Peter Thiel completed the enchanted house $130 million sale of Casa Encantada through a limited liability company, paying $130 million at a foreclosure auction in Pomona in July. The deal puts a 40,000-square-foot Bel-Air estate back at the center of Los Angeles luxury real estate, but at a price far below what Gary Winnick’s family had sought earlier this year.
The buyer was Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder. For readers tracking trophy-property pricing, the purchase is notable because it landed as one of the priciest home sales ever in Los Angeles and arrived after the home had already been marked down from a far higher ask.
Bel-Air’s $130 Million Price Tag
$130 million was enough to take control of Casa Encantada in Pomona in July, even though the property had been relisted at $170 million in April. That gap tells the story of a sale driven by foreclosure mechanics rather than a standard open-market negotiation, with the winning bid setting the value at a level the seller had not been able to secure months earlier.
40,000 square feet and 8.4 acres made the estate unusually large even by Bel-Air standards. The house sits overlooking the Bel-Air Country Club, and its scale helps explain why the transaction landed among the priciest home sales ever in Los Angeles.
Gary Winnick’s Higher Asks
$225 million was the price Gary Winnick wanted in 2019, and he pushed that figure to $250 million in 2023 before he died that year. Those numbers are the backdrop to the eventual $130 million sale, which came in at almost half of the later asking price and even further below the earlier target.
$170 million was the family’s April relisting price, and the property went to auction three months later. For anyone watching the upper end of the market, the sequence shows how quickly pricing power can fade when a property moves from aspirational listing to forced sale.
Casa Encantada’s Long Run
1938 was the year James Dolena built Casa Encantada, and the estate later passed to Conrad Hilton in 1950, to David Murdock in 1980 for $12.4 million, and to Winnick in 2000 for $94 million. The 1980 sale set a national price record at the time, while the 2000 deal claimed a second price record, giving the house a long history of headline-grabbing transfers.
Roughly 250 workers per day took part in the renovation handled by Peter Marino, who tracked down the home’s original furniture and sculpted moldings using historically accurate techniques. That level of work is part of why Casa Encantada carried such a premium reputation even before the auction, and why a buyer paying $130 million still got a property with a deep record of reinvention.
The unresolved issue now is the exact ownership structure behind the purchase, since the buyer was a limited liability company rather than Thiel personally. For the market, the key fact is already fixed: a mansion once marketed for $250 million changed hands for $130 million, and Los Angeles has another benchmark to compare against the next trophy-sale test.
