LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $2,515,000
SIZE: 11 acres, 3,256 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Well-connected real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak recently snitched to Your Mama that multi-billionaire businessman and fast up-and-coming Los Angeles-based real estate baller James "Jim" Jannard has added yet another property to his already over-stuffed portfolio of private residences, an 11-acre mini-ranch in the mountains above Malibu that he quietly picked up last month for $2,515,000.
Mister Jannard, now in his mid-sixties, is nothing if not a hard-charging entrepreneur who founded the Oakley sunglasses and athletic-wear empire in the 1970s that he took public in the mid-90s and sold to global eye wear conglomerate Luxottica in 2007 for $2.1 billion in cash. (He remains a significant shareholder in the company.) In 2005 Mister Jannard founded the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company,* an outfit that has elephantine showbiz industry dreams but primarily manufactures high-end digital cinema cameras used to make movies such as David Fincher's The Social Network, Steven Soderbergh's Che, Peter Jackson's Oscar-nominated action flick District 9, and the Baz Lurhman extravaganza The Great Gatsby. In 2010 Red acquired the old Ren-Mar studio complex in Hollywood and re-named it Red Studios Hollywood; According to the studio's website Weeds and True Blood are taped there.
A gated, tree-lined driveway extends deep into the center of the semi-remote Lucky Ranch before it wraps itself tightly around a mature specimen tree in front of the main residence, a 1950s split level rancharoo that at some point was updated in a non-specific and uninspired architectural style.
Listing information indicates the main house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 3,256 square feet and a separate, self-contained two-bedroom guest house offers guests or domestic staff their own living room and kitchen plus a bonus room and bathroom.
Listing photographs show the main house, reasonably luxurious if largely outdated, has wood floors throughout the common living areas, tile in the bathrooms, and wall-to-wall carpeting in the bedrooms. There are vaulted and sometimes clerestory-lit exposed wood ceilings and at least two river rock fireplaces, one in the formal living room and one in the family room. Given Mister Jannard's apparent predilection for grandiose dwellings Your Mama expects the existing abode will be transformed (or replaced) by an accomplished and well-compensated team of smart architects and lady and/or nice-gay decorators.
In addition to the fairly rudimentary equestrian facilities—lean to stable, paddock, and whatnot—the mini-ranch's backyard amusements include meandering flagstone terraces and pathways, built-in barbecue and fire pit areas, a rock- and waterfall-ringed pebble-bottom swimming pool and spa, and organic gardens with a variety of fruit and nut trees.
The horse ranch isn't so convenient to grocery outlets or, besides Malibu and Vine, dining establishments but for Mister Jannard it is but a short if windy, 5.5-mile drive up Decker Canyon from the unapologetically epic, bluff-top estate in Malibu that Mister Jannard purchased from billionaire money man and fellow real estate baller Howard Marks last year in a hair-curling deal that property records show went down for $74.5 million.**
The full extent of Mister Jannard's bulging property portfolio isn't known to Your Mama but we do know that his holdings in Malibu are only the tip of his real estate iceberg. He also owns a handful of properties in the San Juan Islands archipelago in Washington State that includes (but are probably not limited to) a 9-ish acre waterfront estate on Orca Island, a substantially larger waterfront camp on neighboring Crane Island and, a few miles away, the entirety of the 516-acre Spieden Island that he picked up in 1997 for $22 million.
Spieden is not, as it turns out, the only private island owned by Mister Jannard. A few years ago the land hoovering billionaire scooped up the islands of Kaibu and Vatu Vara near Fiji. He's reportedly developing an upscale boutique resort on Kaibu that will, no doubt, only be affordable to those with super-sized incomes or exceedingly high credit card limits.
Back in the United States Mister Jannard owns a number of properties in the excessively pricey Pelicans developments in Newport Coast (Orange County); a nearly 14,000 square foot contemporary mansion in a swanky gated community at the western edge of Las Vegas that he picked up in 2008 for $11.5 million; and two supremely located properties in the trendy and spendy Trousdale Estates area of Beverly Hills, one he bought in October 2010 for $5.2 million and the other he picked up in the late-December 2009 for $19.9 million. In classic baller style the latter residence, a crab shaped mid-century modern, has been razed to make way for a much larger residence.
*Mister Jannard, who has faced some pretty stiff criticism from industry insiders over his digital cameras, recently stepped back from his lead role at Red.
**Mister and Missus Marks purchased the bulk of the 10+ acre estate they they sold to Mister Jannard in 2002 for about $31 million from the estate of deceased Herbalife tycoon Mark Hughes who died in the house from some sort of sleeping pill overdose or something in May, 2000.
listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty