zillow.com

Why go to a resort when you can just call one home?

Hello, friends. Before we get going, a quick programming note: this column you’re holding in your hands (or staring at on a screen, whatever) marks the 260th installment of Unreal Estate. That’s a solid 10 years of coming back to the well (almost) every other week and saying, “Hey, look at this rich guy’s house!” It’s a simple premise, but one I’ve tried to mix up a bit over the years — I hope you’re still having as much fun with it as I am.

Okay, so this week we’re headed to Santaluz, a kind of younger alternative to Rancho Santa Fe in terms of upscale inland living, built around what aims to be “the most desirable country club in San Diego County.” The neighborhood’s webpage boasts that being a club member gets you access to “many fabulous socials, wine festivals, holiday celebrations, wine dinners, musical performances, and receptions throughout the year,” so if you like wine with your golf, maybe this is the place to be.

Residences within the neighborhood range from “Posadas” spanning as much as 5500 square feet down to the comparatively low-rent “Casitas,” which are as small as 2100 square feet and still cost well over a million dollars. Today, we’re going to skip past the cookie-cutter jobs churned out by the builder and visit one of the “Customs,” homes built under an owner’s direction on some of the choicest lots in the development. These tend to be a bit larger.

Case in point: 8060 Run of the Knolls, a 1.5-acre estate with a home boasting 14,633 square feet of living space and a total of 17,316 square feet under roof, which I guess includes garages and covered patios and the like. “WOW!” is the simple Zillow opening for the listing, which goes on to tell us that both country club membership and “90-95% of furnishings” are included in the $10.78 million asking price. All we need to move in are our clothes and some dishes, so let’s take a look at what we’re getting.

The first photo is an aerial shot that makes the house look more like a cluster of resort buildings than a single family residence, along with a very fancy looking pool that I’m sure we’ll hear more about in a minute. “The impossible to list and indescribably stunning features include a detached (att. thru garage) 1637 sq ft casita,” the listing continues, before spending a significant amount of text listing all of those unlistable features. But for the moment, I’m stuck on the casita: it’s detached, but attached through a garage? As in, it’s attached to the main residence, but you can’t get to the guest quarters unless you walk through the garage? Also, it allegedly has a 400-square-foot walk-in closet, which is both a quarter of the whole unit and bigger than my living room.

Our next stop on the photo tour is indeed the pool, with what looks like a water slide coming out of the turret-shaped corner of the building closest to it. We don’t stay here long, and our next stop is a barnlike space with polished concrete floors and half of a basketball court. The pair of recliners pushed against one wall and the home gym equipment in the corner help give us a sense of just how huge this space is — they’re just tiny specks in the background! Maybe this is the “70x47 indoor gymnasium/car showroom” the listing mentions, but I don’t see any cars yet.

Some front shots show us that the driveway and sidewalks around the house are constructed from herringbone pavers, which both look nicer than and cost a lot more to install than more pedestrian concrete. From there, we make our way to the entry, which has a raised ceiling and a pleasant chandelier spiraling down from the rooftop. But we’re also assaulted by an overdose of “gentrification gray.” The arched doorway is gray, and so is the floor. The furniture is gray. Even the built-in bookcases and exposed beams in the ceiling of the next room are gray. This is too much for me already; I hope we see some color soon.

Okay, moving on, we see that the room beyond the entry is a kind of reception hall with a lot of seating and a bar looking into the kitchen. Those ceiling beams, on closer inspection, are a more natural brown, but I notice this only because they’re the only things aside from some pendant lights over the bar that aren’t black, white, or gray. The marble walls surrounding the fireplace and dividing the kitchen between “dirty” (actual kitchen where food gets made) and “chef’s” (don’t use this one, it’s only there to look at and show people how fancy you are) are nice, but this space is too bland. Not that I wouldn’t take it in a heartbeat, but I’d paint the cabinets or something — anything to make this place look less sterile. Also, I would use the heck out of that (blue, hooray!) retro-looking double range, appearances be damned. The dirty kitchen looks too cramped anyway, from the one shot we get of it.

One of those big disappearing walls of glass leads us out to a poolside patio that looks pleasant enough, even if the one ceiling fan mounted way up at the peak of the vaulted ceiling is unlikely to do anything useful. Hopefully, we get at least a hint of an ocean breeze to help keep things cool, even though we’re fully seven miles inland from Solana Beach.

Now we’re headed back in through a formal dining room into a bar/lounge area. I normally don’t gold fixtures like the faucet and drawer pulls in here, but in this instance, I’ll take them over silver, given the gray cabinets. There’s a small home theater off of this room, with a Captain America shield sitting in front of the screen. All it does is remind me that I’m still desperate to see some hints of color.

Oh, here’s some: a game room has pool and shuffleboard tables, along with a few old arcade consoles. There’s even a skee-ball machine, which I’m surprised to report marks the first time I’ve seen one in any of the rich-guy playgrounds we’ve covered over the years.

Next, we’re off to what looks like a miniature version of a gym locker room. I have no idea why this is here — it’s your house, you probably have plenty of closets and bathrooms, so why do you need a locker? Then we’re back in the basketball barn, except now there’s a giant toy train parked in the key. Behind the gym, it turns out, is a single-lane bowling alley that I would use a lot more than I would a toy train.

Back in the main house, we’re presented with a bedroom large enough to make a king bed look like doll furniture and a bathroom with a freestanding tub inexplicably placed between a pair of vanities, and a walk-in shower the size of a small bedroom. A door from the bath leads out to a private walled-in patio with a spa tub in the center. We finish our tour of what I presume is the main suite, with a couple of closet shots — the listing claims the total closet space in here measures 43x41, making for a 1763-square-foot closet. That by itself is bigger than a lot of houses.

Some more normal-looking bedrooms and baths follow. Then we see a sauna in which the benches are all covered in pillows. I don’t think this is how saunas work; they’re hot and humid and sweaty, and if this one actually gets used, I don’t want to know how those pillows smell.

Now we’re headed outside again, watching some fountains spray into the “breathtaking 126x43 sq ft sparkling pool and lazy river, swim up bar, covered island, waterfalls, waterslide, dive platform, covered jacuzzi, full outdoor kitchen, full pool bath, and fire features throughout.” Yes, the pool has all of those things, including a bar island accessed by bridge for those not swimming up. Most of the rest of the shots, aside from a few of the guest casita, are of the backyard. And really, this pool is impressive enough that it deserves to be seen from a bunch of different angles. Finally, we get a few closing aerial shots before we say goodbye.

Maybe the listing was right about there being too much to list, as I haven’t even gotten into the hidden TVs, the temperature-controlled wine room, or a few other things. But we’re running long, and looking at this much stuff in one house has me kind of exhausted, anyway.

The Run of the Knolls estate was built in 2018 and last sold as bare land in 2015 for $1.5 million to the Barajas Trust of Highland, California. It was listed in late January for $12 million and quickly went into escrow, but that deal fell through in mid-March, and the property went back online with a reduced asking price of $10,780,000. If you buy it, keep an extra $1489/month in your budget for homeowners’ and country club dues. Also, please invite me over for some bowling or let me crash your train into the pool.

8060 Run of the Knolls | San Diego, 92127

Current owner: Barajas Trust | Listing price: $10,870,000 | Beds: 5 | Baths: 10 | House size: 14,633+ sq ft