Inside a $15.5 Million Lake Tahoe Retreat With Its Own Skate Park
Looks like Splunk cofounder Erik Swan and his wife Julie are singing a swan song, if you will, when it comes to their swank High Sierra lifestyle. Now up for grabs at $15.5 million is the couple’s Lake Tahoe home, which is tucked away in a highly affluent golf and ski neighborhood nestled between the historic town of Truckee and Lake Tahoe’s north shore. Records reveal they paid “just” $5.4 million for the place back in 2012 when it was newly built—but the area’s desirability has grown considerably since then, and they’ve also upgraded and improved the house as only the one percent of the one-percenters can do, decking it out with everything from a skate park to a rock climbing wall.
Sited on a double lot that spans nearly 3 acres in the exclusive and guard-gated Martis Camp community—featuring private ski-lift access, an award-winning Tom Fazio-designed golf course, clubby beach shack on Lake Tahoe, a full-service spa and more — the Swans’ cedar-and-stone-clad dwelling was designed by Zak Architecture and Walton Architecture + Engineering, and completed by Jim Morrison Construction in 2012.
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A lengthy paved driveway rounds a stone wall before emptying into a paved motor court and massive garage, which flank the six-bedroom, eight-bath main house. Inside, the 9,000-square-foot mansion sports wide-plank hickory floors finished with black walnut, teak cabinetry, natural stone countertops, Ann Sacks tiles and custom lighting throughout. There’s also a “nightclub-grade studio sound system” with concert speakers, per the listing, and Control4 home automation and Lutron lighting systems.
All of the expected amenities are in play here: a great room with fireplace, formal dining area, and gourmet kitchen outfitted with a spacious eat-in island, plus top-of-the-line Wolf, Sub-Zero, Miele and Bosch appliances. Floor-to-ceiling walls of glass drink in mesmerizing views of Martis Valley, Mount Rose and the Carson Range beyond. The lower level packs in a media/game room, kitchenette, wet bar and two bedrooms—one of them with bespoke bunk beds.
Upstairs, a duo of hallways on either side of the main living space leads to separate two-story master suites; both have sleeping quarters upstairs, plus a sizable room below that can be used as an office, gym, studio, library or bedroom, per the listing.
But outdoors is where the real magic happens. A series of verandas meander through gardens and descend past a skate park, built-in trampoline, granite hot tub and picturesque manmade creek abutting a waterfall. There’s also a wooden deck with a fire pit, barbecue bay, lounge and al fresco dining area. Beneath all of this lies a 2,055-square-foot, one-bedroom guesthouse equipped with a full kitchen, and an 1,800-square-foot garage below the guesthouse—accessible via stairs, a custom glass elevator or rock-climbing wall—with its own soaring ceilings, epoxy floors and “scissor-lift” doors.
Though they’re longtime Silicon Valley locals, the Swans now appear to reside primarily in Malibu. In addition to their Lake Tahoe spread, the couple still owns a lavish estate atop a prime bluff in Malibu’s celeb-studded Point Dume neighborhood, purchased for $17.7 million in 2016. (That house, incidentally, was featured prominently in the Pierce Brosnan film “Some Kind of Beautiful.”) In 2015, the Swans paid Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber $13.3 million for another Point Dume house that was sold three years later to Walmart heir Steuart Walton for $14 million.
A tenured technology exec, Swan likely is best known for cofounding and serving as CTO of the publicly traded, San Francisco-based company Splunk, a leading software platform for analyzing machine-generated data. He now acts solely an adviser to Splunk, which has a current market cap in excess of $24 billion.
Jonas Mikals of Martis Camp Realty holds the Lake Tahoe listing.
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