For Daphna Ziman, L.A. real estate has become a lot like the film industry: starved of glamour and history.
Ziman, the president of Cinemoi North America — a television network rooted around film, fashion and lifestyle — is listing the former estate of Warner Bros. co-founder Harry Warner after years spent meticulously restoring the three-story Tudor-inspired residence. She bought the property in 1996.
She has tapped Coldwell Banker Realty’s Jade Mills and Joyce Rey, along with the Beverly Hills Estates’ Lea Porter, to list the home at 1006 North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills for $34.9 million.
“The entire beginning of the entertainment industry and all the incredible leaders of the entertainment industry have always fascinated me,” Ziman said in an interview with The Real Deal. “When I heard this was the original Harry Warner Estate it tickled me.”
Dilapidated grandeur
Built in 1923, the home has long played host to Hollywood bigwigs and visiting global dignitaries. The seven-bed, nine-bath main house is about 12,000 square feet with hardwood floors from France, hand-carved woodwork and a screening room. There’s also a detached guest house, regulation-size tennis court, koi pond and three gated entrances.
It was in shambles, Ziman described, when she bought it with her ex-husband, Arden Realty and Rexford Industrial co-founder Richard Ziman, for whom the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate is named.
Ziman spent the next six years after purchasing the property studying pictures and researching original architect Paul Williams and his vision for the property as she renovated the property. She estimated spending around $10 million on the project.
She came close to trading the property in 2022 when it went into contract, with $32.5 million the last asking price at that time.
In more recent years, she said she pumped another several million dollars into a second renovation that took about a year and a half. That work was aimed at giving it a lift without “sacrificing the historical value and beauty” of the estate.
To expedite the project, she had anywhere from 40 to 60 workers on site each day.
She brought in experts from overseas to limewash the house by hand, brick by brick. The slate tiles and exterior wood were also given a vintage treatment.
“The house was beautiful before, but I had to rethink with the eyes of modern culture,” Ziman said.
The listing agents called out Ziman’s dedication to the restoration.
Mills pointed to the significant investment poured into the home, while Rey pointed to the home’s attributes, including more than an acre of flat land.
The two say the home enters the market as they see buyer sentiment lift.
“I find people being very positive and I feel that the consumer confidence is up,” Rey said. “People have gotten used to these interest rates and they realize they’re probably here to stay and we’re going to be living with, more or less, a 6 percent interest rate.”
Lens into Hollywood
For Ziman, she’s hopeful there’s a buyer that will appreciate the work that went into preserving the estate’s history.
She sees parallels in that multi-year restoration with the $13.5 billion bid she and other investors made for Paramount earlier this year. The group, which calls itself Project Rise Partners, is made up of entertainment, real estate, media, finance, tech and hospitality executives.
Paramount said last month its merger with Skydance Media is on track and set to close in the first half of next year after announcing the deal over the summer. The Federal Communications Commission has since extended the deadline for public comment on the merger from Nov. 1 to January, amid other challenges to the deal.
Meanwhile, Project Rise Partners is reportedly in talks with additional investors in an aim to put forth another offer.
“The reason I’m doing that [Paramount offer] is I want to elevate the studio again and instead of the shoot-them-up, sensationalized movies, I want to bring glamour back in movies. I want to bring back high fashion,” Ziman explained relative to her involvement.
It’s the same logic she applied to the Warner property in showing how a historical mansion can be preserved instead of torn down in favor of the increasing number of contemporary designs she has seen pop up throughout the Los Angeles market.
Developers, she said, are partially to blame for the shift in neighborhoods.
“They substituted history and elegance with a different kind of magnet,” Ziman said. “They called it contemporary, but it is an illusion. You have all these square rooms and lots of glass.”
With all that time and money invested into the property’s restoration, Ziman said it’s now a slice of her own history.
“This house represents an incredible moment of my life, and my two daughters are now married and me living just in the main house, it’s kind of indulgent,” she said. “My heart is aching to leave it, but I know that I should because I need to create a new life for myself.”