A fully equipped sex dungeon inside a luxury Woodside estate. A Tampax box filled with $20,000 in rolled bills. A permanent 30-foot-tall Christmas tree. These are but a few of the oddities that Bay Area estate sale managers have found over the years in the homes of the ultrarich.
“The dungeon was in their barn,” said Amanda Kuzak, a Los Altos-based estate sale specialist who has been helping affluent property owners in Silicon Valley offload their assets for 20 years. “They had straps on the walls and dog cages. But they didn’t put dogs in those cages.”
Kuzak estimates she’s liquidated more than 1,000 Silicon Valley mansions, giving her a direct line into the secret lives of the uber-wealthy in burgs like Atherton and Los Altos Hills. “The $30 million to $40 million price point is very common for us,” she said of clients’ home sales. “Those markets are wild.”
The practice of estate sales dates back to medieval times, when they were used to settle debts and redistribute property. But the Bay Area, home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, is a unique beast, according to sellers. Sometimes clients pay a flat fee for a sale, based on its assessed value — it’s common to bring in appraisers for high-value items — other times they work on a revenue split, averaging 30% of total sales.
“We get a peek inside a lot of different lives,” said Kuzak. “We find sex toys. Huge porn collections. Drugs. Nothing really shocks me anymore.”
Vicky Kearsey, who operates Beehive Estate Sales, once discovered a hidden room full of silver coins, accessible via a secret opening behind a closet. “When people have passed, they can’t tell you what they’ve done,” she said. “They do very unusual things.”
Kearsey has made her specialty the conspicuously adorned homes of the East Bay, zeroing in on estates in toney burgs like Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda. She estimates that 20% of her clients are families upgrading from $10 million “starter” houses to mansions worth $20 million to $50 million. The other 80% are people who are redecorating or downsizing to move into luxury retirement homes, or families auctioning off the estate of a deceased relative.
During a clearout of a mansion in the Oakland Hills, a residence formerly owned by a defense attorney, Kearsey found 50 loaded handguns. “There was a sawed-off shotgun above the door in his closet. There were guns attached underneath the desk in his study,” she said. “They were all loaded. It was very scary.” The place had already been swept by police, she added. Apparently, they’d missed a few pieces of the arsenal.
For Al Bolo, the 59-year-old founder of Bolo’s Estate Liquidations, 80% of clients are relocating, whether it’s a Sequoia Capital partner leaving Atherton for Montana or a Pacific Heights Billionaires Row resident moving to Marin. San Francisco owners have more eclectic tastes than their Peninsula counterparts, Bolo contends. Bronze statues and abstract art are “really hot in San Francisco right now.”
Rich people do random stuff, Kearsey has learned, and can be forgetful. “I found $20,000 in notes wedged inside a Tampax box under the sink,” she said. “We also found a gold bar in someone’s office supplies, and gold coins in a Tupperware jar.”
Like us, the uber-rich might also neglect to take down their Christmas trees in a timely fashion. But rather than haul theirs to the curb in the spring, a Kuzak client left the 30-foot-tall, bauble-covered tree towering in the home’s grand hallway for two years before the estate sale crew arrived.
They are different in other meaningful ways. One of Kuzak’s clients bought an $18 million mansion on a whim and used it for only two months before deciding not to keep it, then asked Kuzak to get it ready for sale. Another had 20 full-time staffers maintaining the grounds of an estate the client hadn’t visited in years.
At one Atherton estate sale, Bolo found $250,000 of Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry hidden in a shoebox. He texted the owner, who “was flabbergasted that they’d forgotten them,” he recalled.
At another sale, he was surprised to find the owners had invested millions turning their Woodside mansion into an Egyptian wonderland, complete with marble walls, giant tapestries, and a pool dyed green “to match the Nile.” It was gorgeous, but Bolo worried that the amassed possessions might not connect with local buyers, so he rang a contact at the Luxor Las Vegas, who scooped it all up. “You have to think outside the box sometimes,” he said.
On the more traditional luxury side, Kearsey unearths a lot of bling. These have included a 2.5-carat alexandrite ring valued at $24,000, 14-karat gold and pearl earrings, and Tiffany and Christian Dior necklaces. She displays the most expensive finds in glass cases during sales, sometimes hiring armed security. Haute couture is common among the clothing left in closets, she added: “We get a lot of Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Hermes.”
For shoppers, these luxury discards can mean incredible deals. So deep are the discounts (which are determined by the estate sale companies, with exceptions for fine jewelry and art) that the sale managers sometimes become shoppers themselves. Kuzak has purchased a Chanel pin and an entire “collection of vintage Ferragamo flats” from her clients. “I regret not buying the black Birkin bag we had in recently,” she said, referring to a luxury handbag that retails for anywhere from $8,500 to $2 million. “We sold three Birkins a couple of weeks ago.”
Bay Area buyers have gotten wise to the existence of everything from heavily discounted Restoration Hardware sofas to Rolexes to Pelotons, Kuzak said. “In other parts of the country, people would buy something and never part with it. Here, it’s constant turnover.”
Her business has evolved, too. In July 2023, she launched the app Kuzak’s Closet, shifting her business from IRL chaos to digital democracy. No more elbowing your way to that vintage Eames chair — now everyone’s got a shot at Silicon Valley’s castoffs from the comfort of the couch.
Antiques are common, and this being the Bay Area, some of the best “antiques” are tech artifacts. “We’ve sold one of the first Apple computers, Atari, Playstations,” Kearsey said. Discmans are hot with Gen Zers, she added. For Bolo, his hot tech item was an Apple Lisa Computer he uncovered on a Woodside estate. “It was so cool, so nerdy,” he said. It sold for around $10,000.
Kuzak said she’s seen a rise of estates selling off their Covid essentials. Fancy home gyms and pricey work-from-home setups — complete with green screens and ring lights — are hitting the market faster than you can say “Zoom fatigue.”
Beehive Estate Sales operates in-person only; Kearsey keeps the address of each sale a secret until 5 a.m. that day. When ex-Golden State Warrior Adonal Foyle’s Orinda estate hit the market in September, it was like Black Friday for sports memorabilia, Kearsey said, with hundreds of voyeurs turning up. “Generally, we don’t advertise the names of famous people. We try to play it very discreetly.”
Being in the estate biz has helped Kearsey keep her possessions streamlined. “I purge stuff I don’t use,” she said. Meanwhile, her clients are drowning in stuff. “It’s always shocking how much people accumulate here — it’s way, way more than a normal person.”
She is often puzzled by what people leave behind when they move, especially things one might expect to pass down through generations. She has sold artworks by Picasso, Dali, and Chagall, and Remington bronze statues. “I’m surprised the family doesn’t want it, but they have fine art up the wazoo,” she said. In her experience, many clients feel guilty about letting go of heirlooms, but their kids have little interest in them.
Their disinterest could be another person’s future heirloom — at least if they’re looking to outfit a sex dungeon or have a house big enough for a 30-foot Christmas tree.
