World's most expensive house on sale for €350 million

PanARMENIAN.Net - The owner of Villa Les Cèdres, a 187-year-old, 18,000-square-foot, 14-bedroom mansion set on 35 acres in France, hopes that its property will pass from old money to new. With a list price of €350 million ($410 million), the owner, the Italian distiller Davide Campari-Milano SpA, is betting that the house’s combination of history, luxury, and a prime location along the coast of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat will be enough to make it the most expensive residential sale in history, Bloomberg says.

Les Cèdres was built in 1830 and bought in 1850 by the mayor of Villefranche-sur-Mer, when it operated as an olive tree farm. (There are olive trees more than 300 years old on the grounds.) The mayor’s descendants sold the property to the Belgian King Leopold II in 1904, who, made stupendously rich by his exploitation of mineral resources and rubber trees in the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), expanded the gardens that still surround the home.

In 1924, 15 years after Leopold’s death, Villa Les Cèdres was acquired by the Marnier-Lapostolle family, industrialists best known for producing Grand Marnier liqueur, a blend of cognac and triple sec. For 80 years the family cultivated the exotic plants that fill the manicured grounds. According to chief gardener and conservationist Marc Teissier, it was in the orchards near the home that the family harvested bigarades, the bitter oranges used to flavor Grand Marnier.

Les Cèdres remained in the Marnier-Lapostolle family until 2016, when Campari acquired Société des Produits Marnier Lapostolle (SPML), Grand Marnier’s parent company. Confronted with a piece of property that could be worth 20 percent of its gross 2016 sales, Campari almost immediately put the mansion on the market through the real estate agent Savills.

The €350 million listing is likely aspirational: the number comes primarily from the amount of land and the size of the home relative to its location. Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is, by real estate agents’ accounts, at least, the most sought-after of the Caps, including Cap d’Antibes and Cap-d’Ail. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen owns a neighboring villa, as does composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The sale is being handled by a steering committee of five family members from Marnier and Di Fede, who acts as a Campari representative but has no sway on the decision to sell the property to any one buyer.