A $65 million house has been listed in Los Angeles, testing the very top of the city’s market at a time when the ultra-luxury sector is awash in inventory. 

The listing, a spec house set on around an acre fronting the sixth hole of the Bel Air country club’s golf course, has 27,000 square feet, with eight bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. Designed by architect Paul McClean and listed with Branden and Rayni Williams, the property was built by Nile Niami, the movie producer-cum-real estate developer best known for his yet-unfinished, $500 million spec mansion in Bel Air.

Niami’s success has come, in part, from developing houses that double as pre-packaged lifestyles. They’re almost always sold fully furnished and will often include art, wine, and a range of luxury cars in the sale.

This home, which could be for a family, Niami says, “has a wine room, pool table, bar, ballroom, separate family room, and a pool.”

It’s designed in a style that Niami describes as “French Regency-Contemporary,” which means that it’s slightly less glassy than his previous houses. He is developing a house next door, he says, “and I didn’t want to do two contemporary houses next to each other, which is why we did this in a kind of French, or European, style.” Still, he says, “it’s California living.” To that end, there’s ample outdoor entertaining space, and French doors open onto a pool that’s intersected by a marble walkway. 

Like the rest of Naimi’s projects, there’s a profusion of marble and high-end finishes throughout the house, while the furniture, which comes with the house, is a melange of massive couches, tables, and comfortable chairs. The only thing that isn’t included in the sales price, Niami says, is the art—and, he adds, a motorcycle posed by a spiral staircase. “That’s my personal motorcycle,” he says. “But if someone wants it, everything in the house can be negotiated.”

Mansion Fever

That flexibility might come in handy, given the current state of Los Angeles’s real estate market. Sales in L.A.’s luxury tier were down 9.6 percent for the second quarter of 2018, according to the most recent report by Douglas Elliman. The average price per square foot, the report continued, was down slightly, and it noted that “luxury listing inventory expanded faster than the overall market.” In Bel Air, the average sales price was down a whopping 21.6 percent, according to the same report, and the average price to square foot fell with it: down 19.6 percent, to $1,207.

“There are a lot of properties on the market, and we’ve found that with some properties, there’s some aspirational pricing that brokers are using,” says Stephen Kotler, the chief executive officer of Douglas Elliman Real Estate’s western region.

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