If You’re Ready to Move Way Up, Hurry

A Mediterranean-style Laguna Beach mansion known locally as “the Gucci house” sold this week for $13 million. A mile up the coast, a house that sold last year for more than $14 million is back on the market for $18 million.

From southern Orange County to Malibu and beyond, the coastal abodes of the region’s richest and most famous are once again hot items.

Real estate agents say the battered mansion market bottomed out two years ago and has zoomed this year. Many buyers are flush with stock market winnings and in a confident mood.

“It’s like artwork, some of these one-of-a-kind ocean properties,” said Bill Rolfing, a First Team-Nolan agent in Laguna Beach. “Sometimes you make big money. Sometimes you lose. But there is nothing in the world like that house.”

During the first eight months of 1997, 757 homes in Los Angeles County sold for $1 million or more, up 51% from the first eight months of 1995, according to real estate figures compiled by Axcion/DataQuick.

The proportional increase was even greater in Orange County, where 205 homes sold for $1 million or more through August, up 61% from the same period in 1995.

“We’d have to go back to 1992 to come up with numbers close to these--it’s the strongest market in five years,” said John Karevoll, an Axcion/DataQuick statistician.

The sales are reminiscent of the halcyon days of the ‘80s when many fortunes were invested in such homes.

Indeed, the $18-million bluff-top home now for sale was built by Boyd Jefferies, a stockbroker convicted in the ‘80s insider-trading scandals. It was bought by an unidentified software baron in November for $14 million--the highest-priced home ever sold in Orange County.

“People are not afraid to spend money again,” says Paul Grisanti, a Coldwell Banker Jon Douglas agent in Malibu, adding that the fear of falling prices has subsided.

The conspicuous-consumption embarrassment factor, which set in when nearly everyone except Hollywood executives was hammered by the state’s long recession, has waned as well, Grisanti said.

That can translate into a hunger for properties like the Gucci house, which towers on a bluff above Aliso Beach, or the former Jefferies house, which has an octagonal bedroom cantilevered out over the sea, complete with a turntable bed.

“Four years ago, if you had money, it was considered very un-OK to spend it on a house or a nice car,” Grisanti said. “Now people are not afraid of offending their friends, because the economy is better all around and their friends aren’t hurting financially anymore.”

Prices are also on the rise, though still well below their near-hysterical peaks of eight years ago, real estate agents say. The decline spelled big losses for those who mistimed their mansion procurements.

Dodi al Fayed, the millionaire killed in a car crash with Princess Diana, paid $7 million this year for a Malibu home, Grisanti said. The seller had bought it from actress Julie Andrews and producer Blake Edwards in 1992 for a reported $8.5 million and, according to Grisanti, “must have put at least $1.5 million into it.”

The Laguna mansion that sold Tuesday was built eight years ago by Severin Wunderman, a manufacturer and distributor of Gucci watches, who decorated it with such touches as fireplaces imported from European chateaus.

Nancy Lavigne, a Coldwell Banker agent in Laguna, said the 10,000-square-foot estate with guest house, surrounded by palm trees and 10-foot walls, is on a cliff-top property with a gazebo where stars such as Charlie Chaplin once gazed out at Santa Catalina Island.

As an illustration of how the market has changed, Wunderman told The Times in a March 1996 interview that he was trying to sell the estate for $10.8 million. Unable to find a buyer, he pulled it off the market for a year before again listing it with little fanfare last May.

“After the first of the year, the oceanfront market just triggered,” said agent Bill Dolby, who has a listing on the home next to the Gucci house at a mere $5.5 million.

“People are buying them like crazy.”