Back in the ’tween-holiday stretch of 2018, Marlon Brando’s house sold to Getty Oil scion John Gilbert Getty, who paid $3.9 million in November of that year for the singularly medieval, Moorish-inspired Spanish-style, which exudes the Gothic atmosphere of a Poe short story collection.

Getty passed away two years to the month of closing on the house in a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas, the latest casualty of an accidental Fentanyl overdose; the super-powerful narcotic can be lethal in a pinhead-sized dose. And so the 1926-built home—known as the Laurel View Residence—returns to the open market late in the winter of 2021, this time around asking $4.295 million. But it won’t be on the market for long; a buyer stepped up in short order to send it into pending status.

While it rises up only two levels from the street from behind its upper privacy wall, the hillside house looms beguiling as Brando’s artistic stature in back. The flourishes suggest scale and power in no uncertain terms: flying buttress supports, soaring cathedral ceilings, and the tower that represents its apex.

The step-down living room is worth the price of admission by itself, boasting three-level split staircase, a limestone fireplace decorated with a pointy four-centered arch and carved Solomonic columns, and a massive picture window flanked by glass doors.

Arched casement windows and French doors, narrow-plank oak, original tile, private balconies, Moorish lattice blinds, and various sunroom living areas are other details of this marvelously eccentric and architecturally significant property.