Over in a particularly prime pocket of Los Angeles, on a hallowed parcel once home to legendary Hollywood actress Claudette Colbert, a newly built spec mansion has just popped up on the market. The asking price is a hefty $45 million, or a about $37 million more than the Holmby Hills spread last sold to a development group for almost four years ago, back in March 2019.
Completed this year, the grand house rests on property that has a celebrity pedigree dating back to the 1930s. That’s when Colbert commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd Wright to build her a striking Colonial-style mansion on a 4-acre hilltop estate surrounded by picturesque gardens, where the It Happened One Night star lived until the ’60s with her husband Dr. Joel Pressman, head of UCLA’s Neck & Hand Surgery Department.
A vintage souvenir postcard published circa-1941 from the “Homes of Movie Stars in California” series shows a view of Claudette Colbert’s Holmby Hills mansion.
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Later owned by retired Northrop Grunman chairman and CEO Kent Kresa, and subsequently occupied by businessman Juan Villalonga, the house sold in 2014 for $7.3 million to a real estate developer who razed Colbert’s home and subdivided the surrounding land into smaller lots. An original piece of the property was next snapped up in 2019 for around $7.6 million by Kohen Development Group, who went on to design and construct a sleek architectural-style home boasting six bedrooms and 12 baths filtered across a little more than 17,600 square feet of three-level living space.
Tucked away behind a gated driveway and high hedges, on nearly three-quarters of an acre near the prestigious Harvard-Westlake Middle School campus, the contemporary showpiece is centered around a mature olive tree that’s encased by glass walls and sits amid a water feature on the…