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 News from Around Banderas Bay | November 2005 
License to Thrill
 Helen Davies - timesonline.co.uk
| | Bond girl, Luciana Paluzzi’s £7m Mexican pad is for sale, says Helen Davies of The Sunday Times |
Want to live in a James Bond villa? Now you can — or close to it. Luciana Paluzzi, the Italian actress who played fiery redhead Fiona Volpe in Thunderball, is selling her clifftop house at Costa Careyes on Mexico’s Pacific coast for £7m (12 million USD).
Paluzzi’s villa is one of seven on the Peninsula de Estrellas, a wealthy gated community south of Puerto Vallarta where neighbours include the singer Seal and model Heidi Klum. Most owners fly in on their private jets to an airport an hour’s drive away.
“I don’t want to sound like a snob,” says Paluzzi, “but when you get to Puerto Vallarta, you see people in shorts with beer bellies and cowboy boots. It’s not like that in Careyes. There are no day-trippers like in St Tropez. Everybody is left alone.”
Paluzzi and her husband, Michael Solomon, former president of Warner Bros International Television, waited three years for the perfect plot. “I knew where I wanted,” she says. “I flew down the next day to make sure. There was no electricity, no water, nothing.”
It took two years to build their villa, Casa Dos Estrellas, which was completed in 1994. Paluzzi won’t say how much the site and the work cost, but says it was “a fortune”.
“You think that because it’s Mexico things are cheap, but it’s just the opposite.”
Inspired by the local style and the difficult terrain, the villa is a series of linked curved huts. The interiors reflect the bright pinks, yellows and reds of Mexico, matching the bougainvillea on the terraces. The house was designed by architect Manolo Mestre, who also designed heiress Isabel Goldsmith’s hilltop villa just above Careyes.
There is an 80ft swimming pool, a private beach, six bedrooms, including a sprawling master suite with his- and hers- baths and four and a half acres of lush greenery.
Paluzzi made nearly 60 films between the 1950s and 1970s, and married Solomon in 1980. They own homes in Beverly Hills and Miami Beach, but are selling to see more of their family, who are based in New York and Rome.
Casa dos Estrellas would let for £64,000 ($110,000 USD) for the Christmas fortnight. “Almost all big villas that you can rent for Christmas have gone to Londoners,” says Wayne Hudson of Careyes Villas, “mainly to those in investment banking and the hedge-fund industry.”
www.careyesvillas.com |
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