The Wall Street Journal
Kipp Nelson’s home overlooking West Hollywood also features a racing simulator which allows users to compete against Lewis Hamilton.
Start your engines: A mansion built for a race car enthusiast is hitting the market in Los Angeles for $62 million.
Measuring about 16,000 square feet, the house belongs to former Goldman Sachs partner and extreme sports fan Kipp Nelson. The house has a showcase garage for 12 cars, a model racetrack dubbed the Kippway, and a Formula One racing simulator.
Mr. Nelson, 61, is a partner at Long Arc Capital, an investment firm based in New York and London. He is also a former partner at Goldman Sachs in London, and in the 1990s competed in Formula Three racing, an entry point for Formula One drivers.
He bought the property just above the Sunset Strip on the west side of L.A. in 2014 for roughly $12 million, records show. Mr. Nelson said he had spent years looking for the perfect site, then spent several more years on the design and construction of the six-bedroom home, which was completed in 2018.
Sitting on a promontory overlooking West Hollywood, the property has views of the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Designed by Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig, the house has interlocking boxes and planes resembling a Rubik’s cube, and an industrial flavor with folding metal shutters and a steel, concrete and glass facade. Mr. Nelson said he aimed to blend the industrial look with softer materials, such as wooden floors and ceilings.
The three-story house has many “gizmos,” said Branden Williams of Hilton & Hyland, who has the listing with his colleague and wife, Rayni Williams, and Nousha Hagenbuch of Sotheby’s International Realty. Pocket doors and window walls slide away to reconfigure rooms, making them smaller or larger depending on the occasion. Lights and heat lamps appear at the push of a button. A dining room table has wheels so that it can be pushed outside for outdoor events.
“The scale of everything feels fine when I’m just here by myself, but the house easily opens up and you could have a gathering of a couple hundred people,” Mr. Nelson said.
The property also has a rooftop terrace and a large gym that is accessed via a bridge from the master suite. The garage has unusual tiled lighting that Mr. Nelson said reminds visitors of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“It does feel like you’ve walked into a surreal, futuristic-type setting,” he said.
There are two separate pools, and an olive grove on the basement level. Mr. Nelson said during the coronavirus lockdown, he has used the 125 stairs leading from the olive grove to the rooftop terrace for workouts.
The Kippway is included in the price, said Mr. Williams, as is the Formula One simulator, which allows users to compete against the times of champions such as Lewis Hamilton.
“The problem with having a 10-year project is that your life has changed by the time you’ve finished it,” Mr. Nelson said.
While the L.A. market slowed dramatically amid the pandemic, Mr. Williams said the market is showing signs of life since California entered phase two of its reopening plan. “We’ve been doing a lot of showings,” he said.