The pop icon said she stayed at the over-the-top, 15,000-square-foot mansion for several months with her family last year
2 minA Beverly Hills mega mansion that singer Mariah Carey once rented hit the market Monday asking $31.99 million.
The 15,000-square-foot residence, inspired by a mashup of European architectural styles from Baroque to Louis XV, is located on a 0.6-acre lot on Laurel Way. The three-story home includes eight bedrooms, and an entryway that features a 30-foot rotunda and not one, but two imposing double stairways, one outdoors and one indoors.
It was built by a Russian couple who immigrated in the 1970s, and set about building their dream home, much to their neighbours’ consternation . “I used all of what Europe has to offer,” Natalie Glosman, whose husband Leonid is a dentist, told Today.com in 2014.
The Glosmans purchased the land for $2.2 million in 1988 and sold the home in 2019 for $30 million. The buyer was a California entity, BHLW LLC, according to property records. The manager for the entity could not immediately be reached for comment.
Last year, Mariah Carey rented the house for three months in the spring, which was asking for $125,000 in monthly rent at the time. The Queen of Christmas then partnered with Booking.com, which offered visitors a special two-night “ritzy summer reprieve” at the house, with a Carey-curated itinerary, including reservations to her favourite restaurants, according to marketing material from the booking platform.
“One of my Lambs has the opportunity to experience L.A. in true Mimi fashion by staying in the same home and visiting all my favourite places in the area!” Carey said in the Booking.com news release at the time .
The house has some additional Hollywood elan, as it served as filming location on several occasions. Danny DeVito and one of the cast members of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” have been filmed there, according to Today, and in the second season of “True Detective,” it stood in for the “incredibly gaudy” home of the corrupt and alcoholic mayor Austin Chessani, according to Curbed.
In addition to its grand entryway, the home features arched doorways, French windows, coffered ceilings, wainscotting and Rococo wall mouldings, in a blend of Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles. Outside, there is a broad green lawn with a shaded sitting area, and a back patio with a glamorous pool to match the home’s style.
Alla Furman and David Kramer of Hilton & Hyland/Forbes Global Properties are marketing the property. They were not immediately available for comment.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
