imaginative traveller: Listing of the week: Mary Kay's pink mansion

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Listing of the week: Mary Kay's pink mansion

Zillow

Mary Kay's former home is painted a soft pink

By Erika Riggs, Zillow

Mary Kay Mansion
8915 Douglas Ave, Dallas TX
For sale: $3.3 million

The former home of the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics is exactly the color you would expect: A soft shade of light pink. Mary Kay pink, to be exact.

Mary Kay Ash's stucco mansion was built in 1984 by Dallas Design Group and served as the businesswoman's home and headquarters for entertaining Mary Kay consultants until 2000. Although Mary Kay did not design the home, touches of the makeup icon are inherent in many of the home's features, according to listing agent Karen Luter.

Like, for instance, the solid pink quartz toilet and bath.

The beauty-product queen's former home is back on the Dallas real estate market for $3.3 million. Mary Kay sold the home in 2000 in her efforts to downsize, and now the current owner, a Dallas physician, is following suit and hoping to move to the San Juan Islands. What's unusual, notes Luter, is that both Mary Kay and the physician are successful entrepreneurs.

"It's interesting that it [the home] was purchased by Mary Kay, who was a self-made woman, and it was sold to another self-made woman from humble beginnings," said Luter.

Ideally, the next owner would follow the trend, but if the buyer happens to be a self-made man, Luter says she won't discriminate.

Despite its pink-hued exterior, the interior of Mary Kay's home has an elegance that belies the outside.

The home is built on a grand scale, with 40-foot-high ceilings and a foyer that includes busts of famous composers inserted in the ceiling. Highly detailed paneling and moldings appear throughout the house, as well as enormous floor-to-ceiling, beveled glass windows that look out to the terraced gardens.

Situated on an acre of land in the high-end Dallas neighborhood of Old Preston Hollow, the grounds of Mary Kay's home were designed to mimic the San Simeon estate, William Hearst's famous home in California.

The former Mary Kay home was redone by the current owner: New flooring, paint, updated kitchen and geothermal system for heating and cooling.

Mary Kay Cosmetics was founded by Mary Kay Ash in 1963. Frustrated when her employer promoted the man she trained rather than her, Mary Kay quit to write a book to help women succeed in business. Out of her research, she realized she had a business plan that would work for her makeup company. She began giving out pink Cadillacs to her top Mary Kay sellers in 1969.

In an age when many women were not encouraged to work outside the home, Mary Kay's company was a significant opportunity. Luter shared an anecdote from one of the woman who worked with Mary Kay in the company's early days:

"Mary Kay told them (the consultants) to work really hard all day and then get home and saut? some onions in a skillet. As the fragrance fills the house, your husbands will think you've been cooking all day."

According to Zillow's affordability calculator, a monthly payment on the pink manse would run about $12,150, assuming a 20 percent down payment on a 30-year-mortgage.