Who says you can’t go home again? Former Dodgers CEO and U.S. ambassador Jamie McCourt has sold her 22-acre Napa estate to its previous owner, class action attorney and winery owner Robert Lieff, for $14 million, according to public records.
The sale closed in June but has not been reported until now.
McCourt, who was president and CEO of the Los Angeles baseball team between 2004 and 2012, purchased the vineyard property from Lieff for $11.3 million in 2013, or about $500,000 per acre. When the property first returned to market in March asking $15.5 million, listing agent Ginger Martin told TRD that the former ambassador to France and Monaco was selling because she no longer uses the property. That was the same rationale Lieff gave the Wall Street Journal for selling the home to her in 2013.
Robert L. Lieff ( Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP)
Perhaps Lieff has found new reasons to come north. He is a founding lawyer at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, and the firm has offices in San Francisco, as well as New York, Nashville and Munich. But the company website lists Lieff’s home as Montecito and Santa Ynez, where he and his wife Susan operated Lieff Ranch Wines out of their 56-acre property. About half the estate is dedicated to vineyards.
At the end of last year, the Lieffs listed their Santa Ynez ranch for sale with an asking price of $16 million and it sold for $13.5 million in June, according to property records. The couple sold because they were looking for “a new project” and recently bought another, bigger ranch in San Luis Obispo County that needs a lot of work, according to the Wall Street Journal.
McCourt has already done much of the heavy lifting to update the property at 40 Auberge Road, located next to the Auberge du Soleil luxury resort in Rutherford. Lieff built the estate over several years beginning in the late 1990s, after buying the property for $800,000 in 1997. But McCourt completely renovated the 3,500-square-foot main house in 2015 with custom metal windows and doors, concrete floors and a chef’s kitchen, according to the listing notes. The property still has its 75-foot-lap pool, award-winning two-bedroom guest house from starchitect Stanley Saitowitz and 4 acres of cabernet grapes, all installed during the Lieff era.
This isn’t the first time Lieff has returned to his old stomping grounds. In 2012, he bought back his 10,500-square-foot Montecito home from his ex-wife, according to the WSJ.
“I knew I would get this house back sooner or later,” Lieff told the paper at the time. “I always wanted this house.”