The reflecting pool helps you reflect on just how amazing your life is now that you live here.

We’ve seen plenty of expensive homes here at Unreal over the years; gawking at the ultra-wealthy is kind of our raison d’etre, after all. But this week, we’re really going over the top with a house that, if it sells at or even near its list price, would more than double the cost of the highest publicly-listed sale in San Diego County.

“This remarkable 77-acre Covenant estate comprised of 7 parcels will transcend your expectations with multiple residences, two state-of-the-art barns, riding arenas, several pastures, tree-lined trails, 15 acre bass-filled lake, tennis court, and the ultimate in privacy, security, and seclusion,” begins the Zillow pitch for 16401 Calle Feliz, a sprawling 15,000-square-foot estate in Rancho Santa Fe.

First, let’s talk about size. Yes, Rancho Santa Fe is further inland than other ridiculously-priced neighborhoods like La Jolla and Del Mar, and that means you’re more likely to get several acres of land than you would be at the beach. But 77 is a lot of acres. Consider that the average suburban lot from the 1950s through the ’70s was around 6000 square feet. At just over seven lots per acre, you could build almost 560 normal-person houses on these grounds — or more than 1300 houses, if you used the average lot size of 2500 square feet found in my mid-city neighborhood.

Now let’s consider that the main house is claimed at 15,000 square feet of living space, and that’s not even including the two-bedroom guest house attached to the game room, the garages and barns, or the multiple caretakers’ quarters. Just the main house occupies more than a third of an acre under roof! With this much space, we’re going to have a lot of looking around to do, so we may as well get started with the massive photo roll — though if you’d prefer, the listing office has set up a website featuring a video that opens with a shot of a white-haired man in a vintage Porsche driving for a full 15 seconds just to get from the gate to the front door. (It also features a rather creepy close-up of a horse’s face around the 40-second mark.)

Any similarity to There Will Be Blood is purely coincidental.

The first view we see is of the front of the house and the driveway, where the Porsche from the video is parked to one side of a black-bottomed reflecting pool reminiscent of the one between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in DC. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether this is a matter of hubris or just having entirely too much room for a driveway. We then get some aerial shots, showing what would be a massive pool elsewhere, but which here looks like a tiny postage stamp in the corner of a manicured back lawn. Also a barn facility that makes the house itself look rather small.

Moving on from there, we appear to be standing in the entryway of the mansion, said to be built in “a classic Santa Barbara style with an understated elegance.” Arched passageways lead us through the rooms, seemingly all the way to the back yard. One of these is a living room with some tasteful exposed beams and plenty of light, but appointed in a way that makes it feel like it’s more a place to admire fancy vintage furniture than a room in which to sit down and relax.

The dining room and some of the others we see are fine, really — about what we’d expect in this column, nothing more. But then we get to what looks like a wine cellar of sorts, outfitted with an intricate raised-relief entry door and an arched wrought-iron cage at the back that appears to be protecting a lot of bottles. Even though I don’t much fancy wine, I can appreciate this space as something special.

Traipsing through the photo gallery, we see a covered patio overlooking the pool (which feels plenty large when seen up close), and a kitchen designed to look much older than the home’s supposed 2008 build date. I like some of what’s going on here, but the blue-and-yellow checkerboard backsplash lined in green with the maroon tile on the counters seems a bit busy. The first bedroom we see looks enormous, as do the bath and private patio that appear to be attached to it. Another is more moderately sized, but then we jump back outside to a courtyard that appears to be filled with wooden raised-bed vegetable gardens, a space that I would very much like for myself. Some more outside shots follow before we make it to the “fully equipped game room.” This space more than lives up to its name: I see a full bar, pool and air hockey tables, pub seating, a wall of arcade games, and even a two-lane bowling alley dubbed Rusty Duck Lanes.

The photos start bouncing around a lot from here, but there is indeed much more to see. We get some shots of the guest/servant quarters that appear to be nearly as nicely-appointed as the main house, more of the barn and other horse facilities, and a few of the riding trails that pass by the estate’s 15-acre private lake, the one the listing calls “bass-filled.”

Public records show the property last changed hands in 2004, when it was bought by a Wyoming-based limited liability company. It’s been listed several times dating back to late 2020, and the asking price of $98,500,000 remains unchanged to date. For comparison’s sake, the highest residential sale price I can find anywhere in the county is an oceanfront estate in Del Mar that went for just over $41 million in 2007, at the height of the last housing bubble. To whomever buys this: please consider my application to live in the servants’ quarters as the humble caretaker of your garden and bartender in your game room.

• 16401 Calle Feliz | Rancho Santa Fe, 92067
• Current owner: Nic LLC | Listing price: $98,500,000 | Beds: 6 | Baths: 7 | House size: 15,000+ sq ft