Pacific Heights mansion wants $40 million

A couple of homes cracked the $40-million mark this year, with 950 Lombard ($45 million) swiping the most-expensive-SF-listing sash last week from 181 Fremont’s grand penthouse ($42 million). The latest entry to the four-oh club is an off-market Georgian mansion in Pacific Heights.

Featuring five beds, five and a half baths, and 10,500 square feet, 2590 Green was featured in a 2008 Architectural Digest article (Metamorphosis on the Bay) that highlighted both the home and the former owner’s unabashed wealth. To wit:

Sitting on a lot that drops steeply to the rear, the house originally had three floors of boxy rooms, connected by a bulky staircase of short, segmented flights, and a partially buried bottom level with low ceilings. Working closely with interior designers Paul Vincent Wiseman and Dara Rosenfeld, of The Wiseman Group in San Francisco, Oakland-based architect William B. Remick developed a plan to open up the interior and reconfigure the space around a new stairway.

Extensive below-grade excavation—requiring the house to sit on shoring towers for nearly a year—allowed for the addition of a guest room, a gym, a home theater, a wine cellar and a billiards room. The once cramped garage became a steel-floored, seven-car showcase for the sleek red Ferraris and other automobiles collected by the husband, who runs a telecommunications company.

The downright gorgeous home, which was built in 1920, comes with a wellness center, a home theater (a throwback to the days of yore), and a bronze-railed stairway that reaches all four floors.

Asking is $40 million.

• 2590 Green [Michael King Estates]