Villa Les Cèdres
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France. Unbranded. Offered at a billion euros and sold for a fifth of it.
Asked about €1 billion in 2016. Sold in 2019 for a reported USD 200 million — USD 221 million per the Financial Times. A fall of roughly eighty per cent from the asking price, and the largest ask-to-sale gap this register holds. Atlantis The Royal's penthouse gave up 9.4 per cent; The Lana's registry sales came in 37 per cent under the average ask. This is a different order of number, and it is the plainest evidence available that an asking price on a trophy estate is not a valuation.
The buyer is the first party in this register to appear on two developments. Rinat Akhmetov holds Flat A at One Hyde Park, bought in 2011, and Villa Les Cèdres since 2019 — one name on a London flat and a Cap Ferrat estate, both entered here on the four-part test rather than on prominence.
The house was built in 1830 for the Pollonnais family, bought in 1904 by Leopold II of the Belgians, who installed Blanche Delacroix there; she sold it to Alexandre Marnier-Lapostolle of Grand Marnier, whose family and then Gruppo Campari held it. Ten to fourteen bedrooms, a fifty-metre pool, a chapel and stables, and a botanical garden the French state has declared a national heritage site — described as the largest in private hands anywhere, with twenty-five heated greenhouses.
Who it is not for
Not for anyone: nothing here is offered, and the register holds it because the transactions are public. Not for a reader treating the 2016 headline as a value — the market answered it four years later at a fifth.
Sources
- Financial Times via blog.capvillas.com, 7 February 2024 — acquired 2019 at USD 221m by Rinat Akhmetov
- blog.capvillas.com, 8 January 2024 — sold by Gruppo Campari for a reported USD 200m
- magrey.com — SCM Holdings describes it as a long-term investment; notes the buyer's One Hyde Park apartment; sold well below the reported ask
- Fortune, 24 August 2016 — offered at about USD 1.1bn by Campari, 35-acre garden, ten bedrooms, thirty stables
- michaelzingraf.com — later estimate about €350m
- No instrument is public; every figure here is as reported
Verification
- Official source
- Checked
- Inventory
- From official source
- Sources disagree
- asking price €350m / €1bn / USD 1.1bn; sale USD 200m vs 221m; built 1830 vs 1870; garden 14, 15 and 35 acres; bedrooms 10 vs 14
- Property confirmation
- Pending
- Last verified
- —
Booking
Private Residences records addresses; it does not broker them. Enquiries are passed to the party named in the record, and nothing on this site is an offer.
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