The Randolph Duke Home, Estate of the Day

I didn't give this one full estate of the day treatment when I first heard about it but a deep price cut makes a welcome excuse. Fashion designer and stylist Randolph Duke put his glamorous home in the Hollywood Hills on the market last December for $8.5 million. The Real Estalker reported that Duke bought his three-lot spread in 2004 for $2.25 million and hired Xten Architecture to build a custom cantilevered home that juts out over the hillside and has retracting glass walls allowing stunning views over Los Angeles from nearly every angle in the home.

When you aren't facing restrictions to make a home family friendly or budget friendly you can do some pretty amazing things. This three-bedroom home wasn't designed for private space. It's a home for parties, for trysts, for photo shoots and for viewing the city below from that particular vantage point that actually makes you believe you have the world by the tail.

The ample use of faux fur, the white couches, rough hewn wood stools and tables and the stacked stone fireplace keep it from being straight contemporary. The result is a magazine layout of a home right down to the sliver of silver reflecting pool which is more like a piece of house jewelry than any functional cooling-off device. The home isn't for everyone and so the price has been trimmed to a less wallet-pinching $6.5 million.