SANTA FE – Actress Shirley MacLaine has put her 7,450-acre Plaza Blanca Ranch at Abiquiu up for sale for $18 million, so she can spend more time in Santa Fe, a local Sotheby’s agent confirms.
MacLaine told the Wall Street Journal she consulted psychics before setting the price and they advised her to sell it for $30 million. But she settled on $18 million because “nine is the number of completion” and the digits in 18 (1 and 8) add up to nine.
“If it works for Shirley, it works for us,” Susan Kline of Sotheby’s International Realty’s Santa Fe office said in a Friday interview.
She and fellow Sotheby’s agent Lynden Galloway are handling the sale. MacLaine’s ranch has a 9,000-square-foot main house, a swimming pool, a labyrinth, a yurt and several other buildings.
Kline called the property “awesome” and “magical” and noted that it’s part of the spectacular high-desert landscape made famous in the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. “It’s all about the land,” Kline said.
“Shirley picked up on all that, that wonderful spirit that has been cultivated there for millions of years.”
“It’s very hard to convey that to someone who has never seen it,” Kline added. “That’s our challenge.”
MacLaine, 79, famous for her interest in alternative spirituality, told WSJ she “views the ranch as “a refuge from a very confused and conflicted world.” The newspaper reports that she built an underground apartment beneath the ranch house, with four bedrooms, a living room and kitchen, modeled on the American Indian kiva. She conducted parts of reincarnation seminars in the space.
Of spending more time in Santa Fe, where she purchased a house six years ago. MacLaine said, “I want to go to the movies, good restaurants. I really need to be closer, or I would tend to become a complete recluse out there.”
MacLaine set off controversy in Santa Fe in 1993 when she planned a home on Atalaya Mountain and had a road bulldozed there. She abandoned the site amid an uproar that ridgetop homes were ruining Santa Fe’s viewscape.
