I thoroughly enjoyed the tour I took of Wayne Newton's home Casa de Shenandoah in 2016 (conducted by one of his backup singers). I think I heard he sold the property. Can you update us on who owns it, if they will ever provide tours again, and what will happen with the vacant visitors center across the street from the home?
Casa de Shenandoah, the 36-acre estate once located at 6629 S. Pecos Road owned by "Mr. Las Vegas," entertainer Wayne Newton and his wife Kathleen, was put on display in 2015 for public tours. By all accounts, it was a popular, successful, and profitable tourist attraction to which this question attests.
By that time, however, the Newtons no longer owned the estate, which had been purchased for $18-plus million by a Texas businessman, Lacy Harber, who started the tours to pay the bills on the historic landmark. But the Newtons still ran the tours, apparently, up until July 2017, when Wayne was bitten by a spider and had to be hospitalized in critical condition.
In May 2018 less than three years after the tours started, Casa de Shenandoah was closed to the public. The reason given at the time was the need for “extensive maintenance, repairs, and renovation." Only a couple of months later, on July 10, 2018, it was announced that the estate would be returned to a private residence, ending the tours for good. No reason was given.
The Newtons hadn’t lived at the Casa ranch since 2013. They now live about a mile down the road.
In 2019, Harber sold the entire property to Smoketree LLC, a company that has never really surfaced; it's registered as an entity domiciled in Las Vegas with only the agent listed. The sales price was a heavily discounted $5.56 million. Prior to the sale, Newton made an offer to buy back the estate for $6 million and believed he had an agreement; then it was sold out from under him for nearly a half-million less. Newton sued Smoketree over the contents of the estate, his antique and art collection and other personal items and he ultimately prevailed.
As for the visitor center across the street, that and its 10 acres were sold in in October 2019 for $10-plus million to a Portland, Oregon-based real-estate investment group, Harsch Investment Properties.
And that's where things stand currently with the Newtons' beloved Shenandoah. Now that all remnants of the Newton era are gone and there are two owners, we highly doubt that the property will ever be open to the public again, at least not in its current condition.
 |
Hoppy
Oct-12-2023
|
