Anjelina has a home for you

The Campbell Cliffs Estate

We don't know what the 22nd Century will look like, but this magnificent Campbell Cliffs Estate may give us a glimpse. It is Tucson's largest and most expensive estate, and chock-full of the latest technology. It sits on the Catalina Mountains, on ten breathtaking acres. Its backyard is the Coronado National Forest, and beneath it rests the entire Tucson Valley.

The house has 24 room and 31,000 square feet of living space. Unique Homes magazine calls it "a monument to human comfort, architectural artistry and high technology"

Campbell Cliffs features "inside-out" and "floating" designs. In any given room, the floor tiles or fireplace mantels extend outside, past the windows, to provide a seamless transition from home to desert.

Coconino Sand Stone laid by a master Vietnamese mason glorify the structure as natural light flashes through the home from every direction through some 8,000 square feet of dual pane, low-e safety glass -- some sections standing as high as 36 feet tall.

The 1200 sq. ft. kitchen has salad, dessert and meat preparation areas with infrared warmers, trash compactors, a commercial freezer with a 60 cubic-foot capacity, and a filtered ice-maker. 40+ feet of preparation countertops are easy-clean thick granite.

There is a lot more to show and tell, but the above should suffice for anyone who is able to take a quick decision and snap it up on Ebay before the crowd gets there. The price is a cool US $13,500,000 – not including the Lear Jet you will want to fly in and out from your main residence in New York.

Meet Anjelina Belakovskaia

So who is putting this magnificent estate on sale? Who is the agent who will show you around and negotiate all the little details that need to be addressed when you make a snap purchase? It is none other than our good friend WGM Anjelina Belakovskaia, three time US women's chess champion and real estate agent.

Anjelina used to live in New Jersey, just a half-hour ride from Manhattan, and the tradition was that we always visited her (and her charming husband Lawrence) for a home prepared Sushi meal. This was the case every time Armand Rousso arranged one of his mega events – Kasparov vs Deep Junior, Kasparov vs X3D Fritz, etc. Mind you, we first got to know Anjelina during the Kasparov vs Deep Blue match in 1997, when she gave us a very candid assessment of the play of the world champion.

Anjelina serving finest Sushi in her apartment in New Jersey

This remarkable young lady moved from her native Odessa, Ukraine, to the United States in July 1991, to play in the World Open in Philadelphia. She got off the flight from Moscow to New York with $100 in my pocket, knowing only a few words of English. She was a professional chess player who had won the Women's Championships of Soviet Union and Ukraine – and at the same time graduated from the Odessa Agricultural University with a B.S. degree in accounting and bookkeeping.

Her first job in the US was slicing watermelons and playing chess – with the hustlers at Washington Square Park. "Two, five and ten dollars per game" were her first English words in the country, she says. Anjelina told us how on her first day she came home with something like $35 – and the feeling that she had struck a gold mine. "Such a lot of money, so easily made – so it was true that it was only a matter of time before you became a millionaire in America." Unfortunately that chess enterprise was short-lived. After about ten days nobody wanted to player her any more. They had lost too much money.

After that she opened a chess school for children, rented an apartment, found some friends and began to speak a little bit of English. She moonlighted with numerous jobs, including a bit role in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer", which earned her enough money to pay an immigration lawyer for a green card. She took up tournament chess and in 1993 was awarded IM title. Anjelina won the New York Women's Chess Championship three times and played in the 1994, 1996 and 1998 Chess Olympiads as part of the US Team. In 1995 she became US Women's Chess Champion, defending her title successfully one year later. In 1999 she won the title for a third time.

At the same time Anjelina, like a remarkable number of other chess player in the US, worked as a currency trader, later switching to the stock market. In 1999 she became a graduate student at New York University, graduating in 2001 with a Master Degree in Mathematics in Finance (her Master's Project was "Basket Default Swap in the Emerging Markets"). Since November 24, 1999 she has been a naturalized American Citizen.

Anjelina and Lawrence

In 2001 Angelina met Lawrence Bernstein at the Marshall Chess Club, and in 2002 the two got engaged on an ocean cruise in Alaska. It was done the traditional way, with Lawrence dropping down on one knee and popping the question. The couple were soon married and now have a son called Brian Belakovsky. They live in Tucson, Arizona, where Anjelina works as a Real Estate Agent.

Full biographical material is available on the Anjelina Belakovskaia home page

PS. Anjelina tells us that for people who are looking for something less, well let us say pretentious, than the Campbell Cliffs Estate shown above, there are less expensive houses available. The average home price in Tucson is $200,000. "A $200K home in Tucson is comparable to $600K in CA and NY", she tell us. "50% of buyers are out-of-state. If people are looking for great Real Estate investment in the US, you know that they can trust me. And I wouldn't mind to introduce International investors to the community." Here's the contact: