Built for C. Earl Dawson in 1939 on what was then a 130-acre assemblage of land purchased from the University of California in 1936, the 17,000-square-foot Rancho San Antonio estate now occupies a 5.6-acre parcel at 11627 Dawson Drive in Los Altos Hills.
Purchased for $6 million in 1997, at which point it was the largest home in Santa Clara County, the main residence of Rancho San Antonio includes 6 bedrooms, 7 full baths and a loggia that opens to the patio and pool beyond which sits the tennis court.
The living room features virgin redwood ceiling beams. And under the over-sized kitchen there’s a 5,000-bottle wine cellar and servants wing.
There’s also a 2 bedroom guest/pool house, an attached 3-car garage with 2-car carport, a detached 4-car garage, and a 35-car garage which wasn’t an original feature of the property. We can imagine that they have used high-quality services similar to Garage Door service Charlotte.
Listed for rent at $18,750 per month last year (which didn’t include the use of the 35-car garage as far as we know), the Rancho San Antonio estate is now on the market for $23,995,000.
We’ll let you mull those numbers over.
I bet it’ll go over asking.
Spectacular property with great bones but needs updating. I would be surprised if it sells for over $20M.
I would enjoy the servants wing.
Very nice, truly a grand estate. Buyer will want to do a bit of updating/customization
Cool house. My personal beef would be that they should have kept the simpler Carmel/Pseudo Spanish motif inside and out. Seems to be a lot of different decorating themes going on inside. I really like the real terra cotta tile roof and the Carmel stone walls.
It would guess the buyer is a C-suite exec in the valley with a thing for cars. Long shot for a Chinese money-parker? But I suspect the neighborhood would feel too far removed from reference points like Stanford.
Feels like it might be overpriced by 5mm(?) You get an acre and a brand new 10Ksf house on Atherton Ave for @$12mm, I think. All that said, I have little grasp of this market. Good luck to the sellers. Nice home.
You’re off a bit. West Atherton is, of course, a highly nuanced market, but a Circus Club area new mansion on an acre could go for $20M (all hush hush, of course, but what if I was to tell you that’s what certain new builds were getting on a street that rhymes with Gary Pane), $15M-$18M or so for West Atherton with Las Lomitas schools (Polhemus had a sale for $18M, Mandarin had $15M), a hare less for West of Alameda ($14M for a hush hush sale on Fletcher), $12M for the Redwood City schools section (Adam Way sold for $11.8M).
Chinese buyers love Los Altos Hills, for the record. Palo Alto, Hillsborough, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Atherton. But will not touch Menlo Park in many cases, although there has been a surge of investment in the Belle Haven neighborhood East of 101 but near Facebook that per the abstracts has been primarily Chinese buyers.
That being said, price is still a bit steep, if only because there aren’t many comps. 5 acres of land in Los Altos Hills is probably a $9M proposition these days, and then you have the house, but the historic Stonebrook Court was much bigger, also needed updating, and on over 7 acres (if I remember correctly) and that was $25M. An acre and a half is a find in Los Altos Hills, just like Atherton, so 5 is hard to comp. They may be using Belbrook Way in Atherton, 5+ acres but with a much smaller home that was at around $21.8M when all was said and done.
[Editor’s Note: The Morgan Estate on Stonebrook, which sold for $25 million earlier this year having been listed for $45 million in 2008, sits on roughly 8 acres.]
Just curious, how is a sale hush-hush when it needs to be recorded?
I don’t know, but whenever someone says “hush hush” when sharing information with me, I be all Pavlov doggie and start thinking how much money I can make. My critical thinking goes out of the window at the thought of getting “secret” information that leads to riches!
So with all the hush hush, how much should this property sell for?
Hello do you know if this house was on the top of the hill. Owned by Jack or john S. Dawson in the 70’s to early 80’s? Mother’s name Jacqueline Dawson?
Privately shopped, non-publicized, with a healthy dose of non-disclosure agreements and LLCs to boot in many cases. Just like half of the Atherton market. Of course now that transfer tax is no longer able to be withheld, it’s easy to spot these deals as they close if you are looking for them, true.
UPDATE: $5M Cut for a 17,000-Square-Foot Estate with Parking Galore