One of the most expensive homes listed in San Francisco features panoramic views of the North Bay, a seven-vehicle “motor court” and an elevator accessible on each of the mansion’s four floors.

With a listing price of $25.8 million, the 118-year-old corner mansion at 2698 Pacific Ave., that sits a block away from the city’s Billionaires’ Row, has only been home to fewer than a half-dozen families since it was originally built in 1904. It first belonged to a wealthy oil magnate. Decades later, the property one block north of Alta Plaza Park came into the hands of the doctor who founded orthomolecular medicine.

The mansion’s extravagant visuals — from the second-floor “green room” that features gold ceiling accents and a chandelier to the third-floor bathroom with pearl ceramic sinks — make it an “Instagram dream,” Herman Chan, the owner’s agent, said. “Every room is a different backdrop.”

The portico entrance’s ornate overhead is encrusted with detailing.

Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle

No corner of the mansion is spared from lavishness — even the dog wash in its fourth-floor laundry room is coated with navy blue marble tiles.

Yet, the nearly 11,000-square-foot mansion has been on the market since December 2019, according to Zillow. The prolonged listing shows the complexities around how the pandemic has affected the sales of high-end, luxury homes.

Throughout the nation, sales of these lavish properties increased during the pandemic, with listings site Redfin showing a 60% increase in luxury home sales from 2020 to 2021. The jump in those sales is largely attributed to people wanting more space or privacy during a pandemic , but it also illustrated how the wealthy were still spending at a time of economic uncertainty for many Americans.

Yet, in San Francisco the sale of luxury homes (defined by listings of $4.5 million or more) increased by “only” 31% during that same time frame. Meanwhile, the median sale price for luxury homes in San Francisco decreased by 3.2%, the only city among the nation’s 49 most populous with a decline in that category. (New York City was excluded in the data.)

“There has been a little bit of a reticence” from buyers, Chan said. “A lot of that can be attributed to the pandemic. For the past year, I think people who are ultra, ultra high net worth are exploring other cities.”

The grand staircase is a soaring, stately feature suitable for making a grand entrance.

Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle

Through the market fluctuations, the mansion at 2698 Pacific Ave. remained unsold — though not for lack of attention.

A video tour of the mansion by a popular real estate YouTuber has more than 1 million views with thousands of comments from viewers who admired its “breathtaking” interior designs.

The owner’s agents regularly field booking requests. Influencers drawn to the mansion’s exorbitant backdrops want it to be the site of their next photo shoot. Couples looking to celebrate their nuptials in grand fashion want to walk down the mansion’s third-floor grand staircase. Startup companies hoping for a big fundraising haul want to court donors with its palatial excess.

Most requests are turned down politely, Chan said, though a movie production company of a “major Hollywood star” is tentatively scheduled to film a scene at the mansion this summer.

About a dozen members of that film’s production crew recently toured what was once called the “Mack Mansion” — named after Julius Mack, the oil magnate and financier whom the estate was initially built for by the famed father-son team Newsom & Newsom. The film crew became enamored with the home’s top-floor views of the bay, Chan said.

The view from the roof patio of the penthouse suite at 2698 Pacific Avenue is one of the selling points of the $25.8 million mansion.

Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle

Much of the mansion’s recent fanfare came after it hosted the prestigious Decorator Showcase in the spring of 2017. A team of 28 elite interior decorators descended on the mansion, each picking a room in the home to renovate. A second-floor bathroom now features all-black walls with turquoise tiling and a marble sink with gold faucets. The library room across from the mansion’s green room includes modern, orbital-like light fixtures with a wood-beam ceiling.

The interior designs, much of which remain in place, wooed the current owners, who no longer live in the home. They purchased the mansion for $16 million in fall 2017 after attending the Decorator Showcase earlier that year.

Now, they’re asking $25.8 million for the next owner, a price Chan said is in line with another luxury mansion on the market that hosted the 2019 showcase.

A bathroom in the penthouse features a panoply of designer touches.

Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle

The Mack Mansion and its elegant backdrops have drawn a following on social media over the years. The property, however, has been on the market since before San Francisco’s first shelter-in-place orders.

Though there’s no single answer as to why, Chan said the pandemic likely has played a prominent role.

But, Chan said, “there’s still an appetite for beautiful, beautiful properties, especially for legacy families in the Bay Area.”

Ricardo Cano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByRicardoCano

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In 1969 a young idealist, on her first trip to Hawaii, checked into the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, a sublime pink confection of a place in Waikiki Beach, on the island of Oahu. She threw open the balcony curtains, only to have spoiled the view of the surrounding mountains when she looked down onto the parking lot of the neighboring Sheraton Waikiki, then under construction. In April of the following year, the woman in question released “Big Yellow Taxi,” a protest song inspired by her stay at the legendary resort. A couple of the lyrics—“You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone” and “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”—became bywords of the ’60s counterculture.

If Joni Mitchell were to check in today, and her antennae were still finely tuned (according to local lore, the line “They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum/And charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em” refers to Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu), the vista might inspire an entire catalog of new music. Pilloried by its detractors for being as ersatz as an Elvis movie, Waikiki has more than lived up to its planners’ promise to become a Bain de Soleil–covered bastion of resort living. And the gentrification doesn’t stop there.

In a turn of events that in another era might have galvanized a generation of tambourine-wielding folklorists, the rest of this remote Pacific archipelago has become Eden for the one percent.

EBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who spent part of his childhood in Hawaii, is now back as a full-time Honolulu resident. Salesforce boss Marc Benioff holds court on the Big Island, along with Starbucks capo Howard Schultz. Oprah is over in Maui, as is Jeff Bezos. If they squint they can make out Peter Thiel’s lair in Makena, on the south shore. In December, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan bought an additional chunk of land on Kauai, bringing their total to more than 1,500 acres. And the film producer Allison Sarofim is in Kahala on Oahu, where her family owns the old Clare Boothe Luce estate.

“Going there has taught me the concept of pono, which means living in harmony with each other and the environment,” Sarofim says. “It’s a fundamental value that is deeply ingrained in Hawaiian culture, and it’s my hope that people see and understand that part of Hawaii, as opposed to simply a beautiful vacation destination.”

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg

Ian TuttleGetty Images

Promoted for 120 years as a tourist escape for its sun, surf, and great year-round weather, Hawaii is a victim of its own success; Sales of properties costing $10 million or more have increased sixfold in the last year.

“We always thought people wanted authentic experiences, and we encouraged them to come and live like a local,” says Chris Kam, president and COO of Omnitrak, a Honolulu-based research company. “Somewhere along the line that messaging got interpreted as ‘Move to Hawaii and become a local.’ ”

One of Omnitrak’s recent findings, Kam says, has been a trend during the pandemic of outsiders immersing themselves in a place they’re considering moving to, a fad well suited to the kaleidoscope of sights on offer here. This development has been encountered firsthand by Titus Kinimaka, a long-haired 64-year-old big wave surfer who is also an actor and the owner of the Hawaiian Surf School in Kauai, where the students include tech bros and corporate bigwigs.

“There are a lot of really interesting things going on below the surface, if you’re willing to make the effort,” he says. “I’m not surprised that a lot of these people who come decide to stay.”

The first gentrifiers of the islands were mostly robber barons, but today’s status-conscious transplants are more likely to come from Palo Alto or Wall Street. The Big Five (the sugarcane conglomerates that wielded considerable power in the early 20th century) may have gone the way of traditional instruments like the pahu, but a scan of the map and headlines reveals that serious money from the mainland is as prevalent as ever.

Though there are no formal programs or tax incentives to attract residents from out of state, the draw of Hawaii, beyond the Gilligan’s Island escapist fantasy, its isolation and the perception that it’s a safe place to visit and, by extension, remains to live. Then there is the allure of the not insignificant anonymity of a largely TMZ-free zone.

The charge of the billionaire brigade, at least as portrayed in the media, is being led by the notoriously press-shy Zuckerberg, who purchased several hundred acres on Kauai in 2014 for $53 million and shelled out $120 million on subsequent expansions. Last year he became the poster boy for “There goes the neighborhood!” anxieties when he infamously shared a video of himself, slathered in zinc cream, surfing on a hydrofoil—an image that is not likely to be featured on official tourism channels.

Larry Ellison and Bill Gates

Sean M HaffeyGetty Images

Before him, Oracle co-founder and megadeveloper Larry Ellison had, by 2012, bought most of the land on the island of Lanai for $300 million, and he has since spent some $500 million developing it, including the famed Sensei Lanai resort. And Bezos recently splurged on a secluded 4,500 square-foot $78 million megamansion with girlfriend Lauren Sánchez on La Perouse Bay, near the southern tip of Maui, about two miles from the Four Seasons Maui at Wailea, where the HBO series The White Lotus was filmed .

But it is the 35-mile Kona-Kohala coast, on the northwest part of Hawaii Island, as the Big Island is also called, that continues to attract the likes of Walmart heir S. Robson Walton, Emerson Collective billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, and Benioff, who wears Hawaiian shirts to work and named his dog Koa, or warrior.

They join Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, who bought the Four Seasons hotel and the surrounding Hualalai Resort in 2006, going on to build an oceanfront home valued around $75 million at Hualalai’s tony Kukio Golf and Beach Club. For his part, Bill Gates reportedly stays up the coast at the Hilton Waikoloa Village, even though, since 2007, he has co-owned the Four Seasons hotel management company with Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. (Last year Gates became the majority shareholder.) It is increasingly hard to see the forest for the megayachts.

There are waiting lists for private jets, and good luck getting into the right golf club without the right connections, although Bezos and Co. can always emulate Charles Schwab, the founder of the brokerage company, and billionaire investor George Roberts, who founded their own golf course on the Big Island in 2003. The club is said to be open to just 100 members, invitation only.

Not surprisingly, a lot of these tech arrivists are buying their way in with the help of organizations, such as the Hawaii Community Foundation, that connect donors with charities. Benioff recently made the news as a good neighbor by coordinating the donation of 1 million face masks to Hawaii County Civil Defense through the University of California San Francisco, where he funded the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine. In 2016 Zuckerberg incensed locals by building a six-foot-tall wall along the perimeter of his enormous estate, so he then poured more than $22 million into various nonprofit organizations on Kauai, including $4 million to save the Alakoko Fishpond. In January he gave $50 million to the University of Hawaii, its largest cash gift ever.

According to John De Fries, president and CEO of the Hawaiian Tourism Authority, it all sounds like a lot of movement, but the change has been more gradual than most people know. “Obviously, it’s highlighted right now by the top entrepreneurs and global game changers,” De Fries says, “but before those headliners came here, the wealthy kind of came here quietly.”

Doris Duke and James Cromwell

bedmanGetty Images

De Fries is referring to the decades-old migration of high society, led principally by transplants from San Francisco, which has been beating a path to Hawaii ever since Laurance Rockefeller, the son of John D. Rockefeller, built the landmark Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Kohala Coast in 1965. Rockefeller tapped his friend Lurline Matson Roth, who was possessed of not only immaculate taste but also a substantial shipping fortune, to design a template for the beau monde to luxuriate in style, like Luce and Doris Duke, whose estate, Shangri La, became part of the modern mythology of Hawaii. (Her feud with Barbara Hutton escalated there, when the Woolworth heiress decided to help out her friend by redecorating Duke’s Xanadu.)

“If you cut a tree, you can read the rings, and Hawaii has a lot of rings,” says designer Michael S. Smith, referring to the melange of architectural influences at play in the islands, everything from Balinese to Midcentury Modern and Mediterranean . “But the essence of Hawaii style really comes from the fabulous homes of these grandes dames.”

Luce commissioned the Russian-born Hawaii modernist master Vladimir Ossipoff to build her a post-retirement sanctuary that exalted the lush tropical splendor. Halenai’a, or House of the Dolphins, was finished in 1967, and 32 years later the beachfront manse was acquired by Allison Sarofim’s father Fayez. Today Sarofim too preaches the gospel of environmental conservation: “Like many, I go to Hawaii to recharge, and a crucial part of that experience for me is to connect with nature.”

The land remains Hawaii’s most precious inheritance, one that requires caretaking by everyone, visitors and locals alike, from generation to generation. De Fries, who was born in Waikiki, learned that early on from his grandmother. When asked to explain the concept of a glass half full versus half empty, her reply was that it is always 100 percent full—with the water we drink and the air with breathe. And all of it filled with light.

“She taught me that until you learn to value what’s intangible the same way you value what is tangible,” De Fries says, “you will just keep repeating the same lessons in life. Each is a life-giving force: Our ancestors referred to them as ha, that breath of life; wai, the water we drink; and i was in reference to the light or spirit in the glass. In this story is the essence of who we are as a place and as a people. And it speaks to our fullest potential, because we come from the land of life-giving water with lessons to learn and lessons to teach.”

This story appears in the April 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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