SF, CA - The Billionaire's Row (pun intended)

When you reach the middle of Lyon steps, you are on a wide street nicknamed Billionaires Row. Beautiful homes, however, there are stories behind those facades. It seems as if even billionaires have trouble with their neighbors.

Here’s a story by Henry Blodget from May 29, 2011:

Larry Ellison has a house in Pacific Heights in San Francisco that he bought in 1988 for $3.9 million. It’s a huge house--10,000+ square feet--with sweeping views of the Bay.

At least it used to have sweeping views of the Bay.

Until some redwoods in the back yard of a neighbor’s house grew so tall that they started blocking the view.

The neighbor’s house in question, Jim Carlton of the Wall Street Journal reports, was bought by Bernard and Jane Von Bothmer in 2004, for $6.9 million.

Larry Ellison’s lawyers said he had a agreement with the prior owner that the owner would keep the trees trimmed. The prior owner denies this.

Larry Ellison has since offered to buy the Von Bothmer’s house for $15 million. They’ve turned him down.

The Von Bothmers have several times found limbs from their trees on the ground in their yard, after being unceremoniously sawed-off. Once, Mrs. Bothmer caught three lumberjacks in one of her trees preparing to “top it.” Larry Ellison denied telling the lumberjacks to do that and said he would have fired them if he had known.

And now Larry Ellison has hired an attorney who specializes in neighbor’s-trees-blocking-your-view litigation and sued the Von Bothmers to force them to cut down the trees. In connection with this litigation, he has already submitted a 207-page deposition, in which he revealed that, when a neighbor complained about redwoods on his property in the Valley blocking her view, he chopped them down.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Von Bothmer is attempting to have one of the trees that Larry wants whacked, an acacia, declared a “Landmark Tree” by the city of San Francisco.

Stay tuned

And, the beat goes on….

Here’s a follow-up story by Philip Ferrato from Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The latest twist in our tale of Mother Nature and the distress she causes among mere mortals: Curbed SF intel says Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will buy the home of late socialite/fashionista/philanthropist Dodie Rosekrans at 2840 Broadway- immediately next door to his- for $40,000,000. The Rosekrans' extravagant Willis Polk-designed house, built in 1916, has twenty-two rooms and lacks a garage, but it does have unobstructable views of the bay. And the billionaire's multi-year battle with his downhill neighbors/millionaires Jane and Bernard von Bothmer may be finally coming to a close. Apparently settled yesterday morning, with lawyers beavering away over the holiday weekend, the case is a log-book of Dickensian wrangling over an eighty-year-old acacia and some overly-enthusiastic redwoods and just how many feet of wood would get trimmed from their tops. Meanwhile, there's been an attempt to landmark the acacia, plus during a recent deposition, Jane von Bothmer produced photos of Ellison's employees illicitly strapped into her trees, ready to trim.

This past week, Ellison defended himself in the Wall Street Journal via his tree lawyer, and back in 2007, the von Bothmers turned down two offers from Ellison to buy their property. Having paid $6,900,000 for their house in 2004, renovating it and the garden extensively, the barnacle-like von Bothmers refused to be scraped away, but they have now agreed to maintain the redwoods at a height within two feet of the elevation of the yachtsman's second floor.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.