A $52M Compound Featured In “Basic Instinct” Aims To Break Price Records In Monterey Peninsula

It took 12 years of importing thousands of pounds of raw material to create Seven Coves of Spindrift, but as current owner Gary Vickers likes to say, “I’m a bit biased to the more natural use. If you do it right, people react to that.”

Vickers fell in love with the region after attending boarding school nearby and returned after a successful career in investment banking and software development serving the energy industry. Upon relocating to Carmel Highlands, he decided to tackle the major overhaul of what started out as a one-acre property with three buildings and became an assemblage of four adjoining one-acre lots with a total of five livable homes totaling 18,000 square feet of habitable living space, with 12 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms.

One of those lots was the site of a luxury home belonging to adventurer Steve Fossett who at one point held over a hundred world records and was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon. Another of the houses on the property was featured in the film Basic Instinct as the home of character Catherine Tramell played by Sharon Stone.

Asking $52.375 million, this would break local price records for the Monterey Peninsula by a significant margin. According to a rep for the listing, the highest price on record for the peninsula is a $31 million home in nearby Pebble Beach. That is also the neck of the woods where the next-highest priced listing is—an 8,800 square foot complex that had been asking $49.8 million but has been reduced to $34.9 million.

The commitment to authenticity shows up in everything from the Chesterfields custom-made from Italian mohair (pictured in the living room photo above) to the stone fireplaces that used “many, many 18-wheelers” full of stone from a quarry in Great Falls, Montana. The quarry is owned by the same architect who did the Rockefeller’s Ranch in Wyoming and had the right look for the rustic design intent of the buildings.

“It took a lot a of structural steel to get the look and feel. The lintels are 8-10,000 pounds. You can’t just hang that in the air. You make them look natural, you make them look dry stacked but there’s actually a lot of engineering that goes into that,” said Vickers.

One of the features Vickers didn’t change at all was the ceiling inside the library in Fossett’s former house. It is a homage to the planetary movements discovered by Johannes Kepler that seafarers would use to navigate across the oceans. “It’s got gold and silver leaf and is lit beautifully. It just glows when you go in there,” said Vickers. Fossett himself had a multi-million dollar rare book collection stored here, which Vickers says he aimed to do justice to with his own collection as best he could, including purchasing the eight-year round-the-world photo journey by esteemed photographer Sebastião Salgado.

The kitchen in the South Cottage has rough-hewn wood facades on the cabinetry and appliances.

The kitchen in the Lodge has a more contemporary feel, along with a climate-controlled wall for wine storage that can accommodate 1,500 bottles.

One of the buildings on the property is this “Writer’s Cottage” right on the coastline. They balanced the rustic feel with the need to capture the views by using roughhewn timber to support the structure.

Here you get a sense of how the buildings are all terraced into the craggy landscape to maximize both the views and the access to the waterfront.

Another look at how to get the views without having to rely on contemporary design trends of glass and steel.

The property is listed by Tim Allen of Coldwell Banker Global Luxury. Go here for the full listing.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.