Joel Horowitz, co-founder of the fashion label Tommy Hilfiger, must be a happy man. The reason? Donald Trump is reported to have sold his own Palm Beach property, which was on the market for £63m. The pool of multimillionaires able to spend that kind of money on a home is not great – so that means less competition for Horowitz’s own 210-acre estate, Tranquility, on the banks of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, which is on sale for £50m.

It is intriguing to watch the marketing of a property that is now the second most expensive in America, behind Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s £68m Aspen retreat. Time-wasters get short shrift: the nearest a browsing buyer would get to Horowitz’s home is a look at the first-stop web page of the selling agent, Shari Chase of Chase International, where a few romantic images of Tranquility are overdubbed by lush advertising blurb. To see more, you must be allowed into the special password-protected website. Chase guides me through it.

Horowitz and his artist wife, Ann, bought the plot of land, situated just off US 50, the main east-west highway, in 1996. A huge project, Tranquility was 18 months at the design stage and then took 150 men another three and a half years to construct. Its location on the eastern, Nevada side of the lake is a plus: the state does not levy income tax on individuals or companies, which may explain why people such as Mike Love of the Beach Boys, the Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek and the billionaire Larry Ellison are drawn to the region.

The house is approached by a drive of almost a mile that curls uphill through pine and aspen forest. In the distance to the west is Lake Tahoe and at the back of the house is the Horowitzes’ own private Tranquility Lake. Both are cupped by panoramic views of the Sierra Nevada.

The next step, through the front doors, is pure déjà vu for film fans. “This stairway is an exact replica of the one on the Titanic,” says Chase. “There is another replica in London and Mr Horowitz had someone go over and take rubbings of it. This is exactly the same as the one in the movie.”

The hall spirals off into a circle of reception rooms. The showpiece is the enormous grand hall, with a pair of 18th-century fireplaces that face one another across the floor, and hand-carved, wood-panelled walls. There is also a cigar lounge fashioned after one at the St Regis hotel in New York, and a library that is a copy of the New York Public Library. The dining room is magnificent, with ornate ceiling paintings, and 300-year-old plank flooring reclaimed from a French manor house and installed by a craftsman flown in from France.

Horowitz is a collector of art and antiquities, and everywhere there are valuable porcelains and oil paintings, all of which are included in the price – the house is for sale fully furnished. Other rooms worth noting include the 3,200-bottle wine cellar, with an antique bronze door from the William Randolph Hearst collection, and a cinema with 19 seats – one for every member of the immediate family.

A tunnel connects the main house to a conservatory – a wise addition, because the snow can reach 6ft deep in February. Here, beneath its retractable roof, are a glass mosaic swimming pool and spa, all the instruments of torture you need to keep fit and a poolside bar to ease the pain. Outside, there is a 5,000 sq ft guesthouse and a wooden barn and stable. There is a boat pavilion for less formal parties, and for sports junkies there is also a basketball court, complete with NBA regulation backboards and scoreboards. There are two over-the-water, par-three golf holes and, should your game need some fine-tuning, you can practise on the golf simulator. In total, the property includes eight buildings, none of which is visible from another, giving 38,000 sq ft of living space – 20,000 sq ft of which is in the main house.

The Horowitzes have only ever used this estate as a second home, and now, with the children grown up, they intend spending more time at their main East Coast property. So, how easy is it to sell a £50m estate such as Tranquility in today’s recession-hit climate? Not very, apparently, since the house has been on sale in America “very quietly” since October 2006. It is now being marketed to international buyers. Russians and oil-rich Venezuelans are among those seen as target purchasers.

“The pool of potential buyers who can afford a home like this is very small, so you can’t expect to sell it overnight,” says Chase. “On the plus side, those who do have that kind of money are beyond being affected by the economic downturn. I have already shown the estate to one of the top billionaires in the world. We’ll sell it pretty soon.”

Tranquility, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, is for sale with Mayfair Office (020 7467 5334) and Chase International (00 1 866 233 7111, www.tranquilitylaketahoe.com)

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