Most people spend their 20s living with roommates. A few cobble together enough to buy a starter home. Petra Ecclestone isn't like most people. In 2011, at 22, this London-born Formula 1 racing heiress bought one of the largest houses in the United States -- Spelling Manor in Los Angeles -- for $85 million, more than almost anyone had ever paid for a house in California then.
She spent the next decade learning how to live in it, with a staff of more than 30 people, including housekeepers, landscapers, security personnel and drivers.
Now, she and her fiance, Sam Palmer, are at work on a venture inspired by their experience in Spelling Manor (they sold the house in 2019 for $120 million). They are going to help other rich people buy, sell, staff and decorate their houses.
It will be one-stop service for a very niche clientele: ultrawealthy homebuyers.
The couple would cater to the growing number of global rich people who have flocked to Los Angeles in recent years for the weather, the lifestyle and, presumably, the proximity to other global rich people -- much as they did.
A 56,500-SQUARE-FOOT REDO
Ecclestone, now 32, is willowy and blond and has the not-easily-impressed nature of a woman of great privilege. A mother of four young children, she's soft-spoken and a bit guarded but can be disarmingly blunt and funny. Sitting outside on a warm afternoon as two staff members quietly served coffee and fresh fruit, her eldest daughter curled up in her lap, she explained that she bought the Manor in 2011 sight unseen.
But it wasn't entirely her idea -- it was her former husband's. "He was a bit of an egotistical maniac," she said, by way of explanation.
Before moving into Spelling Manor, she hired designer Gavin Brodin to oversee a top-to-bottom renovation. Originally built in the 1980s for TV producer Aaron Spelling, the house had 27 bathrooms, a gift-wrapping room (which Ecclestone turned into an office for her assistant), a barbershop (which she kept as it was) and a 7,500-square-foot primary suite (which is the size of a more standard mansion).
Brodin described Ecclestone as delightfully decisive. Once the plans were set, "there were zero changes," he said. A team of 500 workers was brought on to complete the project in 12 weeks instead of a typical timetable of nine months or more.
When she moved into the Manor, Ecclestone was married to James Stunt; their divorce was finalized in 2018. It would be several years before she met Palmer, who is 38 and also English.
After Palmer moved to Los Angeles to live with Ecclestone and her three children, he became deeply interested in how the Manor was run. (The couple had a fourth child together in 2020.)
Palmer said people were overcharging Ecclestone left and right. It's almost as if they would pull up to a 57,000-square-foot house and think that money was no object. Figuring out the complicated math of staffing the house and making sure it ran smoothly became his "life's work."
PAST THE BILLIONAIRE BACHELOR PAD
The very top end of the real estate market in Los Angeles has had something of a building boom in the past few years, with developers in Bel-Air, Brentwood and Beverly Hills tearing down older houses to construct almost comically lavish mansions, some with Imax home movie theaters and private nightclubs, often for unknown buyers.
Palmer said that most of the newly built, nine-figure houses the couple see in Los Angeles these days are basically high-end bachelor pads.
"There's black marble everywhere," he said. "I think, 'Do I want a house with a helicopter pad I can't use?'" (He was referring to Billionaire, a speculatively built Bel-Air house by handbag designer and developer Bruce Makowsky that came with a restored, deactivated helicopter on the roof that was listed for $250 million in 2017; it sold in 2019 for $94 million.)
"We go look at houses, and I think there's so much people have missed," Ecclestone said. Palmer said, "It's our passion."
Ecclestone and Palmer have themselves downsized because really, there was no other direction to go.
The couple paid $22.7 million for an 18,000-square-foot modern farmhouse across the street from LeBron James and closer to Ecclestone's eldest daughter's school at the time.
A relative skeleton crew of around a dozen people manages and runs the house from staff quarters that were converted from a 10-car garage. The area includes several glass-walled offices, a break room and a professional-grade laundry operation that can also handle dry cleaning.
Though the couple said they finally feel settled in their new home, Ecclestone said their new venture will help scratch her house-hunting itch. "I'm constantly bored," she said. "I like change."