If you listen carefully, walking through Christian Audigier’s earthy Topanga estate, you might hear side two of ‘Exile on Main St.’ playing on a distant stereo; ‘Loving Cup,’ maybe, flooding through the Canyon at high volume.
Comprising four buildings– apart from cabanas– the private hideaway of the inventive fashion maven, who passed away last year, is for sale for $1.995 million. The house, a 1924 Spanish Colonial, sits amid 3 acres off North Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and has been exhaustively restored. It features three bedrooms and two baths, a striking, hand-carved fireplace, a family room, and a chef’s kitchen with ample wine storage. The grounds feature three guest houses, stone walking paths, gardens, small vineyard, an expansive patio with kitchenette, and a pool with cabanas.
Everywhere one looks, ideas compete for attention; there is restlessness in the surfeit. An overall decorative style cannot really be pinned down—you might come close if you called it pop-cultural Western. But, certainly, it was not meant by Audigier to be easily categorized. The décor seems almost nervous in its need for inclusion; it is easy to see how the varied stylistic components of Audigier’s vision of fashion originated. In some sense, ideas are compulsively objectified in the accumulated eclecticism, each passing into the next like stream-of-consciousness; Audigier was a master at marketing exactly that impulsiveness, and selling it at a premium. In 2011, he sold one of his fashion labels for $62 million.
Audigier bought the estate for $2.075 million in 2008; he was 57 at the time of his death, and loved the worn leather-jacket sensibility of rock-and-roll the Rolling Stones came to musically represent. He brought that fading rock-and-roll sensibility to his clothing lines Ed Hardy and Von Dutch, and his estate radiates it in its absolutely freewheeling creativity. An expert at self-promotion, certainly, but Christian Audigier was clearly an interesting fellow as well.
Rory Posin and Kristian Bonk, of Results Real Estate Group, hold the listing.
