Tommy Mottola Sells Plush Greenwich Estate at Steep Discount
Location: Greenwich, Conn.
Price: $14.875 million
Size: 12,368 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 11.5 bathrooms
Music impresario Tommy Mottola has sold his Greenwich, Conn., estate for $14.875 million. Mottola, who has worked with a who’s who of international superstars including Gloria Estefan, Diana Ross, Shakira, and Jennifer Lopez, not to mention his second wife, Mariah Carey, and his current wife of almost 20 years, mononymic Mexican actress and recording artist Thalía, purchased the 5.7-plus-acre, pond-side parcel in 2010 for $2.85 million. He custom designed and built the 12,300-plus-square-foot Georgian Colonial manor house that offers nine bedrooms and 11.5 bathrooms. The sale price is a notable, but hardly pearl clutching, $625,000 under the final asking price of $15.5 million, but, as was pointed out by the property gossips at the Wall Street Journal, it’s a much more remarkable 25% reduction off the $19.95 million, pie-in-the-sky price tag the property was saddled with when it first came to market about two years ago.
Fronted by a cobblestone motor court bordered by a formal row of obsessively clipped boxwood orbs, the stately, portico-enhanced exterior gives way to light-filled interiors where impeccably crafted classical architectural detailing coexists with all the creature comforts required by a modern-day mogul. The foyer has seamless, creamy beige stone floor tiles and connects through to a stair gallery with a gently curved staircase. Spacious formal living and dining rooms each feature a fireplace and spectacular 28-pane sash windows that drop to the floor and extend almost to the ceiling while a smaller, more intimate, and relaxed sitting room has built-in bookshelves.
Industrial light fixtures hang above a gigantic, marble-topped island in the commercial-sized and decidedly modern kitchen that’s equipped with enough bells and whistles to please even the fussiest of private chefs. The adjoining breakfast room is set in to a sweeping, semi-circular bay lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and the bi-level family room is more than commodious enough to comfortably accommodate two generous seating areas, one for television watching and the other for lounging in front of a rough-cut grey stone fireplace. There’s also a ballroom-proportioned, lodge-inspired Great Room for large-scale entertaining with rustic-luxe finishes that include a muscular, open-beam cathedral ceiling and a massive, raised hearth stone fireplace.
All guest and family bedrooms are luxuriously en suite while the ultra-posh master retreat has two gleaming, all-white marble bathrooms, and extensive closets and dressing areas accessible by a bespoke Lucite and stainless steel corkscrew staircase. A subterranean level finished to the same exacting standards as the rest of the house holds a gym, children’s playroom, and a spa suite with a massage room and beauty parlor. A detached guest house includes a recording studio and additional living quarters for guests or staff.
A prairie-sized stone terrace overlooks vast swathes of uniformly pristine lawns and carefully maintained gardens surrounded by thick stands of mature woods. There’s an open-air pavilion next to a five-star boutique-resort-worthy swimming pool and a picturesque footbridge links to a small island just off the shore of the semi-private lake.
Mottola has a deserved reputation for lavish living and has not infrequently sold his homes to other, even wealthier captains of their industries. Although he was not, as was widely reported, the all-cash buyer of a vast ranch outside Aspen that sold in 2006 for $47 million — turns out it was retail billionaire Les Wexner — in the late 1990s Mottola sold a three-unit combination duplex in the celebrated Century building on New York City’s Central Park West to mind numbingly rich Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos, who has since added a fourth unit to the expensively amalgamated apartment.
About 15 years ago, Mottola sold a Balinese-style spread on Miami Beach’s super-swank Star Island for $14.5 million to Sean Combs, who still owns the tropical waterfront spread. And sometime around the turn of the century, he reportedly paid David Geffen $11.3 million for a mansion-sized unit in a townhouse apartment building on a plum block of the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was overhauled at great expense to incorporate extravagances such as a perfume refrigerator before it was sold in 2003 for $13.8 million.
Mottola was represented by Robin Kencel and Brian Milton of Compass.
The buyer was represented by Stephen Archino of Sotheby’s International Realty.
