A grand, European-style country estate halfway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley has taken a 70% cut from its once-eye-popping price tag.
Guignécourt, a century-old, 47-acre estate, first landed on the market via Sotheby’s International Realty for a cool $100 million in 2013. But a market dominated by young tech execs interested in the new and modern has forced the seller to whittle the price of this grand old property down to $29.85 million, according to its listing agents.
The property, located in the hot Hillsborough market, is one of the largest parcels of land on the San Francisco Peninsula, and includes hiking trails, a reservoir and city views, said Mary Gullixson, who is handling the listing with her son, Brent Gullixson.
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"It’s beautiful, beautiful acreage. There are only two estates with that much acreage in Hillsborough, and it’s one of them," said Ms. Gullixson. "It would give somebody a chance to make it an incredible family compound."
And the home’s French-country feel is no coincidence. It was built in 1912 by a member of French nobility, Count Christian de Guigné, who came to California and married the American heiress to a gold rush fortune.
Guigné hired Bliss & Faville, the same architects behind the historic upscale St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, to build the 16,660-square-foot main house, which has remained in the family ever since.
Current owner, Christian de Guigné IV, had even hoped to keep it in family hands for the rest of his life by originally putting Guignécourt on the market with a life estate condition. The legal condition would have meant that Mr. de Guigné could live in the home until he died, despite handing over ownership.
But he’s since lifted the condition, Ms. Gullixson said.
The mansion has four levels, six bedrooms, eight full baths and one half bath. And that’s just in the main quarters––there are an additional seven staff bedrooms and three staff bathrooms, an eight-car carport and a pool.
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The inside of the home is just as impressive as its grounds with 20-foot ceilings and extensive moulding. But the buyer of this historic estate missed his or her chance to keep its precious furnishings. More than 250 valuable antiques from the estate sold at a Christie’s auction earlier this year, raking in some $2.6 million. The antiques included a painting by Flemish Baroque painter Adam Frans van der Meulen for $47,500 and a Chinese 12-panel decorative screen for $112,500, according to Christie’s auction results.
When an addition was built on the house in the 1960s, an interior designer dug up 18th-Century Chinoiserie wallpaper from the back of a warehouse. So while the furnishings are mostly gone, a buyer could negotiate the antique wallpaper into the sale, Ms. Gullixson said.
The luxury market around Guignécourt has been red hot over the past year. But buyers, many of them in the tech-industry, have favored new developments with top amenities like top-of-the-line wine cellars and state-of-the-art home technology, making Guignécourt, by contrast, a fixer-upper.