Work from home life getting a little dull? Try a corner office with a bird’s eye view.
A new San Francisco listing with an asking price of $22 million comes with a top-floor home office that is the highest residential point in the entire city, according to listing firm Sotheby’s International Realty.
Stacey Caen and Joseph Lucier of Sotheby’s International Realty are the agents representing the property.
The 7,440-square-foot “elegant bohemian”-style home is situated near the summit of Mount Sutro, one of San Francisco’s tallest hills, at about 900 feet. In addition to the corner desk and built-in bookshelves, the top-floor office boasts views that span from downtown to the Pacific Ocean and include the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.
“It’s like you can just see for forever,” Caen said.
The mystique of San Francisco’s weather also adds to the property’s air of grandeur.
“Ever changing weather patterns provide the unique drama of discovery, as if watching painterly application to an inspired masterpiece,” the listing notes.
The top floor office space isn’t the only work from home option, though — a studio space at the base of the house was also designed with remote work in mind. The listing notes this area has “open space for multiple workstations, file storage, bedroom and full bath, [and] refrigerator.”
Furthermore, when one needs a break from the grind while working in the ground floor studio, one need only step outside through four retractable glass panels to a landscaped garden terrace that includes over 100 species of plants.
And, when a complete decompression from work altogether is needed, the home’s “entertaining level” is at the ready. The floor includes a 300-bottle temperature-controlled wine room, wet bar with double refrigerator, TV entertainment wall with 7.1 surround sound system, a spa room and access to a view deck with a gas fireplace and jacuzzi.
The six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home was built between 2012 to 2018 by the seller, Tom Buttgenbach, who is chief executive of solar energy company 8minute. For Buttgenbach, giving the home office a desirable place in the house was paramount.
“Often times, an office ends up being tucked away in a back room that wasn’t good enough to be a bedroom or looks onto the garage or something,” Buttgenbach told The Wall Street Journal. “But for me, it was the most important room of the house.”
If the home sells at its current list price of $22 million, it will be one of the most expensive sales ever made in the Clarendon Heights neighborhood, although not entirely unprecedented. According to Caen and Lucier, the area is seeing a somewhat unusual phenomenon of a market being driven by the designs of a living architect — namely, John Maniscalco, who designed this home.
“One thing that is interesting from the top end of the market, is the architect has had two recent sales last year, [and now] this home has come on the market, and all three of those were ground-up construction, which is unusual for San Francisco,” Lucier said. “So these homes are almost creating a market of their own right now. They’re $14 million, $22 million, this [home] is $22 million. There’s another home he did a renovation on, now for $25 million. So, we’re seeing a unique moment in the market where a living contemporary architect is driving a market with his designs.”
Lucier and Caen noted that a wave of new money wealth seems to be establishing itself in the area with home purchases, with a few major business executives migrating there in recent years. Kevin Systrom, one of the founders of Instagram, for instance, owns a home one block away. However, the median sale price in Clarendon Heights is a bit less eye-popping at $1.6 million, according to Redfin.
“I think the price is being driven by architectural pedigree, design and obviously, location,” Lucier said.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that the square footage of the home at 150 Glenbrook was 5,271 square feet, which is the size of the lot on which the property stands. The square footage of the home’s interior is 7,440 square feet.
