Earlier today Your Mama relayed the already much reported rumors and reports about how Her Hollywood Highness, Cher, went and sold her two-unit duplex combo condo at the Sierra Towers building in an off-market deal for (an as yet unrecorded) $5.25 million.
That alleged purchase price is a smidgen less than the frequently cited $5.5 million dollar asking price but a fortune more than the $3 million she paid idiosyncratic and gleefully lurid actor Vincent Gallo for the two floor condo in early 2006.
With Sir Elton John's exit from the building last year and Cher's more recent decampment, other residents will no longer have to worry about the hair raising circumstance of getting caught in the elevator with Elton, Cher and Joan.*,**
It wasn't long before Your Mama heard from well connected informant Patty Cake who whispered that the scuttlebutt on the West Hollywood high rise gossip grapevine is that the as yet unidentified buyer plans to release the duplex from Cher's thematically one noted Martyn Lawrence Bullard done Balinese-y day-core and to expand the approximately 2,500 square foot duplex into a third adjacent unit.
There have been several other notable transactions over the last year at Sierra Towers. Super fit apparel entrepreneur Marc Ware recently unloaded his 24th floor 1 bedroom unit for $3,350,000 to Minneapolis-based financier Jim Pohlad. Mister Pohlad is an heir to a multi-billion dollar family fortune and the current owner of the Minnesota Twins, a professional baseball team we were informed by our Minneapolis based b.f.f. Chow Lee. He inherited his ownership of the team from his shrewd rags to riches businessman father Carl Pohlad who went to meet his great banker in the sky in 2009.
So Your Mama was told by a couple of separate sources last August, the well-born and so-called Homeless Billionaire Nicolas Berggruen—the globe-trotting philanthropist and private investor with dual American and German citizenship who famously and until recently did not own a private residence and lived exclusively in a series of swank hotels—is currently in the process of combining two and possibly three high(er) floor units into a single 5,000 square foot aerie. The no longer homeless billionaire spent, we were told, close to $7.5 million for the three separate but contiguous condo apartments that were not, at the time, on the open market and, combined, have sweeping views of downtown L.A., over the lowlands towards Catalina Island and beyond Beverly Hills to the smattering of towers that comprise Century City.
And finally, in March 2012, after 1.5 years on the market at ever decreasing prices, one of the building's two penthouse pads—a 3,081 square foot spread with three bedrooms, three bathrooms and wrap around terrace with 300+ degree views—was sold for a sky high $6,400,000. Your Mama was told by someone in the position to know that the owner gutted the penthouse and then successfully flipped the concrete shell six months later in a very quiet off market deal to an unknown buyer for $10.2 million.
Getting back to Cher, the superstar is widely reported to have floated her Malibu estate back on the market as a pocket listing with an asking price of $41 million and her son Elijah Blue recently listed his house in Venice—that was purchased with his mother's real estate trust—with an asking price of $1,899,500.
*That's Joan Collins, of course, who has maintained a pied a terre at Sierra Towers for a number of years
**We tease. For all we know Elton, Cher and Joan are b.f.f.s who have spent many Saturday nights painting each others' toenails and braiding each others' wigs.
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
