Too Fancy? ’Ultimate in Throwback Excess’ Sells for Less Than Half Asking Price

Is there such a thing as too much luxury?

Maybe so, depending on the location (and the price). This home, with a rotating dining room and one of the world’s longest residential pools, just sold for $5.5 million – which may sound like quite the princely sum, until you find out that it was last listed at $12.5 million. That’s a whopping 56% off. (Of course, that’s nothing compared to the roller-coaster ride that Hawaii’s Waterfalling estate has endured, selling for almost 80 percent off its original $26.5 million asking price … and then getting relisted at $8.2 million.)

At $12.5 million, maybe it was just incredibly overpriced. After all, even at $5.5 million the sale doubles the previous record for the Escondido area (north and inland of San Diego).

Or could it have been a little dated? Our friends at Trulia described it as “the ultimate in throwback excess”: “If you took everything about an episode of ‘Miami Vice’ (the swagger of a young Don Johnson, the soft colors of Italian designer suits, the unapologetic excess) and translated it into a piece of luxury real estate, this is what you’d get.”

The 23,000-square-foot home was built on 18 acres atop Paint Mountain in 1995, and has eight bedrooms, nine full baths and two half-baths. There is also a separate guesthouse ready for finishing, which adds two additional bedrooms and bathrooms.

The 288,000-gallon pool is the focal point of the entire home, beginning in the foyer and extending the length of the property until is seems to disappear over the eastern side of the mountain. But before it goes there, it swells within the home’s inner courtyard to accommodate a swim-up bar area with underwater stools and a Jacuzzi spa.

In addition to that pool, the estate’s water features include two 900-gallon saltwater aquariums, stone wall waterfalls, and several koi ponds. There’s even a custom rock water slide that slopes down the edge of the mountain, shooting swimmers out into a small plunge pool.

Among the estate’s other lavish features are the aforementioned dining room with views for miles and a rotating platform upon which to place a round dining table, a commercial-grade kitchen with its own teppanyaki station (the kind made famous by Benihana), a 4,300-square-foot master suite and garage parking for up to twenty vehicles.

The front door alone must be seen to be believed: It’s 10 by 10 feet, it pivots from the center, and it’s shaped a little like a gargantuan puzzle piece.

The estate didn’t receive many nibbles at the $12.5 million mark. It was supposed to go to auction with a $5 million reserve – but an offer of $5.5 million was made and accepted at the last minute.

The project manager for the sale, David Ashcroft of Platinum Luxury Auctions, described the buyer as a private entrepreneur with multiple real estate holdings in Southern California. “When handling a home that is this unique, there’s an expectation that some ‘unusual’ folks will be drawn to it,” he told Yahoo Real Estate, but he was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of potential buyers. “Some very serious businessmen stopped by, including a gentleman within the top 100 of the Forbes wealth list.”

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