Frank Sinatra's vacation retreat is for sale

[Tiki Tom]

Seven fireplaces! That is quite a cabin.
Asking price: $3.9 million.
I'm sure those walls witnessed some amazing parties. Fly me to the moon!
What I always liked about the Rat Pack was that it seemed like they actually liked each other and it was not just a slick marketing gimmick. (Liked each other, with some exceptions, as when Peter Lawford got kicked out.)

http://abc7.com/realestate/frank-sinatras-california-rat-pack-home-for-sale/1587355/

 

[MisterCairo]

Ring a ding ding...

 

[Fading Fast]

Genuine enjoyment in a performer - when they truly enjoy what they are doing or are truly friendly with their co-stars - comes through to the audience in a wonderful way.

Either those guys were the greatest actors in the world (and, honestly, none of them were) or they were just having a great time up on stage and it is that pure joy that makes the audience enjoy it more even if the material wasn't always top notch.

 

[Talbot]

Thanks for sharing

I don't know why, but not a decor style I expected.

 

[MikeKardec]

Sinatra had three or more houses in the Palm Springs area, roughly one a decade from the late 1940s on. The first one probably looks more like what you'd expect, they used to rent it out and there are a lot of pics around the web. The change of address was likely because of divorce settlements. I'm no Sinatra expert but Grandad was a developer in the area in the 1940s so I have a sense of the changing styles.

In the pictures in the link you can see some of the stuff he took with him from the early days. Early Cochella Valley homes tended to be fairly "Spanish South West." Our place, which included a date and grapefruit grove that paid some of the bills, lasted until the late 1960s. It was stuffed in behind the La Quinta Hotel and was a compound with a couple of small houses with tile roofs and adobe-like walls (they might have even been adobe) it was decorated in a Spanish/Indian style like you'd see in Santa Fe. If you look closely at the Sinatra pics in the link, you can see Indian rugs that reflect that era as well as stuff from the other houses he had in between. Palm Springs area architecture went from the look Grandad's place in the pre war era, to angular modernism in the post war era and then as the sense of style decayed (and costs went up) and the 1960s brought less and less interesting designs. Eventually, most of the desert houses were just houses. If I remember correctly, this place was sort of a "mountain cabin motif" because it was built on a hill. Of course the valuable homes in PS tend to be from that great late 1940s to late 1950s era when modernism was fit so beautifully into the desert landscape. Those are the classics!

 

[sheeplady]

$3.9 million seems like sort of... a deal. Not for your everyday person (obviously) but to own the retreat of Sinatra... which is a nice house to begin with... 5 bedrooms and a guest house? I would think this would be worth quite a bit more.

 

[Fading Fast]

$3.9 million seems like sort of... a deal. Not for your everyday person (obviously) but to own the retreat of Sinatra... which is a nice house to begin with... 5 bedrooms and a guest house? I would think this would be worth quite a bit more.

I wonder if his day of adding value is fading*? That's a sincere thought not a snarky comment. I'm 52 and was an outlier as a Sinatra fan when I was a kid and young adult. And while he's had a few revivals, he'll never mean to a generation what he did to my parents' one. And my parents' generation are (I'll just say it) dead or selling their houses, not buying them.

Is owing a "Sinatra" home as meaningful to today's buyers as owing a "Al Jolson" or "Marlene Dietrich" one would have been to my friends when they were young adults (I was always a fan of FL era stuff, but 9 out of 10 of my friends had no idea who Jolson or Dietrich was)?

Antique cars experience a "generational" arc of interest as adults with buying power tend to favor those cars that were popular but out of reach when they were kids.

* I know there are avid collectors of his memorabilia, and that still has value, but a home owned by him is different and, IMHO, might experience the same generational lost of interest as cars do as time goes by.

 

[MikeKardec]

I know there are avid collectors of his memorabilia, and that still has value, but a home owned by him is different and, IMHO, might experience the same generational lost of interest as cars do as time goes by.

I think you are right. You also have to take into consideration that real estate is just different. It's not portable and you can't buy a $3 mil plus on a whim, unless you are one of a very the few people on earth who have that much money, and they tend to be the people who ARE the "Frank Sinatras" of the world, not the people who buy their memorabilia. There are three Sinatra houses in the desert and the others are more symbolic, in their architecture, of the era in which he is known for. It's also the California low desert, not the place where one can live and work easily ... that limits things.

You often see a modern movie star buying the house built by someone from the silent era, or something of the sort, but there is more of a nostalgia in the Hollywood community for the old days whereas the the music biz seems to have moved on. Nashville might be the exception but the real estate is not as expensive. Those Hollywood houses are also still good houses in convenient neighborhoods ... living in So Cal I get the impression that, like Sinatra, Palm Springs has seen it's "day" come and go. The fashionable appeal of all those desert towns, Vegas and Phoenix included, has changed; it seems we no longer fear the cold as we once did.

Local get-a-ways from LA were all the rage when traveling elsewhere was expensive and slow. As airfare has become cheaper and easier to manage, and as nations have relaxed foreign ownership regulations, what was once a movie star's house in Palm Springs has become a home in the Caribbean or Hawaii or Australia or Fiji. It's also true that the celebrities of that day just didn't make the kind of money they do now, we have vastly lower taxes, larger markets and better deal making ... though music might be the exception in that the entire industry has been devalued and there's no current music fad, so it's no longer easy to make the big bucks.

 

[G.W. Masters]

$3.9 million seems like sort of... a deal. Not for your everyday person (obviously) but to own the retreat of Sinatra... which is a nice house to begin with... 5 bedrooms and a guest house? I would think this would be worth quite a bit more.

that's what I thought. $3.9M seems like the price one would pay for that if it were just a regular property as opposed to something owned and loved by someone such as Frank Sinatra. Wow.

 

[sheeplady]

I guess I thought Palm Dessert homes were worth more... I just did a search and a 5 bedroom runs about $1 to $11.9 million; with lots in the $3-5 mil range. I would've assumed, however, that the Sinatra home might have a better location and large bedrooms and such. Plus, even if one is not a "Sinatra fan" I would imagine it has far more style than some of the homes I just did a search on... even if rich lots of those would be guts (shudder).