When I die and go to Heaven, this is the mansion I want. Everything about this house speaks to me because of two of its most important attributes: It’s huge, and it’s PRIVATE! The architect who built this house clearly understood the privacy needs of a public figure like Sugar Ray Leonard. When you’ve got his kind of money, you want to feel safe. But nobody wants to feel like they’re living in an armed camp. So the home has to be huge to preserve the feeling of freedom and openness while keeping its residents cloistered in privacy. No looky-loos are getting into this place. You need a drone to see what’s going on inside the gates…just one of the many perks of being a Palisades resident.

With the home being situated in the mountains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it would be easy to think that this house was in Portofino, not Los Angeles. The architect has basically created a little slice of Italy for the owners, right down to the selection of the building site. The architect manages to makes two acres feel like 200 with creative landscaping. Sitting in the middle of it, it would be easy to think that there’s nobody around for miles, even though they’re surrounded by next door neighbors. The earthy color palette used on the house, the grounds and the roofing subtly binds the house to the natural environment around it. Where most houses of that size would stand out from the landscape, this house actually feels like part of the landscape, making it feel like it belongs there. 

I absolutely love their antique Italian tastes. You have to be really careful with Italianate architecture because there’s a tendency to go way, Way, WAY over the top with all the sculpture and what not. But Mrs. Sugar Ray did it the right way…she rusticated and went Tuscan with it. Tuscan design is rough and organic with lots of wood and natural stone that has that hand-hewn look. This house is full of hand-hewn antique fireplaces, columns, and hand-picked pieces of finery imported from Italy. It’s “provincial”, but in a nice way. Everything looks natural, like it was worked on by a person, not cut in a factory. It’s “country” without looking crappy. It’s shabby-chic. The Leonards have hints and touches of that gaudy Italian style throughout the house, like the big planters and ornate columns. But the architect softened it with lots of rustic touches here and there that make a big, drafty house feel like a comfy, country cottage. It avoids that gaudy, ornate feeling you get with a lot of Italian architecture. Don’t get me wrong. That’s cool if gaudy your thing, but its not mine. This is why I prefer Spanish hacienda-style architecture to Italianate. They’re both Mediterranean styles, but Spaniards understand that sometimes less is definitely more. 

But where Spanish design can feel kind of dark and heavy, this house shows the real genius behind Mediterranean architecture in its use of natural light. Everywhere you go, the house is flooded with air and light. When I first moved to Spain, I was a little concerned that there was no central air conditioning because it was seriously hot there. But it only took a week for me to discover that because of the way homes were designed, they stayed really cool. You didn’t even need a fan. Everything is painted in white or light colors because white reflects the light, so the heat bounces off instead of being absorbed. And all those lovely arches keep a fresh breeze moving through the house, day and night. I became a fresh air fanatic living there because the house was never too hot or too cold. The design of the house actually WAS the air conditioning. And that’s the beauty of this house. So much of it invites the owner to throw open the doors and let the fresh air in, creating a nice flow between the indoors and the awesome entertainment spaces outside. You could have 100 people there for a party and you wouldn’t feel crowded because of that seamless unity between the indoor and outdoor entertainment spaces. Their parties must be off the hook!

The stucco, tile and woodworking of Mediterranean architecture in general has a hand-crafted feeling I dearly love precisely because it’s natural and feels like it was built by a person, not a machine. I can see why she imported so many antique pieces from Italy. There’d be no way to get anything like that here in America without someone wanting 3D print it for you. It might look the same, but Mrs. Sugar Ray understood that it’s not just about appearance. It has to feel right when you touch it. There’s nothing like the real thing. So she wisely went to Italy, bought it, and dragged it home with her. And the extra effort shows in every little detail of this house. Each piece adds a warmth to the place that will still be a part of that house long after they move. No matter how you change the furniture, those thoughtful little touches are what makes the house feel like a home.

That’s because she feels the same way I do about big houses: The house should look and feel like you actually live in it. She doesn’t like museum houses either…the kind where you feel like you can’t touch anything because if it breaks, you owe the owner $12,000 dollars. I think the reason these great houses feel like museums is because their owners tend to have a lot of houses, like the late senator John McCain, who owned 12 houses. When you have that many houses, none of them is really a home. They’re personal hotels you stay in whenever you happen to be in town. Home is where you raise your kids, wash your dogs, and invite the neighbors over for birthday cake. That’s how this house was designed. This is a house for people who really love to be at home. It’s a mansion, but it’s a mansion for people who cook their own meals, do their own shopping, and they love to entertain. She may keep a staff of people to clean it and maintain the grounds, but she’s a homemaker in the most flattering sense of the word. And she’s made her beautiful home into the party spot where everyone congregates whenever there’s a reason to cut a turkey or pop open a bottle of champagne.