SELLER: Tommy and Thalía MottolaLOCATION: Palm Beach, FL
PRICE: $8,250,000
SIZE: 8,062 square feet, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It seems that phat-living multi-millionaire music mogul Tommy Mottola is in the mood to divest himself of some of the high-priced and high-maintenance properties in his real estate portfolio.
In late January 2011 it was reported that Mister Mottola sold a 324-acre spread inside the exclusive Wildcat Ranch subdivision near Aspen, CO for $17,750,000. That's a lot of damn money for a ski chalet but it's far less than the $27,500,000 he originally wanted for the place when it was listed in the summer of 2010. That property includes an 11,000 square foot log home with 5 bedrooms plus two guest houses with another 4 bedrooms.
Thanks to a leg up from our friend and sometime researcher Hot Chocolate we've recently learned that Mister Mottola and his third wife, the Mexican singer and soap story superstar Thalía, recently hoisted their posh pad in Palm Beach, FL on the market with an asking price of $8,250,000.
The Svengali-like music industry bigwig was once the CEO of global music conglomerate Sony where over the years he oversaw–and some say sucked the blood from–a long list of current and former a-list entertainers including Bob Dylan, Jessica Simpson, the Dixie Chicks, Destiny's Child, Carly Simon, John Mellencamp, Diana Ross, Jennifer Lopez and, of course, his second ex-wife Mariah Carey.
Mister Mottola now captains his own much less successful music industry ship with the not-quite-revived but legendary 1970s label Casablanca Records, now part of the behemoth Universal Republic Records outfit. Once upon a time Casablanca released iconic songs by iconic artist like Donna Summer, Cher, The Village People and Parliament. Since the label's "revival" by Mister Mottola, the company's biggest recording artist to date is former actress and alleged necklace thief Lindsay Lohan. That Miss Lohan made records at all is another issue for another time and place.
Property records show Mister and third Missus Mottola–whose real first name is not Thalia but Ariadna–scooped up their Palm Beach property in June of 2008 for $6,000,000. The Palm Beach County Tax Man shows the 2-story Caribbean cottage-style mansion was built in 2008 and measures 6,372 square feet while listing information shows it spans a much larger 8,062 square feet, a number that Your Mama thinks includes both the interior spaces and the numerous terraces, balconies and loggias. Floor plans included with listing information for the pristine property show a total of 5 bedrooms and 6 full and 2 half bathrooms.
The gated and secured mansion, at the less glitzy northern tip of Palm Beach, occupies a corner lot with a parking lot sized brick motor court that leads back to an attached three-car garage. Inside a double height foyer has stone floors and an impressive staircase with a Chippendale-inspired banister that winds around the room to the second-floor bedrooms. A powder pooper was discretely tucked up under the stairs and an elevator installed just off the foyer in a small vestibule that leads to a full guest suite with walk-in closet and private facilities.
The mansion's main entertaining spaces include a formal living room with coffered ceiling, hardwood floors, fireplace and a trio of French doors that open to the back yard, a nearby formal dining room and a cozy library with wood framed windows and moldings. The family room, open to the lavishly appointed kitchen and breakfast area, has custom cabinetry with louvered doors that hold and hide the entertainment systems. Like the formal living room, the family room also opens through a trio of French doors to a well-equipped and cozy loggia with custom-fitted all-stainless steel barbecue station.
Upstairs three guest bedrooms each have a walk-in closet, private pooper, and access to a small but private balcony. The master suite occupies its own wing of the second floor. A short entrance hall that leads into the bedroom helps to add a sense of privacy to the suite that includes a vast 546 square foot bedroom and his and her bathrooms and walk-in closets. The children will please not that whatever you may think of this house (and its day-core) it was smartly designed with what our friend Hot Chocolate calls Proper Pooper Placement (P.P.P.), which in a nutshell means that the bathrooms are located in relatively discrete locations and include at least one window for light and ventilation.
Because Mister and third Missus Mottola's Palm Beach residence occupies a corner lot, much of the grounds are tied up in the front of the property which leaves only just enough room at the back for a well-equipped and luxe-looking loggia, a separate tented dining area and a slim 40-foot long swimming pool surrounded by deep green grass and ringed by–natch–a number of swaying palm trees.
In addition to a positively frightening display of guns and taxidermy in the library, some of Mister and third Missus Mottola's blue chip contemporary art collection are on display inside their Palm Beach abode and include a pair of Andy Warhol prints of Queen Elizabeth II in the living room, another Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe in the dining room, a Roy Lichtenstein in the short hall outside the dining room that connects the foyer to the kitchen, a multi-colored polka dot painting by Damien Hirst in the family room.
Mister Mottola is a well known baller among real estate gossips. An article in New York Magazine quotes a supposed friend of Mottola who says, “Tommy has an addiction to buying lavish, enormous places, overpaying for them, putting millions and millions of dollars into them, most often with good taste, showing off with them,” says a friend, “and then when they’re finished, he suddenly realizes they’re too big or too expensive.”
In 1998, Mister Mottola sold a sprawling Mount Kisco, NY estate to big biznessman and franchise food tycoon Nelson Peltz and his wife Claudia for $20,550,000. That house burned to the ground just weeks later. The following year he acquired three high floor apartments at The Century building on Central Park West in New York City that he flipped back on the market four months later and sold for $7,650,000, approximately $350,000 less than he'd paid for them. They were bought by Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos.
Also in 1999 he paid DreamWorks co-founder and gay gajillionaire David Geffen $13,300,000 for an 11,456 square foot quadruplex condo in a 35-foot wide townhouse building on E. 64th Street in New York City. After an extensive renovation said to have cost as much as $10,000,000 and include the installation of a perfume refrigerator he flipped the 8 bedroom and 9.5 bathroom townhouse condo back on the market with a bone-chilling $34,000,000 price tag. It was finally sold in September of 2003 for $13,800,000.
In 2001 he took in $18,300,000 when he sold a 47-acre estate on Mount Holly Road in Katonah, NY, the same bucolic but very ritzy Westchester County enclave where Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren live like landed gentry. It appears from our rudimentary, entirely unscientific and possibly inaccurate research that Mister Mottola moved from Katonah to The Summit, a brand-new custom-constructed 11,000-plus square foot Aspen-style mansion on 11.9 acres in North Salem, NY. He listed that rustico-luxe residence in May of 2007 for $19,500,000 and sold it a little over a year later for $14,750,000.
Over the years he's reportedly owned a string of homes in the Hamptons and property records and various reports indicate Mister Mottola's current real estate holdings include a residence in Manhattan, an estate in the hedge funder-friendly enclave of Greenwich, CT and a 750-acre spread in rural Columbia County, NY bought in early 2000 for $2,000,000. In July 2006 Mister Mottola reportedly paid $47,000,000–in cold hard cash–to acquire Crystal Island Ranch a 949-acre spread near Carbondale, CO that includes a 12,000 square foot main house with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, two guest houses and a private 18-acre lake.
Like Your Mama and all the other real estate gossips, the children will have to wait with bated breath to see if the sale of Mister Mottola's ranch at Wildcat Ridge in Aspen and his Palm Beach beach house is a lightening his real estate load to save some dough or an effort to free up some cheddar for one or more fancy-pants properties. We shall see.
listing photos and floor plan: Corcoran
