'Scarface' mansion on market for cool R374m
[caption id="attachment_34388" align="alignright" width="405"] AMERICAN DREAM: El Fureidis in Montecito the setting for 'Scarface', is on the market for $35-million[/caption]
WHEN the world is yours, where do you live? This is the question facing Tony Montana (Al Pacino) in the film Scarface. After troubled beginnings, he has grown into a life of gangsterism. Money is flowing in, his enemies are subdued.
He chooses a gorgeous fortress-style villa in Miami. Here he marries his girlfriend Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), surrounded by his family, friends and henchmen. The setting could hardly be more perfect.
And now that setting – swimming pools, palm trees and all – is for sale. El Fureidis (Spanish for "Tropical Paradise"), a palatial residence set in 4ha, is every bit the home it appears in the movie. Yet it has one crucial difference: while Scarface is set in Coral Gables, Florida, where expats from Cuba and Puerto Rico run the underworld, the real-life El Fureidis is in Montecito, part of Santa Barbara near Los Angeles.
"It is one of the more expensive areas in southern California," the agent responsible for the sale Emily Kellenberger explains. The guide price for El Fureidis is a cartel-busting $35-million (R374-million).
Most homes would be happy with a connection to a film as renowned as Scarface. But at El Fureidis, it is only one chapter in a long and fascinating history.
"It was filmed in 1982/1983, so I'd say the Scarface connection is the property's most recent claim to fame," Kellenberger says. "We have had quite a bit of interest off the back of that connection. But there is more to the estate than just as a movie set."
Built in 1906, El Fureidis is a "founding estate" of Montecito. At the turn of the century most of this part of California was still relatively undeveloped, with plenty of land still to be snapped up by enterprising developers. James Waldron Gillespie, who built the property, had ventured west from New York City and wanted to build his dream home.
To get a feel for the kind of architecture he wanted, he toured Europe to seek inspiration. He was friends with the celebrated architect Bertram Goodhue, and over the course of a year they travelled all the way to India. This included 805km on horseback, from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Persia.
Better known as a designer of Spanish-revival public buildings, such as the California Tower in Balboa, San Diego, and the Los Angeles Public Library, Goodhue only designed three private residences.
"It's a collector's item," Kellenberger says. "He mostly designed museums and churches, and there is something of that monumental quality to the estate."
Set behind private walls, the house is approached via a colonnaded driveway. Spanning more than 929m², it has four large bedrooms and nine bathrooms. There is also abundant entertaining space, as you would expect from somewhere that doubled as a kingpin's hideout.
"The estate is private enough that you could live here as a couple or a small family quite comfortably," Kellenberger adds. "The roof terrace is amazing, and so are the pools."
We don't have to take her word for it. Before it was even a glimmer in Brian de Palma's eye, El Fureidis hosted grand parties. At one stage the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann was resident there, and received guests, including Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein.
Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill are said to have held their wedding reception there, too. It is even rumoured that John F Kennedy and Jackie Onassis spent a portion of their honeymoon between these calm walls: the ultimate accolade for an aristocratic American home. What is for sure is that in the past 108 years, the estate has seen festivities to match those depicted on screen.
Goodhue was great friends with the artist Lee Lawrie, best known for the statue of Atlas outside the Rockefeller Centre in New York. At El Fureidis, he created no fewer than nine basso-relievos that depicted scenes from Arthurian legend. They are not the only artistic flourishes. You enter the dining room via grand bronze doors. If you look up, you will see a ceiling finished in gold leaf, with a mural depicting Alexander the Great's conquest of Persepolis.
A conversation room, staggered with seating derived from the Roman senate arranged around a shallow pool, has a similarly opulent ceiling. This was inspired by the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome.
Yet this is no antique wreck. The home has recently undergone a multimillion-dollar renovation by its Russian owner.
For Kellenberger, however, the highlight of the sprawling estate is not the buildings, but the 4ha of gardens, mixed between wilder Mediterranean planting and more formal, Persian-style gardens.
"The setting is really magical," she says. "There are views of ocean, islands and mountains from the terraces. Gillespie, the original owner, was a keen botanist and kept a rare collection of trees, including palms, sequoias and redwoods."
Apparently Walt Disney, on a visit in 1957, was so taken by the palms that he took some of them back to Disney World to decorate his Jungle Ride.
At the end of the film, we see Montana's enemies scaling El Fureidis's walls, before the kingpin succumbs. His is a corrupted version of the American dream. But at this marvellously eccentric home, you can see why he was so tempted. © The Telegraph
