Scooter Braun, the high-profile manager of some of the biggest names in music—including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato—and who drew the ire of Taylor Swift in 2019, has purchased the former Broad Art Foundation building in Santa Monica from an entity linked to Prince Alexander von Fürstenberg. According to the Wall Street Journal, the final sale price of $25.9 million fell short of its asking price of $32 million some months ago.
Front view of the former Broad Art Foundation, purchased by Scooter Braun. Photo: Anthony Barcelo. Courtesy of Westside Estates Agency.
The building is all but hallowed ground for the art crowd of Los Angeles. Built in the 1920s for a telephone company, the structure was purchased by the Broad Art Foundation in 1984 to serve as a “lending library dedicated to increasing public access to contemporary art through an enterprising loan program,” said its website. To date, the foundation has made more than 8,500 loans to over 500 museums and galleries around the world. At its Santa Monica location, it also functioned as an event space for artists and other creatives to gather.
In 2016, having outgrown the building’s 24,000 square feet across four floors, the billionaire art collector and “venture philanthropist” Eli Broad decamped for downtown L.A. There, he opened the Broad, a scaled-up art museum showcasing the vast contemporary collection he and his wife, Edythe Broad, have built together. The collection now comprises nearly 2,000 works by more than 200 artists, becoming one of the world’s leading collections of postwar and contemporary art.
A rooftop designed for entertaining. Photo: Anthony Barcelo. Courtesy of Westside Estates Agency.
That same year, 2016, the Santa Monica building was picked up by Alexander von Fürstenberg, son of fashion icon Diane von Fürstenberg, for $16.5 million. According to the listing by Westside Estate Agency, the brick and terra cotta property sits across from Venice Beach. The landscaped roof deck has several lounging areas that provide stunning panoramic views of the low-rise neighborhood, downtown Santa Monica, and the Pacific Ocean.
Scooter Braun appears to be on a roll. In September 2021, he paid $65 million for a home in Brentwood. The 19,000-square-foot modern farmhouse was previously owned and built by Larry and Kathleen Paul, part owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team. That sale marked the largest residential deal in Brentwood history and the second largest in all of L.A.’s Westside.