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California mansion featured in “Scarface” hits market for $40M
Located in Montecito, exterior was used for assassins' raid on Tony Montana
Say hello to my little mansion!
The mansion featured in the movie “Scarface” where Al Pacino’s title charter snorted mountains of cocaine before being killed by assassins is hitting the market for $39.995 million, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.
Known as “El Fureidis,” or “Little Paradise,” the outside of the Mediterranean-style mansion on about 10 acres in Montecito was featured in the 1983 film — but the inside, where Pacino’s character, Tony Montana, famously overindulged on drugs before taking on an army of intruders intent on killing him with a grenade launcher attached to an AR15 assault rifle, was shot elsewhere.
The four-bedroom mansion, inspired by Roman and Middle Eastern designs, was drawn up in the early 1900s by Bertram Goodhue for James Waldron Gillespie, a wealthy New Yorker, according to the report. It features a Byzantine-style “conversation room” that has a fountain beneath a high-domed ceiling with bench seating around it.
A large dining room’s barrelled ceiling has a 24-karat gold-leafed painting depicting Alexander the Great conquering Persepolis, according to the newspaper. There are also two guest cottages on the property with three more bedrooms.
The home was last sold in 2015 for $12.26 million to Houston-based businessman Pradeep Yohanne Gupta, the CEO of the private investment bank IQ Holdings, after the house was offered for $35 million.
Gupta told the Journal the inside of El Fureidis looks nothing like the carpeted décor of Montana’s house in the film, and that, despite the violence that takes place in the film, it is a pretty peaceful place where sparrows and woodpeckers are the loudest things you’ll hear.
The Montecito market has been headed upward since even before the pandemic, which has sent pricing skyward, the lead listing agent Dina Landi told the newspaper. A recent buyer in the area includes former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who bought a home there for $30.8 million in 2020, according to the report.
[Wall Street Journal] — Vince DiMiceli