For sale in Fort Worth: $8 million mansion and a piece of Cowtown history

A Fort Worth mansion with a fascinating history made headlines this week when Bloomberg Pursuits, the luxury brand of Bloomberg Business, featured it on its website.

The 14,000-square-foot home on Crestline Road, near River Crest Country Club, is selling for $8 million, but that’s only the beginning of the eye-popping details on the three-story mansion, which was completed in 1913 by the prestigious Fort Worth architecture firm of Sanguinet and Staats.

There are six bedrooms and eight bathrooms on three levels, a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, a full fitness center, two kitchens, plus a huge outdoor barbecue area that includes a gas pizza oven. There’s a large pool, naturally, and a guest suite on the 1.5 acre lot.

There’s even a concrete bank vault, according to Bloomberg, complete with a steel door, that today has morphed into a media room.

The Baldridge Estate, as the home is called, was named for its first owner, Earl Baldridge, and it is one of Fort Worth’s original homesteads. In 1978 it was registered as a historic Texas landmark.

But the ornate house has undergone major renovations in the last 10 years, when Paun Peters, president of the oil and gas company Western Production Company, bought the house as a foreclosure.

“My wife, dare I say, lusted for that house,” Peters told Bloomberg. “She always dreamed of having herself in there and walking around on one of those balconies.” They bought the house for about $3 million and put in millions in renovations, including a half-million spent on the lush landscaping, he said.

Peters and his wife are downsizing and moving to Dallas, which is why the palatial Fort Worth estate in on the market now, looking for a new owner to take it into its second century.

This story was originally published March 10, 2017 at 1:07 PM with the headline "For sale in Fort Worth: $8 million mansion and a piece of Cowtown history."