Renovation alone was $35 million for this classically beautiful Bay Area estate
This is a house that cost $35 million to restore and update.
No, we didn't miss a decimal point: thirty-five million dollars. Eight million of that went to the gardens alone.
Billionaire Robert Friedland -- whose company, Ivanhoe, mines platinum, gold, copper and other precious metals -- bought the Marin County mansion with his wife in 1995 for $5.5 million. Known as Locksley Hall, it sits on Belvedere Island in the San Francisco Bay.
They listed it 10 years ago for $65 million. And here's a heartbreaker: Three years later, it looked like it had sold for the full asking price ... until months later the sale fell through during the housing crash. The would-be buyer decided to wait out the market.
Since then, the property has come on and off the market quietly at various prices, most recently in 2009 for about $70 million, according to our friends at Curbed San Francisco.
It's back on again, we've learned from Curbed, this time at $49 million, or about a third less than its apparent high.
The mansion, built more than 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, has what the New York Times called "all but 360-degree views of the area's scenic splendor." The Times reported that the Friedlands spent a decade and $35 million on the restoration, including more than $8 million just on landscaping.
The Friedlands' patio, for example, was made using "stone taken from Chinese villages along the Yangtze River before they were submerged by the Three Gorges Dam."
Click here or on a photo for a slideshow of the historic Locksley Hall in Marin County.
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