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Interest in pricey
home takes off

Andre Tatibouet's telephone and cell phone started ringing around 6 a.m. Friday with calls from each coast and the space in between.

The first call was from a friend in Manhattan who said Tatibouet's Diamond Head home was the "House of the Week" in that day's edition of the Wall Street Journal.

"I would have eventually seen it, with my coffee, but it was 6 o'clock in the morning," Tatibouet chuckled.

The call prompted him to hike to the front door and retrieve his copy of the paper.

The house, if you can call a 13,400-square-foot structure with nine bedrooms, eight-and-a-half bathrooms, seven wet bars and a two-story library by such a modest word, has been on the market since at least September.

Tatibouet referred potential buyers to Realtor Patricia Choi, of Choi International, whose number appeared in the article.

The asking price is just under $19.9 million, but the Journal article set an opening bid of $17.5 million.

Tatibouet's listing of the home for sale is unrelated to Central Pacific Bank's foreclosure suit against him for $15.1 million it says it is owed for the Coral Reef Hotel, he said.

The Tatibouets' empty-nest situation spurred the decision to put Villa Noela on the market. His late mother and her caregiver had lived in the home until his mother was moved to a hospice facility. She died in November.

The Tatibouets' grown children are putting down roots in Massachusetts, "so it's just Jane and Andre (in the sprawling estate)."

They'll be scaling back their residential footprint and visiting the east coast frequently and the grown kids "will always have a home to come to" in Hawaii, he said.

Buzzbits

The Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center location of Cheesecake Factory Inc. reported about $19 million in sales in 2004, making it the top performing restaurant in the nationwide chain. The 550-seat location was the largest in the company when it opened in December 2003 with 400 employees, 350 of them hired locally. ... Shoppers at Wal-Mart in Mililani can also pick up auto insurance from AIG Hawaii, should that be on the shopping list. AIG Hawaii opened an office in the store last weekend that will be open from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Sunday. As part of a grand opening promotion, shoppers can enter to win a $500 gift card.