In December 2025, Larry Ellison sold his Pacific Heights mansion at 2850 Broadway in an off-market deal for approximately $45 million. He’d bought it in 1988 for $3.9 million.
That’s not just a real estate story. That’s a lesson in what happens when you own the right property in the right neighborhood for the right amount of time. The people buying in Pacific Heights in San Francisco today (the tech founders, the AI executives, the newly minted billionaires arriving with IPO proceeds and serious design expectations) are not looking at today’s prices. They’re looking at what those prices will look like in 2045, and thinking about how they’ll enjoy the ride along the way.
In this article, we’ll review some of the most iconic homes in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, but we’ll also explore what this neighborhood has to offer, should you be lucky enough to find a residence there.
Where Is Pacific Heights in San Francisco?
Pacific Heights sits on one of the city’s highest ridgelines, running roughly from Van Ness Avenue west toward the Presidio, and from California Street in the south to the edge of Cow Hollow in the north. It sits above the fog line (a pretty important detail when the marine layer is definitely a thing). The views from its upper streets take in the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the Marin Headlands, and the Palace of Fine Arts simultaneously.
After the 1906 earthquake leveled much of San Francisco, the city’s wealthy moved west to Pacific Heights in search of terra firma. Pacific Heights in San Francisco has been the city’s most coveted residential address for over a century, and it shows no signs of relinquishing that title.
The Pacific Heights San Francisco mansions lining its streets have housed sugar barons, Oracle founders, literary giants, heads of state, and now the architects of artificial intelligence. The neighborhood doesn’t trend. It endures.
What follows are four of the most remarkable properties currently defining what it means to live at the top of this city, and why Pacific Heights in San Francisco continues to set the standard for what residential architecture can achieve.
3199 Jackson Street: The Biggest House in San Francisco
If you want to understand the ceiling of residential ambition in this city, start here.
At 26,260 square feet spread across five levels, 3199 Jackson Street is the biggest house in San Francisco by any reasonable measure. Having recently changed hands for $32 million, it began its life as a 1905 residence and was transformed over multiple years into something that reads less like a home and more like a private institution.
The scale is genuinely difficult to process until you see the amenities list: an indoor basketball court with glass-walled gym overlooking it, a yoga and movement studio, a spa with massage room, a golf simulator, a wine lounge with a 1,500-bottle cellar, a media room, a catering kitchen operating alongside the main chef’s kitchen, a rooftop retreat with outdoor kitchen and hot tub, a primary suite with dual marble baths and Golden Gate Bridge views, a private two-bedroom guest apartment, and garage parking for approximately 20 vehicles.
This is not a house optimized for one family. It’s a compound (recent listings use that word deliberately) designed for multigenerational living, staff quarters, large-scale entertaining, and the kind of privacy that comes with owning an entire city block’s worth of square footage. Listed at $32 million, it represents the apex of what the Pacific Heights San Francisco mansions category can offer in terms of sheer scale.
The architecture manages to absorb that scale without feeling institutional. European-inspired detailing, a courtyard anchoring the main social spaces, radiant heat throughout. A rare opportunity to own the most significant private estate in the neighborhood.
2990 Broadway: The Last House on the Gold Coast
There is a stretch of Broadway in Pacific Heights known as the Gold Coast: twenty-five properties on the north side of the street, each one owned by legacy families, captains of industry, or tech entrepreneurs who understood what they were buying into.
2990 Broadway is the last house ever built on that stretch.
Designed in 1987 by architect Sandy Walker for the Jewett lumber family, this 10,180-square-foot residence was constructed on the final available lot on Outer Broadway, making it both the newest address on the block and, by definition, the last. The Jewetts used it as a private entertaining venue for dignitaries including Prince Philip and George H.W. Bush. That provenance alone places it among the nicest homes in San Francisco by any historical standard.
The property sits at the western edge of Billionaires Row, adjacent to the Lyon Street Steps and offering panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin Headlands, and Alcatraz. The listing describes it with the phrase “glamorous intimacy” (which is exactly right for a home that seats thirty at a formal dinner but still feels personal).
It listed most recently at $38 million.
2840 Broadway: The Most Expensive Home Ever Sold in San Francisco
In 2024, Laurene Powell Jobs (entrepreneur, philanthropist, and widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs) purchased 2840 Broadway for $70 million. It is the most expensive residential sale in San Francisco history and a defining moment for Pacific Heights in San Francisco as a global address.
The property sits on Billionaires Row, steps from the Ellison estate that just changed hands and the Jewett House that defined the block’s final form. Powell Jobs is not a passive buyer. Through her organization Emerson Collective, she has reshaped education, immigration policy, and media. Her arrival at this address is a signal about where Pacific Heights in San Francisco sits in the hierarchy of places the world’s most consequential people choose to live.
The amazing homes of Pacific Heights in San Francisco have always attracted this profile (not just wealth, but influence). Danielle Steel consolidated the Spreckels Mansion. Peter Thiel, Jan Koum, and Mark Pincus all own or have owned homes in the neighborhood. The pattern is consistent: people who have built things that matter, buying into a neighborhood that reflects that permanence.
At $70 million, the Powell Jobs purchase resets the ceiling for what Pacific Heights real estate can command. The person buying on this street in 2025 is making the same bet Ellison made in 1988. The math on that bet, thirty-seven years later, is not subtle.
2606 Jackson Street: The Perry House
Most Pacific Heights San Francisco mansions speak the language of the neighborhood: Victorian corbels, Edwardian facades, French Chateau detailing. The Perry House does not.
Designed in 2002 by the late architect Olle Lundberg on a double lot at 2606 Jackson Street, this 7,470-square-foot modernist residence is one of the few properties in Pacific Heights that deliberately breaks with the neighborhood’s architectural vernacular, standing as a case study for modern-style homes in a city of designs that are centuries old.
The owners assembled the site over more than a decade, purchasing an adjacent property in 2000 specifically to create a footprint large enough for what they had in mind. Lundberg’s structural response to that footprint was a steel-framed building with glass (an engineering decision driven in part by seismic performance). Where most Pacific Heights construction relies on wood framing with ornamental exterior finishes, the Perry House is built like what it is: a precision object placed in a neighborhood that didn’t ask for it, and which is better for its presence.
The result is one of the nicest homes in San Francisco for a buyer who wants views of Alta Plaza Park and the Bay, seismic engineering baked into the structure, and an architectural identity that owes nothing to the houses on either side of it. It listed in April 2026 at $22.5 million.
For anyone arriving in San Francisco from the tech world with an appreciation for systems that perform under pressure, the Perry House is the most legible property on this list. It was built to solve a problem, and the solution happens to be beautiful.
Our Experience Working In Pacific Heights
Pacific Heights is an exclusive neighborhood. And while we’ll talk about lots and zoning in a moment, there’s an unexpected trap waiting for homeowners beyond feasibility studies (and architects without experience working here): your new neighbors!
While there’s no official HOA in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, it can feel like it at times. On the one hand, you’ve got residents who have lived there for generations. On the other hand, you’ve got an influx of new blood and the collision between old and new is unavoidable.
Inexperienced architects don’t take this into consideration, and that can lead even the most ambitious designs straight into hot water. Even worse, those architects can burn right through retainers dealing with neighbor complaints as opposed to design.
In all ways, transparency is the best policy for our clients, the permit office, and our clients’ new neighbors. Lots can be bigger than standard San Francisco lots, which means there’s more room for design freedom. We’re proactive with our efforts by sharing the process and design early on so that neighbor expectations are aligned with the project.
This simple step minimizes stress for all involved and allows the neighborhood an opportunity to see something new come to life, and celebrate participating in the process.
Is Pacific Heights in San Francisco Right For You?
The amazing homes of Pacific Heights in San Francisco are not just real estate investments. They are statements about how you intend to live (who you want as neighbors, what views you wake up to, what architecture surrounds your daily life).
The neighborhood rewards buyers who approach it the way serious people approach any high-stakes decision: with a clear understanding of what they’re buying, what it’s worth, and what it could become. Ellison understood that in 1988. The numbers confirm it.
At the time of this writing, 26 single-family homes are available in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, averaging $5,510,000. The properties on this list are not in that category. But the buyers who will own them in 2045 are almost certainly looking right now.
If you’re beginning to think seriously about what your version of that decision looks like (what you can actually build, what a renovation of an older Pacific Heights in San Francisco home would cost and involve, what the process looks like before a single drawing is made) that conversation starts with a free 40-minute Design Discovery Session.