A six-story Russian Hill home known as the Verdier Mansion is listed for $25 million. Its past includes use as an opium den, a brothel and a World War II officers’ club. John Skeen, a former San Francisco securities executive, and his wife, Donna, are selling after two decades in the home as they retire to Southern California.
The property has not changed hands in 20 years, according to SFGATE. Listing agent Gregg Lynn, who represents the home through Sotheby’s International Realty, told the outlet that the Skeens preserved and updated it. Lynn also said buyers from the emerging AI industry have shown interest, and described the mansion as the largest home near downtown and Mission Bay.
Other outlets have separately confirmed the sale price and scale of the home. According to bizjournals.com, the Russian Hill mansion lists for $25 million and features six bedrooms spread across multiple levels. California Home + Design describes it as a Tudor Revival survivor rising six stories, with six full bathrooms, two half-bathrooms and a six-car garage, all connected by an elevator serving every level.
A Home Recast Across Generations
Architect Houghton Sawyer designed the mansion, which was completed in 1906 for Robert G. Hanford as a gift to Gabrielle Guittard Cavalsky. Her family had opened the Guittard Chocolate Company on San Francisco’s Sansome Street in 1868; it is now the country’s oldest continuously family-owned chocolate company. SFGATE’s account says Cavalsky held concerts at the home, that Hanford left the property to her and her family around 1909, and that the couple divorced in 1914.
The mansion later became associated with Paul Verdier, an heir to the City of Paris department store dynasty who eventually served as its president. The City of Paris opened its first San Francisco store on the waterfront in 1851 and moved to Union Square in 1896, according to California Home + Design. SFGATE reports Verdier bought the home in 1919; it also recounts that squatters later entered through underground tunnels and used it as an opium den.
From Brothel to Officers’ Club
SFGATE reports that Sally Stanford, a prominent San Francisco madam, leased the mansion for a high-end brothel before repeated police raids prompted her to move the operation. Stanford later became mayor of Sausalito in the 1970s. During World War II, the property served as an officers’ club. John F. Kennedy reportedly visited on multiple occasions, though that claim is reported rather than independently confirmed here.
The building also had periods as a theater and artist salon. Catherine Doliani bought it in the mid-1950s and divided it into apartments. Dr. Thomas and Lena Grotz took possession in the early 1990s and restored the home; SFGATE dates their work to 1992 and notes the addition of a free-standing spiral staircase and kitchen upgrades.
Later Owners and the Current Listing
Myron Scholes, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and professor emeritus of finance at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, owned the mansion before selling it to the Skeens in 2006 for $12 million, according to the seed reporting. Property records reviewed by PropertyShark confirm the November 2006 sale at that price and list the home as currently assessed at $16,399,080, with property taxes totaling $193,951. PropertyShark lists the construction year as 1907, differing from the 1906 completion date cited elsewhere in the dossier.
Assessment and Asking Price
The $16,399,080 assessment listed by PropertyShark is a tax figure, not the mansion’s $25 million asking price. The California Board of Equalization says a county-assessed value forms the basis of a property’s tax bill. Its guidance cited here does not establish how a future sale would affect this property’s assessment.
Inside, the mansion includes a temperature-controlled wine cellar, a colonnaded interior courtyard once accessed from what was likely a ballroom and is now used for billiards, and a kitchen that opens onto a terrace, per California Home + Design. The home sits near Ina Coolbrith Park, not far from the Vallejo Street steps originally designed by Willis Polk. It has also drawn pop-culture attention, having appeared as the dream house in season two of the Netflix series The OA.
Listed Once Before, in a Very Different Market
This isn’t the mansion’s first brush with the open market. SFGATE’s earlier reporting on the property, nicknamed the House of the Grand Passion, noted it was listed for $14 million in 2006, and SocketSite later reported that asking price was cut by $2 million, or 14.3%. The current $25 million ask arrives amid a vastly different San Francisco luxury market than the one the Skeens bought into two decades ago.
San Francisco luxury home sales jumped 22.2% year over year in March, with the median luxury sale price reaching $6,808,561 — a 9% annual increase and the highest level for that time of year on record, according to Redfin. High-end homes in the city went under contract in a median of just 12 days that month, even as the total number of luxury listings fell 15.2% year over year.
Sales above $5 million rose 109% during the first nine months of this year compared with the same period in 2025, and nearly 92% of San Francisco homes sold above asking in September, according to Compass data cited by Hoodline in its coverage of a $17.2 million Presidio Heights sale. That same report detailed a 15,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion at 2898 Vallejo Street that sold off-market for $56 million, reportedly the city’s priciest residential sale of the year, alongside a 6,175-square-foot home at 2833 Vallejo Street that closed for $19.4 million after listing for $20 million. Whether the Verdier Mansion will fetch its full $25 million ask remains to be seen.
