McConaughey, who have helped drive prices of the trailers into the millions of dollars. A casual beachfront cafe sits at the base of the bluff.
On the other side of the trailer park, on the cusp of Paradise Cove, sits an estate long owned by Barbra Streisand. To the south is the iconic Geoffrey’s restaurant, which has been serving surf and turf from its oceanfront patio since 1983.
Local realtors say the appeal of the Cove is obvious. Rather than a beach house on the sand or a blufftop mansion with more far-reaching views, homes in Paradise Cove offer the best of both worlds. Sitting behind gates off the highway, the houses are largely shielded from public view and occupy multi-acre parcels much larger that those typically available in nearby Point Dume or in the neighbouring celebrity-filled Malibu Colony. Most of the homes are also shielded from the view of their neighbours. “If you do see them, you’re seeing the corner of a roof in the distance,” said local agent Kurt Rappaport , who has sold many of the homes on the cove.
A lot of the homes also offer direct beach access via private pathways and some include beachfront cabanas or smaller homes on the sand. One formerly owned by singer Kenny Rogers has a private funicular, a type of cable railroad, that leads from the blufftop house to the ocean.
While publicly accessible, the beach at Paradise Cove is rarely busy, since there is limited parking, though it is a draw for local surfers, local agents said. Some might recognise it from the 1970s television hit “The Rockford Files,” starring James Garner, which was filmed at the cove.
A steady drumbeat of big-ticket deals in recent years has helped cement the stretch’s reputation as the most sought-after beachfront enclave in California.
Most famously, entertainment power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z paid $190 million for a mansion designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The blufftop house, measuring about 42,000 square feet, was designed by Ando for prominent art collectors Bill and Maria Bell, who spent a dozen years constructing what Maria Bell has said is a “sculpture as much as it is a building.” The deal, which closed in May 2023, was briefly the most expensive ever in the state.
Before that, a deal by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, on the same blufftop held the record. In 2021, they paid $177 million for a 7-acre compound formerly owned by fashion mogul Serge Azria and his wife, Florence Azria. That property includes a roughly 10,000-square-foot main residence, two guesthouses, a cinema and a spa.
More recently, Powell Jobs, founder of philanthropic and investment company Emerson Collective, added a $94 million property to her private Paradise Cove compound, bringing her total aggregate spending in the cove to more than $170 million. The assemblage has involved separate transactions with four sellers spanning from 2015 to 2024.
Other major transactions include WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum’s purchase of two neighboring compounds for a combined $187 million in 2020 and 2021, as well as movie producer Edward H. Hamm Jr’s $91 million deal to buy a home from British videogame designer Jonathan Burton and his ex-wife, Helen Musk, in 2023. In 2022, billionaire media mogul Byron Allen also paid $100 million for a Malibu estate formerly owned by self-storage billionaire Tammy Hughes Gustavson.
These wealthy newbies join a string of well-known names on the bluff. They include tennis legend John McEnroe, “The Apprentice” creator Mark Burnett, and Kari Clark, the wife of the late television host Dick Clark.
Leonardo DiCaprio is also doing construction on a home on Paradise Cove; he bought the site, which is next to the home owned by Burnett, for $23 million in 2016, according to property records and a person familiar with the deal. His property was formerly owned by director Ridley Scott.
Values in Paradise Cove have shot up so significantly thanks in large part to the lack of available inventory, Rappaport said. Since prices there are so high, the cove doesn’t typically draw speculators. Owners there are so rich they usually don’t need the money and don’t typically sell, unless they have had a significant change in circumstances, he said. One of the few available homes on the cove is an $85 million Greek-inspired estate owned by Peter O’Malley, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. O’Malley has owned the 2.5-acre property since around 2000 and is selling following the death of his wife, Annette O’Malley, last year.
When properties do come up, “there’s usually a neighbour to buy it,” Rappaport said.
Homeowners such as those on the cove don’t always start out with a plan to assemble a larger compound. Those plans shape up over time as opportunities arise, Rappaport said. The larger footprints mean increased privacy and protected views and limit the chance that homeowners will have to deal with construction on the neighbouring lot. “They think, ‘Oh, it would be nice to have the house next door,’ ” he said.
Even as the broader Los Angeles luxury market has been hobbled by interest rate increases, a drop in demand from foreign purchasers and an exodus of high-net worth individuals to lower-tax states, the Paradise Cove market has continued to post record deals.
“It reminds us that these home sales have nothing to do with the broader market they sit within,” said appraiser Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel. “It’s a very specifically designed submarket and its success doesn’t wash over onto the whole housing market.”
Miller said it isn’t uncommon in ultrahigh-end communities for transactions to happen in clusters as they have in Paradise Cove.
“There is one big transaction and then a lot of copycats around it. I think it’s FOMO,” he said, using the popular acronym for “fear of missing out.”
In the overall L.A. market, the slowdown in deals has been compounded by a new mansion transfer tax, which applies only to the city of Los Angeles. It has “killed off excess demand,” particularly from developers and property speculators who plan to flip the properties, Miller said. Previously, that represented a significant portion of the buyer pool and the market fed on itself, he said. The new tax, enacted last year, requires sellers to pay 4% on sales of homes priced between $5 million and $10 million, and 5.5% on sales of properties at $10 million or above.
While sales are up 15% year-over-year in the overall luxury Los Angeles market, eight-figure sales are rare. None have closed in the city of Los Angeles since the introduction of the tax, according to data from Stephen Shapiro, co-founder of Westside Estate Agency.
The tax has only made sellers more resolute about their pricing, local agents said.
“Our problem [in Los Angeles] has been that the buyers think that it’s a buyer’s market and the sellers have been feeling like they’ll get their price if they hold out,” said agent Jade Mills of Coldwell Banker Realty.
In Paradise Cove, buyers are under no such illusion that the market favours them.
“They are willing to step up,” Mills said.
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Unmarried home buyers say they are giving priority to a financial foundation over a legal one
4 min
The big wedding can wait. Couples are deciding they would rather take the plunge into homeownership.
In reshuffling the traditional order of adult milestones, some couples may decide not to marry at all, while others say they are willing to delay a wedding. Buying a home is as much, if not more of a commitment, they reason. It helps them build financial stability when the housing market is historically unaffordable.
In 2023, about 555,000 unmarried couples said that they had bought their home in the previous year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Census Bureau data. That is up 46% from 10 years earlier, when just under 381,000 couples did the same.
Unmarried couples amounted to more than 11% of all U.S. home sales. The percentage has climbed steadily over the past two decades—a period in which marriage rates have fallen. These couples make up triple the share of the housing market that they did in the mid-1980s, according to the National Association of Realtors.
To make it work, couples must look past the significant risk that the relationship could blow up, or something could happen to one partner. Without a marriage certificate, living situations and finances are more likely to fall into limbo, attorneys say.
Mark White, 59 years old, and Sheila Davidson, 62, bought a lakeside townhouse together in Newport News, Va., in 2021. But only her name is on the deed. He sometimes worries about what would happen to the house if something happened to her. They have told their children that he should inherit the property, but don’t have formal documentation.
“We need to get him on the deed at some point,” Davidson said.
White and Davidson both had previous marriages, and decided they don’t want to do it again. They also believe tying the knot would affect their retirement benefits and tax brackets.
Couples that forgo or postpone marriage say they are giving priority to a financial foundation over a legal one. The median homeowner had nearly $400,000 in wealth in 2022, compared with roughly $10,000 for renters, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Even couples that get married first are often focused on the house. Many engaged couples ask for down-payment help in lieu of traditional wedding gifts.
“A mortgage feels like a more concrete step toward their future together than a wedding,” said Emily Luk, co-founder of Plenty, a financial website for couples.
Elise Dixon and Nick Blue, both 29, watched last year as the Fed lifted rates, ostensibly pushing up the monthly costs on a mortgage. The couple, together for four years, decided to use $80,000 of their combined savings, including an unexpected inheritance she received from her grandfather, to buy a split-level condo in Washington, D.C.
“Buying a house is actually a bigger commitment than an engagement,” Dixon said.
They did that, too, getting engaged eight months after their April 2023 closing date. They are planning a small ceremony on the Maryland waterfront next year with around 75 guests, which they expect to cost less than they spent on the home’s down payment and closing costs.
The ages at which people buy homes and enter marriages have both been trending upward. The median age of first marriage for men is 30.2, and for women, 28.6, according to the Census Bureau. That is up from 29.3 and 27.0 a decade earlier. The National Association of Realtors reported this year that the median age of first-time buyers was 38, up from 31 in 2014.
Family lawyers—and parents—sometimes suggest protections in case the unmarried couple breaks up. A prenup-like cohabitation agreement spells out who keeps the house, and how to divide the financial obligations. Without the divorce process, a split can be even messier, legal advisers say.
Family law attorneys say more unmarried people are calling for legal advice, but often balk at planning for a potential split, along with the cost of drawing up such agreements, which can range from $1,000 to $3,000, according to attorney-matching service Legal Match.
Dixon, the Washington condo buyer, said she brushed off her mother’s suggestion that she draft an agreement with Blue detailing how much she invested, figuring that their mutual trust and equal contributions made it unnecessary. (They are planning to get a prenup when they wed, she said.)
There are a lot of questions couples don’t often think about, such as whether one owner has the option to buy the other out, and how quickly they need to identify a real-estate agent if they decide to sell, said Ryan Malet, a real-estate lawyer in the D.C. region.
The legal risks often don’t deter young home buyers.
Peyton Kolb, 26, and her fiancé figured that a 150-person wedding would cost $200,000 or more. Instead, they bought a three-bedroom near Tampa with a down payment of less than $50,000.
“We could spend it all on one day, or we could invest in something that would build equity and give us space to grow,” said Kolb, who works in new-home sales.
Owning a place where guests could sleep in an extra bedroom, instead of on the couch in their old rental, “really solidified us starting our lives together,” Kolb said. Their wedding is set for next May.
Homes and weddings have both gotten more expensive, but there are signs that home prices are rising faster. From 2019 to 2023, the median sales price for existing single-family homes rose by 44%, according to the National Association of Realtors. The average cost of a wedding increased 25% over that time, according to annual survey data from The Knot.
Roughly three quarters of couples move in together before marriage, and may already be considering the trade-offs between buying and renting. The cost of both has risen sharply over the past few years, but rent rises regularly while buying with a fixed-rate mortgage caps at least some of the costs.
An $800 rent hike prompted Sonali Prabhu and Ryan Willis, both 27, to look at buying. They were already paying $3,200 in monthly rent on their two-bedroom Austin, Texas, apartment, and felt they had outgrown it while working from home.
In October, they closed on a $425,000 three-bed, three-bath house. Their mortgage payment is $200 more than their rent would have been, but they have more space. They split the down payment and she paid about $50,000 for some renovations.
Her dad’s one request was that the house face east for good fortune, she said. Both parents are eagerly awaiting an engagement.
“We’re very solid right now,” said Prabhu, who plans to get married in 2026. “The marriage will come when it comes.”
