Mystery buyer drops $16M on Houston mansion

A palatial Houston mansion sold for $16 million less than a month after being put on the market. The buyer and seller are both as anonymous as its previous owner was notorious.

The 21,500-square-foot home is on a one-acre lot at the corner of River Oaks Boulevard and Avalon Place. The River Oaks neighborhood was established in the 1920s and became an exclusive haven for the wealthy during Houston’s postwar boom years. It continues to be one of the most expensive in the city.

2115 River Oaks Boulevard, Houston (Craig Vance)

River Oaks is no stranger to palatial homes, scandals and the highly eccentric habits of the wealthy. Even by those standards, the mansion is prominent and locally famous. That’s due in part to its physical presence—for decades, River Oaks residents referred to it simply as “the big white house on the corner.” But its previous ownership by a grandson of one of Houston’s most prominent oil-rich families forms the bulk of its legend.

Baron Enrico di Portanova and his wife, Baroness Alessandra di Portanova (Facebook via Villa Arabesque)

Baron Enrico di Portanova, aka Baron Ricky, was a Houston socialite whose title appears to have been self-awarded but whose relation to the wealthy Cullen family patriarch who built the house in 1968 was genuine. He and his second wife, born Sandy Hovas but remade as Baroness Alessandra, put it on the map with decades of hosting celebrities, politicians and other newsmaking notables to their large and innumerable parties.

Baron Ricky also “hauled in 75 tons of steel and glass to enclose and air-condition” the backyard, as a 1980 Texas Monthly article put it, because the couple “liked good weather.” The addition “looked like a savings and loan lobby combined with a health spa,” according to the article. “Immense chandeliers hung over a forty-by-forty-foot swimming pool sunk into a floor of travertine marble.” The enclosure and chandeliers, now called “the magnificent indoor pool area,” remain.

Baron Ricky’s life also involved multiple lawsuits to claim his inheritance and gain conservatorships over family members; private-jet lunch trips to Nuevo Laredo; a bigger, more extravagant mansion in Acapulco where he and Allessandra entertained the likes of Nancy and Henry Kissinger and a home invasion that left his horse groomer dead.

Interior views (Craig Vance)

The gated Houston property and mansion, which underwent a $7 million renovation in 2004, features the marble floors, multiple fireplaces and porte-cochere expected for a residence of its size, vintage and location. The broker on the recent sale was Nancy Almodovar, who topped the Houston Business Journal’s lists of residential real estate professionals by transactions in 2020 and 2021 and by sales volume in 2021. Almodovar’s Nan realty company is partnered with Christie’s.

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