British video game tycoon buys $46M Bel-Air mansion

The buyer who placed a $45.8 million auction bid for a 21,000-square-foot mansion in Bel-Air last spring has been revealed.

Jeremy “Jez” San, a video-game tycoon from the United Kingdom, topped the bidders’ list for the hilltop mansion at 777 Sarbonne Road, Dirt.com reported.

777 Sarbonne Road, Los Angeles (Compass)

San and his wife, Natasha, bought the newly built seven-bedroom, 11-bathroom estate known as Palazzo di Vista, which helped send its developer spiraling into bankruptcy.

The 1.2-acre spread was developed by Dr. Alex Khadavi, a London-born celebrity dermatologist who originally listed it for $87 million, with an auction reserve set at $50 million.

The property closed on June 1, having sold to San for $41.2 million less than its asking price.

For its physician developer, who’d called the auction result “horrible, horrible, horrible,” it wasn’t supposed to end that way.

Khadavi paid $16 million for the hilltop property with a Spanish-style mansion in 2013. He then received an unsolicited $24 million offer from a developer who planned to bulldoze the home and replace it with a bigger one.

777 Sarbonne Road, Los Angeles (Compass)

The botox doctor turned down the offer – and decided to do the renovation himself. While he initially planned a “light” $10 million overhaul, he eventually scrapped all but one wall to build a far larger, contemporary mansion, according to Dirt.

Seven years and $30 million later, his dream home was complete. But he’d blown his budget on the over-the-top property, and filed for bankruptcy protection early this year.

Despite its still-lofty sale price, it’s unclear if he’ll get anything from the $45.8 million deal, as Khadavi still owes tens of millions to creditors, including the bulk of a $27 million construction loan from Axos Bank, a unit of Axos Financial.

In the meantime, San and his wife have explored every highlight of their two-story hilltop house, with floor-to-ceiling glass and sweeping views from Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean.

Its many gizmos include a “retractable hydraulic DJ table,” a glass-walled elevator, a master suite with a private deck made from Calacatta gold marble, a multi-sensory art gallery for non-fungible tokens, tequila bars, a champagne tasting room, marble vanities, a nine-car “auto museum,” Feng Shui koi pond and an infinity pool.

A $250,000, 1,400-pound custom Terzani chandelier hangs from the ceiling over $7 million worth of marble.

San, a pioneering tech entrepreneur and video game programmer, became a self-made millionaire from the 1980s Atari hit game Superglider and the British video game developer Argonaut Software. Later ventures included building and running one of the world’s first online poker casinos.

He now runs FunFair, a crypto firm that provides Ethereum blockchain-powered answers to problems in the online gaming industry.

— Dana Bartholomew

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