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In August 2026, a residential property in Hillsborough, California, sold for $70 million, establishing a new sales record for the town and becoming the highest-priced home transaction in Northern California so far. The property, known as Villa de Verano, had entered the market in late 2025 at $88 million, briefly withdrawn, and relisted at the same price before a reduction to $78.8 million in May 2026.
Assembling a Hilltop Kingdom
Villa de Verano—Spanish for “Summer House”—occupies more than 12 acres of hillside terrain on the San Francisco Peninsula, land assembled from three formerly independent estates and redeveloped as a single, gated compound. Completed in 2013 after more than six years of construction involving over 110 subcontractors, including European craftsmen retained specifically for the project, the estate encompasses approximately 17,000 square feet of total living space.
The main residence, designed by Andrew Skurman of Skurman Architects and furnished by Suzanne Tucker of Tucker & Marks Design, spans 12,404 square feet across three levels, with an additional 4,612-square-foot guest house. The accommodation includes six bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, and ten powder rooms.
The architectural program draws from two distinct traditions: the formal garden landscapes of Italy’s Lake Como and the Spanish Colonial Revival style associated with George Washington Smith, whose work shaped California’s early-20th-century luxury vernacular. The original owners, who commissioned the property as their primary residence, provided their architect with a 15-page brief of desired features and a separate six-page document of exclusions—a level of involvement that underscores the bespoke nature of the finished product.
Where Craft Meets Scale
The interiors reflect a commitment to custom craftsmanship. Many furnishings and artworks were commissioned specifically for the residence, creating a unified aesthetic across the main house’s public and private rooms. Notable spaces include a double-height living room with marble columns and hand-carved arched openings; a kitchen beneath a coffered wood ceiling with lattice detailing; a 2,100-gallon saltwater aquarium; a home theater with fabric-lined walls and a tented ceiling; a fitness center and spa; a glass-walled conservatory; and a game room with a professional wet bar and direct access to the swimming pool. The primary suite features a wraparound glass wall opening to a stone terrace with views of San Francisco Bay.
Gardens Worthy of a State Prize
The estate’s grounds, recognized with the California Landscape Contractors Association’s Grand Sweepstakes Award, are organized as a series of outdoor rooms and experiential zones. Features include a 150-seat amphitheater and event lawn; an Asian garden with a koi pond; a rose garden; a redwood grove with meandering paths; and a reflecting pond of considerable scale, flanked by Italian cypress and terminating in an open-air pavilion with fountains modeled after those at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
A two-story sports pavilion commands an elevated position above a sunken championship tennis court and accommodates additional courts for pickleball, volleyball, badminton, bocce ball, shuffleboard, and horseshoes, along with a putting green and an executive-length golf course. The pavilion includes dressing rooms and bathrooms, functioning as an independent recreational facility.
From Builders to Buyers
The sale was managed by Jennifer Gilson of Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty. The sellers, who built the estate and resided there for years, have since relocated to Palm Desert.
The buyer, whose identity has not been publicly disclosed, is reported to work in the artificial intelligence sector—a detail that situates the purchase within a broader pattern of AI-derived wealth entering the Bay Area’s upper-tier housing market. As inventory in San Francisco’s luxury segment tightens under demand from high-earning technology executives, buyers have increasingly turned to Peninsula communities including Hillsborough, Atherton, and Woodside, drawn by the combination of privacy, acreage, and proximity to both San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
A Town With a Long Memory
Hillsborough has long served as a refuge for individuals who have shaped California’s economic and cultural landscape. The town’s residential history includes figures such as William Randolph Hearst, Bing Crosby, and, more recently, Elon Musk. Villa de Verano now joins this lineage not merely as an occupant but as a new benchmark—a physical manifestation of where the market stands at a particular moment in the region’s economic evolution.
The Road Ahead
The $70 million sale arrives at a moment of significant wealth concentration in the artificial intelligence sector, with implications for real estate markets across the Bay Area. Whether this transaction represents an anomaly or the establishment of a new pricing tier for Peninsula estates remains to be seen. What is clear is that Villa de Verano has, for the moment, redefined the upper boundary of what the market will bear—and in doing so, has set a standard against which future offerings will inevitably be measured.
