Paul Allen’s estate in Atherton, California, listed last week for $41.5 million.
Open Homes Photography
The estate of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen in Atherton, California, came on the market with a $41.5 million price tag last week, a year after his death. The sprawling mansion, more than ten times the size of the average American house, is set on two acres in a small town in Silicon Valley full of tech-titan billionaires.
Neighbors include Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet, and Meg Whitman, the former HP CEO who now is CEO of video startup Quibi. The median home value in Atherton is $6 million, according to Zillow. That’s more than four times the median value in San Francisco.
Allen’s 21,000-square-foot mansion, listed with Courtney Charney of Parc Agency, has seven bedrooms and 13 bathrooms. Allen bought the newly built home in 2013 for $27 million. For pictures of the interior, click here.
The design is open and airy with white walls and blonde wood. In fact, a lot of blonde wood: the floors, the kitchen cabinets, the family room’s built-in bookcases and other accents all use the same light-colored wood. The kitchen, with two marble-topped islands, opens to a sitting area as well as a breakfast nook with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the yard.
While the home’s overall theme is casual, there’s a formal dining room with a fireplace for important business dinners or holidays with stuffy relatives.
There’s also a movie theater, a gym, a home office and an outdoor dining area with a wood-fired pizza oven. The landscaping is a mix of manicured lawns, flower beds, wooded areas – and there’s even a meadow. The grounds also hold a pool and two outdoor fireplaces. There are two separate garages with five bays, according to the view from Google Earth, as well as driveway parking for two dozen cars.
Allen was a boyhood friend of Bill Gates who convinced him to drop out of Harvard University to start Microsoft in 1975. Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with cancer that later went into remission. When the company went public in 1986, he became a billionaire.
Allen’s net worth was about $20 billion when he died of cancer on October 15, 2018. He owned the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and a stake in the Seattle Sounders soccer team. He also invested in aerospace, filmmaking and real estate.
Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate redeveloped the South Lake Union neighborhood north of downtown Seattle and sold an 11-building office complex to Amazon for $1.16 billion in 2012.
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