Sea Cliff property where Sharon Stone once lived now SF’s priciest listing

An 8,500-square-foot Italianate Victorian that was once home to Sharon Stone in San Francisco’s tony Sea Cliff neighborhood is now the city’s most expensive single-family listing.

The property at 1 25th Avenue, which came to market this week with an asking price of $39 million, has had only four owners since it was built in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake by close friends of the Hearst family. At the time, there was no Sea Cliff neighborhood or even a Golden Gate Bridge, and the home sat alone on the cliffside overlooking what is now Baker Beach.

Phoebe Hearst Brown, who was named after the Hearst family matriarch, lived in the home her entire life and told the Examiner in a 1987 interview that she had grown up “in an Italianate-Victorian house that stood alone on a cliff when there was nothing else there but sand dunes and lupine and rabbits.”

Brown still lived in the home when she died in 1990, and about a year later the estate sold the home for the first time, getting $2.4 million, according to public records. Stone purchased the property, one of the few with direct beach access, in 1998 with her then-husband Phil Bronstein, who was then the executive editor for the San Francisco Examiner. The couple divorced in 2008, but by then they had already sold the Sea Cliff home to Faranak Aliabadi for $13 million.

Aliabadi, a dentist, purchased the home for $13 million in 2005 with her then-husband Dariush Meykadeh. She is selling now because their daughter is going to college and she wants to travel more, she told the Wall Street Journal.

Aliabadi had been planning to renovate the kitchen and add a lap pool to the rear of the property, according to listing notes from agent Neal Ward, but the rest of the cliffside home has been seismically retrofitted and the home’s eight full and three half baths have all been updated. Ward will also be listing 9 25th Avenue a few doors down for $32 million, according to his website. That property does have a pool and has been owned by the same family since the 1980s. He handled the $24-million 2020 sale of 190 Sea Cliff, the highest price achieved in the neighborhood thus far.

That home had an infinity pool, indoor movie theater and basketball court, and a more modern look overall than 1 25th Avenue, which still has original features such as gold foil details, parquet floors and intricate fireplace mantels. As it has for more than a century, the home also has the unobstructed views over the Pacific Ocean and Marin headlands for which the neighborhood is known.