If your birthday plans include an 800-person private party, with most of the guests arriving at the destination in their private cars and, more importantly, if you have $165 million burning a hole in your bank account, The Manor is back on the market.
The Manor is one of the most controversial, largest, expensive and famous private properties in the Los Angeles County – and the entire United States. It is the former home of Aaron Spelling, still the world’s most prolific TV producer of all times as attested by Guinness, so it’s also known under the name Candyland, or the Spelling Mansion.
It could be yours now if, as noted above, you happen to have some $165 million laying around. To start with.
Candyland was built to entertain, so one of its highlights – and one of the reasons we’re talking about it – is its custom motor court that can easily accommodate 100 cars, for when you have guests over. In fact, it has two separate motor courts and two equally-custom driveways, all laid by hand with granite tiles and marking a spectacular entrance into just as spectacular a property.
But Candyland being a private residence means that there’s separate car storage on the property as well. So, whoever is the next (filthy rich) owner gets four two-car garages with climate control, and 16 carports. It’s not enough space to house a car collection, but it’s a good place to start for the dailies. Seeing how the mansion offers 56,500 square feet (5,249 square meters) of living space divided across 123 rooms, 27 bathrooms and 14 bedrooms, and plenty of open space, one could easily find something else to convert for this purpose.
Photo: Sally Foster Jones Group
And that’s just the proverbial icing on the cake.
To anyone watching TV shows through the ‘80s and the ‘90s will hardly need any introduction about Aaron Spelling. For younger readers, let’s just note that he was the brainchild behind every hit TV series in those decades, from Dynasty and Charlie’s Angels, to Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, so, when he passed away in 2006, he left behind an estate estimated at well over $600 million – including the gigantic Manor his wife Candy Spelling had built over a span of eight years.
In 1983, he bought the former 1932 Bing Crosby estate and razed it, so he and Candy could build their dream home. As Candy would later say, they wanted a home that would include “everything” and that probably explains best how one of the most extravagant and controversial buildings of modern times came to be. Well, that and money. The Spellings were only able to move into the place in 1991, after spending close to $23 million on it, and they held on to it until 2011, when Formula One heiress Petra Ecclestone bought it – cash in hand! – for $85 million.
Ecclestone spent another $20 million to overhaul Candyland over a period of 12 weeks. Most of the European antiques Candy had scoured Europe for eight full years were removed, as were the floral tapestry and baroque furniture, and were replaced with monochrome pieces. Before and after photos are available in the gallery above. Ecclestone did not live here for long, though, selling the place “sight unseen” for $119.7 million in 2019 to an undisclosed Arabian buyer.
Photo: Hilton & Hyland
Exact details or extensive photos of Candyland were never made public, because this was, despite its outrageousness, a private residence. Even the latest listing, which is asking for $165 million because the market has ballooned, is strikingly ungenerous in its description.
But this is, without a doubt, one of the most opulent displays of wealth under the guise of a family home: you get beauty saloons (Ecclestone knocked down Candy’s three gift-wrapping rooms and her doll room for it), wardrobes that look like medium-sized clothes boutiques, two-lane bowling alley, lounges, private cinema, wine cellar, formal and informal dining rooms, professional-grade kitchen (where you can easily cook dinner for a party ranging from four to 800 guests), a game room, gym, tanning rooms, and pretty much anything else you could ever want, so as to never set foot outside of the property for the rest of your life.
This family home is bigger than a football field and bigger than the White House, so it’s not like you’d be cramped for space, either. It also comes with orchards and water features, tennis court, and plenty of greenery all around.
An entire book could be written about Candyland and it would still barely scratch the surface of the outrageousness of it all. So here’s Candy, planner and architect of The Manor, doing her best to explain it, in the documentary she put together as she was getting ready to move out ahead of the 2011 sale.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
Would you like AUTOEVOLUTION to send you notifications?
Google News