If the front of this house looks familiar you might be flashing back to the 1990s television show "Party of Five." Charlie, Bailey, Julia and the rest of the Salinger clan lived in this 19th Century mansion in San Francisco. This house on a hill has stunning Golden Gate and Bay views from multiple levels. There are seven bedrooms total. The main level has a reception foyer with 12 foot box-beamed ceilings, stained glass windows and a grand main staircase leading to the upper levels. The main level also features a large living room, formal dining room and an open kitchen and great room with a greenhouse solarium that leads out to the garden. Upstairs the master bedroom suite has his and hers master baths and dressing areas and a home office with wet bar. The top level of this home has a large media/game room with cathedral ceilings, a wet bar with refrigerator and an abundance of skylights and windows. On the lower level there is a garage and storage room. This home is listed at $7.2 million.

[via Zillow blog]

Most of what you need to know is right there in the invitation. The Montblanc boutique store located near Union Square in San Francisco is having a two week private sale. What does private mean? That you are invited, and others aren't of course. Sales such as this aren't scheduled to my knowledge, and mean that there are deals to be had at the impressive Montblanc store. Among the included items are watches, pens, jewelery, and their fine leather goods. Did you know that Montblanc makes really nice wallets? Even belts and bags I think. If you are nearby and have been looking for the right time to incorporate some new Montblanc in your life, this is the time.

Ariel Adams publishes the luxury watch review site aBlogtoRead.com.

The Twitter guys are definitely on the move. Earlier this year, Biz Stone listed his Berkeley home for $575,000 and it sold quickly. Now Evan Williams has put his San Francisco penthouse on the market. One thing is for certain these guys like their nests contemporary. William has a two-bedroom loft in the Heublein Building. The sleek modern apartment is one of three penthouse units in the building and it has 11 foot ceilings. The home has a remodeled kitchen with a wine refrigerator and comes with a two-car garage. The interior has a bit of a rough look from exposed concrete and pipes. A private patio offers city views. Williams has listed his home for $1.498 million. Curbed SF says that he's building a modern home, designed by his wife which should be finished next year.

[via On The Block]

Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher have finally found a home for their art collection. The pair spent years trying to build their own museum in San Francisco's Presidio but dropped those plans after facing major opposition from residents and city officials. Instead the large collection of contemporary art will have a home at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It's a huge get for the museum, the collection is a 1,100-piece assortment of works by 185 contemporary artists with many fine pieces from Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close and Andy Warhol and could be worth nearly $1 billion. Donald Fisher released a written statement that said in part: "San Francisco is where we raised our family and opened our first Gap store, and we want to give back to the city we love by sharing the art that means so much to us."

The museum is already in the planning phase for a major expansion and the Fisher Collection will be on display in a new wing. Works from the collection will be shown with the museum's existing holdings in modern and contemporary art. The works will go into an art trust and the pieces will be on loan to the museum for 25 years. The first peek at the art will come next summer when some of the works are shown as part of the museum's 75th anniversary celebration.

The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco has unveiled the remodel of their lavish penthouse suite. The $15,000 suite with the gorgeous bay views, a billiard room, dining room, living room, two-story library and terrace is being reopened this month just in time for a wedding that unites two prominent wine families. The suite takes up the entire eighth floor and has three bedrooms. For your $15,000 a night you get the services of a butler, housekeeper, chef, masseuse and personal trainer and the use of a Ferrari California.

[via MSNBC]

Venture capitalist Tom Perkins has been in a selling mood lately. He reportedly sold off the Maltese Falcon for $100 million and his long-time Belvedere, California home, which was on the market for $20.5 million, is no longer listed. But Perkins has bought something too. The Wall Street Journal reports that Perkins recently closed on a 4,800-square-foot residence on the 60th floor of Millennium Tower in downtown San Francisco for $9.35 million.

The unit which has views of San Francisco Bay from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge and beyond is said to be the best unit in the building. Another similarly sized residence on the same floor sold in June for $8.1 million. The building's prices were reduced by 15 percent in February. The tower includes a club level with a screening room, pool and pool terrace, fitness club, tasting room, lounge, dining room and fitness center. A residents-only dining room is serviced by Michael Mina's restaurant RN74 which is located in the tower.

This 1904 Georgian-style home in San Francisco is located in the Presidio Heights area with views of the Golden Gate Bridge from the back terrace. The original graceful lines of the home have been updated with a modern interior that is pretty much flawless. It's hard to find fault with a home this beautiful. Particularly noteworthy details are the dining room with a coffered ceiling and large fireplace, the kitchen with its French doors to the outside and the glamorous red-walled library. Upstairs the master suite has a window that is a perfect frame for a Bay view and also includes a sitting room with a fireplace, two bathrooms and dressing rooms. Outside there is a large grilling area and an outdoor amphitheater with two sets of chairs. This home was listed at $15.75 million just a few weeks ago but has already been dropped to $12 million.

Another project planned for San Francisco's Presidio has been scrapped. Last month Gap founder Donald Fisher decided not to go forward with his art museum and this month Foggy Bridge Winery has decided not to proceed with building a working winery in a former airplane hangar near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Neighbors had expressed concerns over having a winemaking facility, tasting room and restaurant in Crissy Field, a popular recreational area. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat says that the winery dropped its plans a few weeks ago. The Presidio Trust is hoping that the facility will be used for something more educational and family friendly like a flight museum. Foggy Bridge has not given up the dream of having a winery in San Francisco. The wine brand already features a stylized version of the Golden Gate Bridge on the label.

The San Francisco real estate market is full of pricey properties and the former estate of the late superstar lawyer Melvin Belli is one of the biggest. The Wall Street Journal's Private Properties column reports that the home now belongs to a businesswoman who bought the home in 1992 for around $6.5 million. She's looking for a big return on her investment, the home is now listed at $39.5 million.

The home does occupy an enviable spot in Pacific Heights and does have great lines. It was created by San Francisco architect, Frederick H. Meyer for Stetson G. Hindes, a prominent engineer whose firm constructed the drydock at Pearl Harbor and other major projects. The home makes the best use of the views, providing them with a formal framework that is far from California casual. The home has six bedrooms and there is both a large main kitchen with a butler's pantry and catering room as well as a second kitchen on the lower floor. The master suite has two seating areas and views of the bay and the home's exquisite landscaping below. This property also includes an elevator, 3,000+ bottle wine cellar and garage parking for 4 cars.

Experience more lush living in luxury homes and mansions or see the stars living large with celebrity homes galleries at AOL Real Estate.

It's happened again, another luxury hotel is in default. Millennium Partners has said that it has defaulted on a two-year-old, $90-million CMBS loan for the Four Seasons San Francisco. Like other hotel owners, Millennium made this move as a bargaining tool with an eye toward renegotiating the debt with the special servicer, LNR Property Corp., because the value of the hotel is lower than the debt. Alan Reay, president of Irvine, CA-based Atlas Hospitality Group told GlobeSt.com. "My prediction is you are going to see vast majority of CMBS loans in California--probably throughout country--defaulting."

We've already seen another California hotel, the W Hotel in San Diego in a similar situation. Loans made over the past two years were made at the peak of the market. Now with real estate prices and hotel occupancy rates in sharp decline, borrowers want relief. The Four Seasons San Francisco remains open and is offering a package that offers a free third night if you stay two consecutive nights.

Today's home has some of the best views of San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge I've ever seen. The home in the Sea Cliff area is set high on a cliff and behind a gated drive. The wood and glass home is cantilevered over 55 steel pillars. The decor is pretty dated and there are some questionable finish choices such as the black stone and dark wood in the kitchen and the pale carpeting in the main areas. The listing says that there are approved plans for a huge addition of around 3,500 square feet which makes sense since the home is less than 4,000 square feet and has just two bedrooms.

A Socket Site post from last year provides more details. The home was listed at $18 million last year but was as low as $9 million back in 2002. It has been on and off the market for ten years. Frank Lloyd Wright may have done a preliminary design for the site but his drawings bear only faint resemblance to this home. It is listed at $11.5 million.

Looks like Gap founder Donald Fisher will be taking his art elsewhere. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Fisher and his family have scrapped plans to build a contemporary art museum at the Main Post of San Francisco's Presidio. Earlier Fisher had scaled back the plans for his museum in San Francisco's Presidio to appease those who found the museum's first planned design a bit overwhelming. Fisher originally unveiled his plans for a contemporary art museum at the end of 2007. The Fishers had hoped to convince critics, San Franciscans, and regulatory bodies such as the National Park Service that the museum would be beneficial for the park.

Donald Fisher released a statement that said he and his wife would be taking some time to consider the future of their collection and other possible locations for the museum including some inside the Presidio, just not on the site of the former bowling alley that they had originally planned on. The statement also said that the decision was made "with disappointment and sadness." The Chronicle reports that an outside survey of possible impacts of various Main Post Presidio projects found that the scale of the museum, even with the newer more modest revision, was "inconsistent with the overall historical character of its setting."

In addition to the museum the Fishers had promised a $10 million gift to go toward turning the Main Post's parking lot into landscaped grounds but it's not known if that offer is separate from the museum gift. The comments on the Chronicle article are spirited, some are expressing relief that Fisher's plans won't come to fruition while others are disappointed that a museum which would have displayed a large contemporary art collection to the public may end up elsewhere. Given the hard times facing museums everywhere lately, it seems like it might be a better idea to endow a wing of an existing museum rather than create a new one out of whole cloth.

The most expensive real estate in the country has taken some pretty major price cuts over the past year or two. In the past, mega-mansions with huge pricetags would often sit on the market a year or two without a price cut with owners secure in the knowledge that the right buyers would eventually come along. These are uncertain times and there are some very motivated sellers testing their luck in the real estate waters. Our list of top ten reductions of U.S. properties we've covered in the past starts at a $10 million cut and it only gets higher from there.

10)The Sloane Mansion, was $64 million, now $54 million
Price Cut=$10 million
The Henry T. Sloane mansion on East 68th Street in New York City is located just steps away from Fifth Avenue on the East Side. The building has 18,500 square feet total spread out over five stories and there are 15 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, seven fireplaces, a ballroom and a rooftop garden. The mansion was designed by architect Charles Pierrepont H. Gilbert for Sloane, the heir to a furniture empire, in 1905. The home is classic Beaux-Arts style and five of the rooms have all their original details intact including wood-paneled ballroom with original oil-painted murals. It has been on the market for over a year but may need to go lower than $54 million in this economy.

For a $150 raffle ticket you could win a $2.4 million home in San Francisco, California. The San Francisco Dream House Raffle is a fundraiser to build funds for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The raffle is giving away a total of 370 prizes and the grand prize is a $2.4 million San Francisco dream home or $1.8 million in cash. A total of 37,000 tickets will be sold. There are a total of 369 other prizes valued at $25,000 to $300 so you have a 1 in 100 chance of winning something.

The property includes a newly-built main house and a guest cottage which have not been lived in.There is a four-bedroom main house of approximately 3,150 square feet and a separate two-bedroom guest house that is around 1,150 square feet. Both homes are decorated and the main home includes a baby's room.

[Thanks, Elizabeth!]

Europe – the same corner of Europe, actually – claims the first three spots in Mercer Consulting's annual Quality of Living Survey. Vienna, Austria and Zurich and Geneva in Switzerland lead the list, followed by Vancouver, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand in a tie for fourth.

Little has changed for the top half of the top 10. Last year, Zurich nabbed the top spot, and Vienna and Geneva shared the #2 spot. Vancouver is unchanged year-over-year, and Auckland's #5 finish last year is roughly the same as its tie for fourth in 2009.

Not only are the top places to live ostensibly enjoyable, you're more likely to be there for a while. Life expectancies in these cities start at 79 years. It's better than living a nice long life in a dump, I guess.

The United States doesn't appear until the bottom of the top 30, with Honolulu and San Francisco. From Asia, only Singapore picks up a spot in the world's 30 best places to live. South America and Africa are not represented at all. It's strange, I half-expected to see Mogadishu on this list.

Of the 215 places listed, Baghdad has the distinction of finishing last. Sometimes, common sense prevails.