The billionaire widow of the Apple founder Steve Jobs has bought the most expensive home in San Francisco, splashing out about $70 million on a mansion with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Laurene Powell Jobs bought the home in Pacific Heights, one of the California city’s most desirable neighbourhoods, in an off-market deal, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The previous owners were Sloan Lindemann Barnett, a billionaire’s daughter, and Roger Barnett, who runs a health supplement manufacturer.
The couple bought the home for $33 million in 2011 and are said to have originally put a $100 million price tag on it before selling to Powell Jobs.
Dating back to 1916, the house is next door to a property owned by the software billionaire Larry Ellison. Sir Jonathan Ive, the British-American designer responsible for some of Apple’s most famous products, also has a home on the block.
Because the sale was an off-market deal there are no new pictures from inside the house. However, the property was featured in Architectural Digest in 2020 when it was described as “with good reason, as the most beautiful house in America”.
The journal reported that the Barnetts did extensive work to the property, which measured around 17,000 sq ft when they bought it.
In 2020 the house was described as a Spanish Renaissance Revival palacio “wrapped around a two-story courtyard crowned with a vast glass roof”. It has views of the San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz Island as well as the famous bridge linking the city to Marin County.
The magazine feature brought the house some unwelcome headlines, however. The Washington Post reported that the article included altered images from inside the property that removed potentially stolen Cambodian relics.
Powell Jobs, 60, married Steve Jobs, the tech entrepreneur, in 1991. They met after he gave a lecture at Stanford’s business school, where she was a student. The couple had three children. Jobs died in 2011 aged 56, after being given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
San Francisco has some of the most expensive house prices in the nation. The city’s previous record house sale was set in 2021 with another home in Pacific Heights that went for $43.5 million, according to the Journal.
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Last month Powell Jobs paid $94 million for an oceanfront property in Malibu, next to a property she already owned. That sum is still some way short of setting records in California, however. The state’s most expensive house was sold in June, when the founder of sunglasses brand Oakley offloaded his Malibu mansion for $210 million.
