Jerry Weintraub’s Palm Desert Contemporary Goes Up For Sale

SELLER: Estate of Jerry Weintraub
LOCATION: Palm Desert, CA
PRICE: $16,000,000
SIZE: 9,152 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 7.5 bathrooms (total)

YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: About 140 miles west and a wee bit south of Beverly Hills, in California’s affluent and blistering hot resort community of Palm Desert, an aggressively modern mansion well-known in architecture, design and real estate circles to be the Coachella Valley getaway of late Emmy winning television and film producer Jerry Weintraub — it was once featured in Architectural Digest — has come available at $16 million. The price, according to online marketing details, which make no secret of the home’s ownership and indeed promotes it, includes the mansion’s many custom furnishings.

As far as we can tell from a careful parse of property records, the “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Ocean’s Twelve,” and “Ocean’s Thirteen” super-producer, who died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest in July 2015 at 77 during surgery in Santa Barbara, purchased the elevated 1.42-acre parcel within the guarded gates of the swanky BIGHORN Golf Club in February 2002 for $2.25 million. Celebrated local architect Guy Dreier was commissioned to custom design a commodious and confidently contemporary residence with aspirational roof lines, luxe limestone floors, hand-finished plaster walls, wood-paneled ceilings, scads of cabinetry handcrafted with exotic woods, and perhaps more wet bars, “morning bars,” and flat-screen televisions than this property gossip has ever seen in a single residence. The sprawling, single-story desert mansion comes in at 9,152-square-feet, according to current listing details, with five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms plus a plushly appointed guesthouse with fireplace, computer work space, “morning bar,” en suite bathroom, and a sun-shaded patio decked out with fireplace, spa and day bed for al fresco naps.

In the so-called “Great Room” there’s a massive two-way fireplace and sunken wet bar with booze fridge and ice-maker. Soaring expanses of glass automatically disappear into the walls at the touch of a button and seamlessly merge the room to an equally ample outdoor living and dining loggia with panoramic view and a poolside fireplace surmounted by a flat screen television. The dining room, with two custom granite tables that each easily seat ten or twelve, is open to the kitchen that features flaxen-hued Obeche wood cabinetry, slab granite and floating glass counter tops, a walk-in pantry, and a slew of name-brand appliances that include a pair of warming drawers, full-size side-by-side fridge and freezer, and an integrated espresso maker. In addition to an intimately proportioned media lounge off the kitchen with half of a dozen flat-screen televisions mounted in a tight grid on the wall there’s a much more spacious and men’s clubby pub room modeled after the legendary Claridge’s Bar in London with shimmering pressed tin ceiling treatment, onyx trimmed smooth-paneled walls, a fully stocked wet bar — natch — and a handful of sumptuous, crimson velvet club chairs that face another gridded bank of six flat-screen televisions.

The residence’s total of six bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms includes the aforementioned guesthouse, four en suite guest bedrooms, and a substantial owner’s domain privately housed in its own wing. In the bedroom, where there is a media center and onyx-faced fireplace in the sitting area, a custom-built bed is positioned to take advantage of mountain and golf course views through towering glass panels that, just as in the “Great Room,” at the touch of a button disappear into the walls when fully open. A pie slice-shaped wedge of glass inserted in to the floor dramatically — or melodramatically depending on one’s feeling of architectural and engineering flights of fancy — illustrates how the bedroom cantilevers ever so slightly over the swimming pool that wraps, moat-like around the rear of the residence. There are two, boutique-style dressing rooms and a roomy pair of sybaritic bathrooms. “Hers” is slathered in green marble and “his” has high-gloss, Macassar Ebony wood cabinetry and a glass-enclosed shower that links through to an outdoor shower space. A steam room in the “his” bathroom is also accessible from the adjoining gym that incorporates a “morning bar” while an adjacent office has a custom-crafted desk of Macassar Ebony, a custom-built bed, and direct access to a golf cart garage fancily fitted with Macassar Ebony storage cabinets and equipped with yet another “morning bar.” Apparently Mister Weintraub found it annoying or inconvenient, a waste of time or some other negative thing to have to traipse all the way from the luxuriously appointed golf cart garage to the nearby gym when he wanted a second or third cup of coffee or whatever else it is one gets from a morning bar. But we digress…

It was only a few weeks ago that Mister Weintraub’s approximately two-acre Beverly Hills estate went up for sale with an asking price of $25 million and, avid celebrity real estate watchers may recall, the super-producer previously owned a seven-ish acre bluff-top equestrian compound in the coveted and exorbitantly pricey Paradise Cove area of Malibu that was once for sale at $75 million but sold in the spring of 2013 for $41 million to apparel magnate Serge Azria.

Listing photos: BIGHORN Properties

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