A highly visible mansion at Divisadero and Pacific in Pacific Heights has finally sold after languishing on the market for over two years, and it has sold to a foreign government.
The stately brick manse known as both the Herbst Mansion, for its onetime owners, and the Coxhead Mansion, for architect Ernest Coxhead, was built in 1899 for wealthy art collector Sarah Spooner, who had recently moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia. As the story goes, and as listing agent Pattie Lawton of Sotheby’s International told SFGate last month, Spooner assembled the properties atop one of the city's most scenic hills, in this already exclusive neighborhood, choosing this side of the street specifically. At the time, women were not legally able to own property in the city of San Francisco, but they could own property in San Francisco County — the dividing line between city and county was, in 1899, Divisadero Street.
As FoundSF notes, reprinting a passage from a book about Pacific Heights by Anne and Arthur Bloomfield, Spooner did not stay long in the house, and its owners by the time the 1906 earthquake and fire hit were John A. McGregor and his family — and McGregor, in addition to being president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, served on SF's Board of Supervisors from 1922 to 1926.
The Herbst family, who were connected to the namesakes of the Herbst Theater, Herman and Maurice Herbst, would own the house as of 1967.
The Chronicle notes that the sellers who were its most recent owners, Ken McNeely and Inder Dhillon, were asking $15 million for it when it hit the market in late 2023, and after some reductions, it just sold for just under $10 million. According to Redfin, it last sold in 2014 for $8.6 million.
The house has obviously stunning views of the city and the Bay, and some seriously elegant rooms, and the buyers, the government of Algeria, apparently are looking to use it as entertaining space.
As the Chronicle reports, the Embassy of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria just opened a consulate in San Francisco in December, in leased space at 465 California Street, but this mansion will not, allegedly, be used as a consulate for any official government purpose.
Daria Saraf, a Sotheby's realtor who represented Algeria in the deal, tells the paper, the embassy was seeking just such stately space in order to "entertain in a gracious way" in SF, given the city's status as an international hub of technology.
Also, they probably need somewhere fancy and well guarded for dignitaries to stay in when they come to the city that isn't some plebian hotel.
