Friday, 26 April 2013
LOCATION: Dallas, TX
PRICE: $10,950,000
SIZE: 11,807 square feet, five bedrooms, seven full and three half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Some of y'all may not have heard but it's been a couple of months now since Texas-based tech-sector scion H. Ross Perot, Jr. put his suburban mansion-sized downtown Dallas (TX) penthouse on the open market with an asking price of $10,950,000.
Natch, Your Mama's real estate gossip gal pal down in Dallas—that would be the quirkily bespectacled sassy-pants real estate chronicler Candy Evans—already discussed the matter but for all you seven children who don't read Miz Evans's always entertaining online endeavor, Candy's Dirt, we're gonna piggy-back on her report on our way to Los Angeles where multiple sources snitched to Your Mama that Mister Perot, Jr. and his wife Sarah recently dropped a wad on an historic house with a high profile provenance. More on that addition to their real estate portfolio in a moment but first...
Mister Perot, Jr., for those of you were weren't present or engaged with presidential politics in the 1990s, is the only son of hard charging and outspoken Texas-based multi-billionaire H. Ross Perot. After he earned a vast fortune in the mundane but necessary world of data processing the elder Mister Perot boldly declared his candidacy for president of the United States of America. And not just once, youngsters, but twice, first in 1992 as an independent and then again in 1996 under his self-founded—and still in existence if tattered—Reform Party.
After he sold his first data processing concern to General Motors for a whole lotta money, entrepreneurial Poppa Perot founded Perot Systems, an information technology operation that grew to become a Fortune 100 corporate juggernaut that was sold in 2009 to Texas-based computer giant Dell for $3.9 billion. The Perot family's take was estimated to somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars and Forbes recently estimated that Perot Senior's net worth balloons to about $3.5 billion.
It can't be easy to grow up in the shadow of a billionaire force of nature the H. Ross Perot, Sr., but Mister Perot, Jr. seems to have made his own way just fine. He served eight years in the Air Force, was one of the first two people to circumnavigate the globe in a helicopter and he earned his own very substantial fortune as a real estate developer of mixed-use developments and vast housing tracts, many of them in and around Dallas and many of them punished with hyperbolic and/or corny names like Harmony and Liberty. Forbes recently estimated Junior Perot's net worth at around $1.4 billion.
As anyone in Dallas can tell you, Mister Perot, Jr. had a significant hand in the development of the not entirely successful Victory Park, a massive, three billion dollar freeway-embraced mixed-use development in downtown Dallas with a variety of office and retail spaces, dining establishments, residential blocks and vast parking lots. At the heart of the 75-acre development is the American Airlines Center arena, home to the professional basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks. The Mavs—as Your Mama understands the locals call 'em—are currently (majority) owned by swashbuckling billionaire Mark Cuban who bought the bulk of the basketball franchise in 2000 for $285 million from—you got it, folks—H. Ross Perot, Junior.*
Victory Park is also where Mister and Missus Perot's penthouse pied-a-terre sprawls across the entire 30th floor of the W Dallas Victory Hotel & Residences. Mister and Missus Perot, who reportedly also keep a substantial single family residence not so far away, acquired the penthouse in 2004.** It appears the building was not completed until sometime in 2006 but we're not really sure and it's not really important to the story. The Junior Perots, globally-engaged art collectors and philanthropists with sophisticated (and expensive) taste, engaged the hard to come by services of accomplished and frequently published Dallas-based lady-designer/decorator Emily Summers who transformed the nearly 12,000 square foot space into an suave, modern residence with 19 rooms and only the finest of finishes and furniture.
The results were published in the March, 2008 issue of Architectural Digest. The photos show Miz Summers's no-doubt ludicrously costly efforts successfully showcases the couple's stellar collection of contemporary art, reflects a cool sophistication commensurate with their net worth and social status and provides a posh perch from which to entertain in an urbane setting high above the truck driving hoi polloi. To her credit Miz Summers managed to imbue the humongous penthouse with a number of spatial moments of relaxed intimacy that surely lend to family gatherings and solitary moments of contemplation. It's really good, people. It may not be your thing, decoratively or geographically speaking, but it's pretty dang flawless, no?
According to current listing details and various other digitized resources, the Perot penthouse encompasses 11,807 square feet and contains five bedrooms and seven full and three half bathrooms.
A central corridor effectively organizes the private and public spaces that include a tremendous living room and a neighboring 25-foot long formal dining room furnished with a simply smashing set of 14 (or more) Robsjohn-Gibbings Klismos chairs that altogether probably cost the Perots more than Your Mama paid for our BMW. Seriously.***
The baronial but contemporary formal living and dining spaces are balanced by spacious informal living areas that include a family room, game room and adjoining his and her studies decadently lined with African teak paneling and custom mill work. The penthouse boasts (at least) three (presumably gas) fireplaces, secured parking in the underground garage for four cars, and several terraces that ring the penthouse and provide unfettered and up-close skyline views of the surrounding skyline and the nasty clover leaf tangle of freeways that frenetically girdle Victory Park on at least two sides.
The finish work is not for the financially feint of heart with limestone floors in the foyer, Venetian plaster walls, whisper soft silk carpeting in the bedrooms, leather tile floors in the twin studies, Balthaup fittings in the sleek eat-in kitchen and regal, ceiling height doorways outfitted with custom-made metal frames and pixilated glass panels that become less opaque at the top. Brava! Miz Summers.
Anyhoo, listing information elaborates that the penthouse is equipped with a small fitness room and the master bedroom features at least one decked out walk-in closet/dressing room plus two bathrooms, hers lavishly suited up with a boomerang-shape make-up vanity, a glassed-in steam shower and a small sofa where Missus Perot Jr. can take a break after a long, hard soak in the super-sized tub.
Home owners dues for the penthouse come to just over $99,000 per year ($8,259.00 per month, as per listing details). A quick (and entirely unscientific) tussle with the well-worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's about twice as much money as the average American earns in an entire year, give or take a few thousand.
We don't know the full scope of Mister and Missus Perot, Jr.'s personal property portfolio but according to Second Shelters—also operated by the inestimable and industrious Candy Evans—Junior Perot owns a large-looking ski chalet in Vail, CO nestled into a treed hillside next door to one owned by none other than Poppa Perot. We recall reading they owned a residence somewhere in Great Britain but we don't recall where we read it now. According to the just-mentioned Candy Evans, the other Dallas residence besides the up for sale penthouse that Mister and Missus Perot, Jr. own that was mentioned in the March 2008 A.D. article, is a nearly 10,000 square foot manse in the affluent Highland Park community near the Dallas Country Club. We also know, as mentioned earlier, the Junior Perots recently dropped $18 million on a magnificent mansion in Los Angeles. Stay tuned for that...
*As a side note: Mister Perot, Jr. retained a minority 5% ownership of the Mavs that has become be a real thorn in Mister Cuban's side. Anyhoo...
**As noted in Architectural Digest (March 2008).
***We tease. We have no idea how much Mister and Missus Perot, Jr. paid for the Robsjohn-Gibbings Klismos chairs but way back in 2000 Christie's sold a set of eight not very similar looking Fruitwood Klismos chairs by Robsjohn-Gibbings (for Saridis) for $28,000. Imagine the cost today for 14 or 16 versions of something similar. It's enough to make a person vomit with financial anxiety. Anyhoo.
listing photos: Allie Beth Allman & Associates
