Gucci Heiress’s California Desert Home Hits the Rental Market for $28,000 a Month
The granddaughter of Guccio Gucci has owned the Palm Desert home for more than 30 years.
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A Southern California desert compound built by a Gucci heiress is now available to rent for $28,000 a month.
Located in Palm Desert, about 25 miles south of Palm Springs, the home was bought and renovated in the 1990s by Patricia Gucci, the only daughter of Aldo Gucci and granddaughter of Guccio Gucci, who founded the luxury Italian fashion house, according to The Wall Street Journal . It has been on and off both the sales and rental markets since 2012, once asking as much as $9 million, the listing history shows.
On a map the 4-acre property’s location appears totally remote, but it’s just 11 minutes from the main strip in Palm Desert, which has grocery stores, restaurants, art galleries and high-end shopping. Driving up to the property, though, it “feels like you’re going through Mars,” said listing agent Michelle Schwartz of the Agency.
“It’s a total retreat,” she said. “You have peace, remoteness, security, safety, but it’s a lot closer [to town] than people give it credit for.”
Schwartz and her colleague Adrienne Herkes brought the property to the rental market at the end of February. Schwartz couldn’t comment on the seller’s identity.
Located within a gated community in the Santa Rosa Mountains, the compound comprises a main house and two guest houses, which in total offer 10 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and about 10,800 square feet of living space. Each guest house has its own kitchen.
Its style takes inspiration from a variety of cultures, with details including Moroccan-style wall niches, plaster walls, and a Greek-inspired built-in bed in the primary bedroom.
The seller “is a world traveler, and she’s collected energy and vibes from all different parts of the world and put them together into this property that she’s been part-time living in for all these years,” Schwartz said.
Both the compound’s tennis court and pool overlook views of the Coachella Valley, as the property sits high up on Bighorn Mountain.
“It’s almost like you’re on top of the world,” Schwartz said. “And oftentimes, you can see bighorn animals. It’s a very natural setting.”
Schwartz added that because of the property’s high altitude, it remains about 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the base of the mountain, making it more bearable, even in the summer.
The property, which can be rented for short terms, hits the market in anticipation of the area’s slew of spring festivals, including Coachella and Stagecoach. Schwartz also thinks the property would be “perfect” for someone seeking inspiration, or even an artist in need of a backdrop for a photo shoot.
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“It’s somewhere you can think. You don’t hear anything—there’s no cars, there’s no noise,” Schwartz said. “You’re close enough to everything [in town], so you can have the nuances of everyday life and modern living, but you’re completely removed once you’re here, and you can breathe.”
Patricia Gucci, who founded the luxury travel bag brand Aviteur, couldn’t be reached for comment.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
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A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
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