A Sleek Los Angeles Spec Mansion Lists for $45 Million – Robb Report

Over in a particularly prime pocket of Los Angeles, on a hallowed parcel once home to legendary Hollywood actress Claudette Colbert, a newly built spec mansion has just popped up on the market. The asking price is a hefty $45 million, or a about $37 million more than the Holmby Hills spread last sold to a development group for almost four years ago, back in March 2019.

Completed this year, the grand house rests on property that has a celebrity pedigree dating back to the 1930s. That’s when Colbert commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd Wright to build her a striking Colonial-style mansion on a 4-acre hilltop estate surrounded by picturesque gardens, where the It Happened One Night star lived until the ’60s with her husband Dr. Joel Pressman, head of UCLA’s Neck & Hand Surgery Department.

Later owned by retired Northrop Grunman chairman and CEO Kent Kresa, and subsequently occupied by businessman Juan Villalonga, the house sold in 2014 for $7.3 million to a real estate developer who razed Colbert’s home and subdivided the surrounding land into smaller lots. An original piece of the property was next snapped up in 2019 for around $7.6 million by Kohen Development Group, who went on to design and construct a sleek architectural-style home boasting six bedrooms and 12 baths filtered across a little more than 17,600 square feet of three-level living space.

Tucked away behind a gated driveway and high hedges, on nearly three-quarters of an acre near the prestigious Harvard-Westlake Middle School campus, the contemporary showpiece is centered around a mature olive tree that’s encased by glass walls and sits amid a water feature on the basement level.

Other highlights include a living room flaunting a soaring two-way fireplace clad in stone and dining area sporting a glass-encased wine display, along with a family room that adjoins a gourmet kitchen outfitted with top-tier Miele and PITT appliances, a couple of mini-wine cellars, dual eat-in islands and a secondary prep kitchen. A movie theater with blackout shades flows via pocketing doors to a bar holding court outside, and there also is another bar in a nook off the family room, plus two laundry rooms, an elevator and office space.

A sumptuous upstairs master retreat features a private balcony, fireplace, hidden ceiling TV, and double walk-in closets and lavish baths, while the aforementioned basement level comes complete with a gym, sauna, and steam and massage rooms; and outdoors,…