The San Francisco luxury real estate market continues to percolate this fall, with a member of a famous coffee family selling a long-time Pac Heights home for $12 million.
Austin Hills, cofounder of popular Napa winery Grgich Hills Estate and grandson of the cofounder of Hills Brothers Coffee, is only the third owner of 2546 Jackson St., a 8,155-square-foot residence across from Alta Plaza Park that dates to the late 1880s. The newly minted fourth owner, according to property records and state LLC filings, is Rocky Toads LLC, which shares a San Francisco address with Tobin Capital Group, a private equity firm focused on self-storage and prefabricated housing.
Buyers agent Ted Bartlett of Compass and sellers agent Farnoosh Hariri of Coldwell Banker declined to comment on the sale.
The four-story home has nine bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms, four fireplaces, and other original period details, according to a marketing brochure. It sits on the 70-foot-wide lot with a circular brick patio and a detached three-car garage.
Hills, who has the same first and last name as his entrepreneurial grandfather, was chairman of the board at Hills Brothers Coffee prior to its sale to Nestlé in 1985. The brand is now owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, which also makes Chock Full o’ Nuts and MJB, another coffee roaster with San Francisco roots.
As his family’s coffee company was winding down in the 1970s, Hills joined forces with winemaker Mike Grgich. His Napa chardonnay famously beat the French at a 1976 blind taste test known as “the Judgement of Paris” that was dramatized in the 2008 film “Bottle Shock.”
Grgich Hills Estate produces about 65,000 cases of wine per year; the estate-grown chardonnay is among its top sellers.
Hills also shares a name with his son, who at one point planned campaigns for San Francisco mayor and district attorney but this summer was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly chasing a Tesla security guard and repeatedly ramming his Land Rover into an occupied car before fleeing Fremont police and getting arrested in Napa.
The alleged attack occurred the morning of June 12, just three days after 2546 Jackson St. hit the market at $12.5 million.
The younger Hills appears to have been living in the home at the time, as a Tesla to which he had access was found abandoned in a walkway of Alta Plaza Park across from the home on the same morning of the Fremont episode.