Battery club founders sell SF home with British pub for $29M

Battery social club and social networking co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch have sold their Gold Coast home — complete with a British pub in the basement — for just over what they paid for it in 2008.

The price came to $29.15 million.

The couple first listed the Pacific Heights 12,000-square-foot property in the fall of 2019 for $39 million, after buying it for $29 million in 2008, according to public records. That’s the same year they sold their British social media company Bebo to AOL for $850 million. They bought Bebo back for $1 million in 2013 and sold it to Twitch for $25 million in 2019.

The home at 2799 Broadway, which the Birches completely remodeled with famed interior designer Ken Fulk, later dropped to $35 million and was most recently asking $32 million. 

Though the property on aptly named “Billionaire’s Row” sold for less than the Birches may have wanted, it is still the second-biggest deal in San Francisco so far this year, after the record-breaking $71 million sale of a home half a block away to Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. 

The buyer is Stone Real Estate Holdings LLC, according to public records, which was represented by law firm Sideman and Bancroft as well as CPA firm Baker Tilly, according to state filings. The paperwork also shows that the deal was a long time coming, with the LLC formed in early March and the close on Aug. 16. 

The buyer was represented by Dan Dodd at Inspire Real Estate, a Side partner, who did not reply to a request for comment. The buyer was represented by Deborah Svoboda, of Sotheby’s International Realty. 

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Svoboda also did not reply to a request for comment, but when TRD spoke to her back in 2022 she said the five-story mansion received two all-cash offers before the pandemic, but neither one ended up working out. The Birches wanted to downsize from their six-bedroom San Francisco home as two of their three children are out of the house, she said at the time, but will always maintain a home in the city since their business is here. 

Fulk designed not only the Birches home but also The Battery, their social club near the Embarcadero, which opened as an invite-only gathering, dining and bar space in 2013. A decade later, the couple launched The Battery Alliance, a global network of 40 private clubs around the world, as well as a software startup for the management of private member clubs.