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to my personal residence, so access to the
property is a lot easier than to Val Verde. We
made that transaction early in 2010.
I still love Val Verde; I think it’s a great estate.
It’s just that [after considering] the time and
effort we’d have to spend on both estates, we
decided to go with El Fureidis.
What, then, are your plans for El Fureidis?
Possibly my parents will live there. This may
change in the future, but right now the plan is
for my mom and my wife’s parents to live in it.
I hope they will feel at home and that it is not
too large, but we can give it a try. At this point,
we think by March 2011 we’ll have a complete
renovation and the house will be livable and
ready for the family.
This is a grand estate. How many bedrooms does
it have?
El Fureidis is a large house. We made some changes
to the interior by recreating how it was originally. There were four small rooms
upstairs and we went back to three. There is a master bedroom on the ground floor,
so it’s not about bedrooms; it’s about the size of them. It’s five bedrooms but they’re
really large and spacious and El Fureidis has a beautiful ocean view from the terrace.
Now that you have settled in Montecito and have a family, what is your ultimate goal
and are you actively pursuing other real estate purchases locally?
To complete the restoration of El Fureidis and make the house livable and to just
enjoy the property. I’m not looking for any other properties right now. I would like
to focus on SG Companies, a business we started in Santa Barbara, San Francisco,
and L.A. This is my only goal in the United States for now.
Give us a little background of your latest venture then, SG Companies.
I started to think about creating SG Companies when the financial meltdown
in the United States hit its peak in 2008. At that time I personally felt that banks
basically shut down in a matter of a few months, not
physically
shut down, but
their approach to lending and the unavailability of credit. I had been a client of
American banks for a long, long time and when I immigrated and began looking to
finance some commercial projects or residential projects, I found that banks were
afraid to lend. So I had a personal kind of experience where banks were just unable
to provide you with credit.
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(above) Italian Renaissance furniture and fixtures, along with a smattering of Moorish and Gothic
touches, picked up and discovered by Gillespie during his world travels are found throughout the house;
(below) According to David Myrick’s “Montecito and Santa Barbara, Volume II,” there were some 125
varieties of palms on the estate when first built.