“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster,” Clint Eastwood once said. And if you want to live like the award-winning actor and director, you can buy his former house in Carmel-by-the-Sea for $21 million.
The century-old Spanish Revival home once inhabited by the star of “Gran Torino,” “Unforgiven” and “Dirty Harry” has been listed for the first time in decades at San Antonio & 9th SWC, according to the Robb Report.
Eastwood, former mayor of the small Central Coast town, bought the house known as Las Ondas in 1981 and sold it in 1996 to Frederick O’Such for $2.25 million.
O’Such, the current owner, then poured $2.5 million and two years of work into renovating the quarter-acre estate.
As it stands today, the 4,400-square-foot stone-clad house rises three stories, with sweeping views of Monterey Bay.
The four-bedroom, five-bathroom house, built in 1924, sits behind a private gate surrounded by cypress trees, one one street away from Carmel Beach.
It has vaulted ceilings with exposed mahogany wood beams, cherry wood floors, plastered walls, a media room, a temperature-controlled wine room, two laundry rooms and numerous indoor and outdoor nooks and crannies.
Broker Tim Allen of the Carmel-by-the-Sea/Junipero office of Coldwell Banker Realty holds the listing along with the Coldwell Banker Global Luxury program. The listing was first reported by the Wall Street Journal,
Eastwood, 94 and a native of San Francisco, fell in love with Carmel in the early 1950s while serving as an Army grunt at Fort Ord, in nearby Monterey.
In 1967, he bought 283 acres of land along Highway 1 near Malpaso Creek, south of the Carmel Highlands. A year later, he and James Garner bought another 340 acres in Carmel Valley.
The actor, producer and director of more than 100 films and TV shows now lives in Tehàma, an exclusive 2,000-acre private residential enclave in the hills of Carmel that he founded.
Houses in Carmel have no street addresses, though there is a movement afoot to change that as delivery services and taxi drivers can’t find their destination, the Associated Press recently reported.
— Dana Bartholomew