Bay Area Estate Asks $16 Million More Than Its 2020 Sale Price

A private-equity founder is asking $35 million for his Bay Area estate, just three years after buying it for $19 million. 

J. Taylor Crandall, a founder of private-equity firm Oak Hill Capital, is listing his 21.48-acre estate in Alamo, an affluent suburb about 30 miles east of San Francisco. When he bought the house in 2020 with his wife, Suzanne Crandall, it set a record for Contra Costa County, said Marilee Headen of Compass, who is marketing the property with Taso Tsakos of Engel & Völkers. 

Located at the base of Mount Diablo, the estate was built around a decade ago for software executive David Duffield, founder of PeopleSoft and co-founder of Workday, who spent about $135 million to build it, the agents said.

The main house, measuring about 20,470 square feet, has stone walls, reclaimed wood beams and a slate roof. There are 10 bedrooms between the main house and two guesthouses. The main house has a library and two offices, one with a terrace.

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The property also has an aviary, a dog run and a car barn for 20 vehicles. A treehouse has windows and finishes that Crandall said are “as nice as most houses.” It can be accessed via a rope bridge that crosses a creek. 

Crandall said the views of Mount Diablo from the property, as well as the quality of the finishes, initially attracted him to the house. There are antique French limestone fireplace surrounds throughout the home. The kitchen hood is hand painted, and there is a custom mural in the home theater. 

Additional amenities include an outdoor kitchen and two pools, one with a waterslide. Outside the primary suite, there is a hot tub and cold plunge. 

After purchasing the property, the Crandalls spent several million dollars adding a Crestron system and a solar field. 

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They are now looking to sell because they have moved to a house in nearby Diablo, which they purchased for around $6 million around the same time they bought the Alamo estate. 

The Diablo house is closer to their children’s schools and activities, although Crandall said he still goes to his office at the Alamo property every day. “We own about five other houses,” including homes in Utah and Massachusetts, he said. “This house has the best views of all of them.”

The agents said the $35 million price is based on the 2020 sales price, plus upgrades by the Crandalls and local market comparables. Crandall said he bought the estate just before the pandemic, and values have increased significantly since then. “This was prepandemic, before people started moving out of dodge,” he said. “I was fortunate enough to buy at a time when the market was quite soft.”

At the time, the highest-priced purchases in Alamo were in the midteens, said Tsakos. If the house fetches its asking price, it will again set a record in Contra Costa County, the agents said.

In October, the median sale price in Alamo was $2.3 million, down 8.8% compared with October 2022, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin.