“Most unusual”: Maurice Kanbar’s SF compound trades for $17.5M

The eight-story Pacific Heights apartment tower that inventor and Skyy Vodka founder Maurice Kanbar had used as his personal compound since the 1990s has sold for $17.5 million, according to public records. And the new owner plans to create “a commune of good friends” in the vacant building.

Kanbar died at the property in 2022, according to a New York Times obituary. His nephew Jeff Kanbar co-listed the 12-unit, 33,000-square-foot building at 2100 Jackson Street with Dan McGue, both of Coldwell Banker, with no asking price last fall. They declined to comment.

Developer Oz Erickson and a group of friends purchased the century-old Beaux Arts property on June 28 after a months-long, “very, very, very complicated” transaction as a personal investment to live in, not to develop, said the Emerald Fund chairman.

He estimates the building needs about two years of seismic, systems and cosmetic upgrades and he has just started getting bids on the work.

“It’s a gorgeous building but it needs a lot of tender, loving care,” he said. “So that is what we’re going to do.”

Erickson lives nearby in a single-family home but said that at 75, he is ready to make the transition to a stair-free lifestyle. He plans to take the top full-floor unit in the elevatored building and has several friends going in on the deal with him who will each get their own full-floor, four-bedroom, 4.5-bath flat as well. 

The ownership will be divided up like a tenancy in common and they plan to find other people they know who may also be ready to shed their big single-family homes and move onto a lower maintenance accommodation to take the other units. 

“We have three good friends who are already involved and there are several more that would do it,” Erickson said. “Sort of like a commune of good friends living together.” 

He said the property — which also has two attached parking spots and 10 more in a detached garage, plus a garden with mature fruit trees — attracted a lot of interest and had multiple offers. It was difficult to know where to set his group’s offer price, he said, given that it’s such a unique property. 

“This is not like buying a standard apartment building, that’s for sure,” he said. “It will be an adventure.”

Kanbar bought the property for $4.3 million in 1996, according to property records, and lived in the eight-story building alone after removing the existing tenants using the Ellis Act a few years later. Erickson said Kanbar lived on the eighth floor, entertained in the seventh floor unit and ninth floor pentroom, took another floor as an office, and had the other suites set aside for visiting family and friends. 

“It’s the most unusual thing I’ve ever heard,” Erickson said of the arrangement. “It was effectively like a 33,000-square-foot house.” 

Erickson said he met Kanbar a few times as both were supporters of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, which now performs at the Kanbar Performing Arts Center. Kanbar also has a hall named in his honor at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, as well as a cardiac center at California Pacific Medical Center. 

The Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce is at Philadelphia University, plus the Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union is named after him. New York University has the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. 

Among Kanbar’s many innovations, he is credited with creating the first multiplex in New York City in the early 1970s, and was a producer for “Hoodwinked,” the 2005 updated animated version of the Red Riding Hood story, and its sequel.

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He is best known as the creator of the supposedly hangover-free Skyy Spirits in the early 1990s, which he has said he named while looking at the San Francisco sky, and designed Skyy’s distinctive blue vodka bottles as well. He sold a 50 percent stake in the brand to the Campari Group for $207.5 million in 2001. 

He was also a real estate mogul who invested $100 million in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma properties in the early 2000s, and the inventor of more than 50 patented products, including a de-fuzzing fabric comb he came up with during a trip to a dude ranch in the 1960s that was his first winning idea, according to the Times obit. 

“Some friends of mine knew Maurice well, and he was evidently a very complicated man, and very, very successful,” Erickson said.