When Casa Encantada, a storied 60-room estate in Bel-Air, hit the market in June 2023, its $250 million asking price made it the most expensive house for sale in the United States. Though it appeared to be gunning to set a record for the most expensive house ever sold in the United States—a title the home already held twice, once in 1980 and again in 2000—a dramatic price drop in November 2023, down to $195 million, seemingly took it out of the running. Now, the home has received another major discount. According to Robb Report, the home is now listed for $165 million, $30 million cheaper than its most recent asking price and $85 million less than its original.
“These kinds of estates come up only once every few decades, and once they’re gone they’re gone,” Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency, who shares the listing with Drew Fenton of Carolwood Estates and Josh Flagg of Compass, previously told the Wall Street Journal. Even so, the current real estate market has made it harder to find a buyer, hence the ever-decreasing price. “If this was 2017, the house would be sold by now, but given the state of the market, there aren’t buyers lining up around the block for any house over $100 million. With that said, there are people out there that can afford a house like this and it just takes that one person,” Flagg recently told Robb.
Spanning 40,000 square feet, the home was built in the middle of the Depression for Hilda Boldt Weber, the wealthy widow of a glass manufacturer from Ohio. Boldt Weber bought the land for $100,000—an impressive sum today but a truly astounding amount in 1934, amid the greatest economic crisis of the modern industrialized world. She’d felt ostracized by her late husband’s peers, who reportedly looked down on her for coming from humble beginnings, and opted to build a grand estate to solidify herself in California society.