Tuesday, 17 July 2012
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $2,950,000
SIZE: 4,072 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Hotel heiress, handbag designer and Tinseltown gal about town Nicky Hilton has hoisted her Los Angeles, CA residence on the open market with an asking price of $2,950,000.
Property records (and various reports from the time) indicate Miss Hilton, now pushing 30, bought the large but fairly unassuming 2-story residence just over five years ago, in June 2007, for $2,800,000 and current listing information shows Miss Hilton's house, set a bit above the street with a semi-circular driveway on a long cul-de-sac just above the western tail of the famed Sunset Strip, was built in 1942 on a .35 acre parcel, measures 4,072 square feet and contains total of 3 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms.
Like her older sister, Paris, Nicky engaged the services of Hilton family friend, lady-decorator and Tinseltown gal about town Faye Resnick, former b.f.f. of Nicole Brown Simpson who once appeared in her birthday suit in Playboy (1995), occasionally appears on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and did up (some but not all) of Miss Hilton's home in a very tightly restrained (and kinda cliché) glamorpuss-a-thon black and white palette with lots (and lots) of chrome, mirrored and white lacquer accents.
Wide brick steps climb up from the driveway to a spacious entrance hall with gleaming, milk-chocolate-colored hardwood floors. To one side of the foyer, the white-walled formal living room has glossy black moldings; a wide window that overlooks the front yard; French doors that open to the backyard; and a sexy fireplace—or "sexy" fireplace depending on your point of view—flanked by a pair chrome and glass bar carts and a pair of kitchy white ceramic dogs that we're not 100% sure where meant to be kitchy.
One one side of the fireplace Miss Hilton has hung an iconic 1955 photograph by Slim Aarons of stylish (and deceased) East Coast socialite and writer C.Z. Guest standing poolside with her son (and a couple of dogs) in front of the wacky Grecian temple at Villa Artemis, her ocean front estate in Palm Beach, FL. On the other there hangs what could be—but may or may not actually be—a Bert Stern-snapped portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
On the other side of the foyer from the formal living room Miz Resnick papered at least one wall in the formal dining room with an appetite-suppressing, Rorschach-ian black and white pattern that was mirrored in the white applique design on the front of a black lacquer cabinet opposite the front door. Did y'all catch that decorative slight of hand, too?
An old-school swinging door in the dining room connects through to the sizable, center island kitchen finished with herringbone-pattern wood floors that look in listing photos to be a reddish-caramel-color and that Your Mama hopes and prays are actually the same milk-chocolate color as in the rest of the house; white, hardware-free cabinetry, some with glass fronts; black, possibly granite, counter tops; black and stainless steel commercial-style appliances including 4 ovens and 2 built-in fridges; a roomy pantry; an upsetting, sage green painted ceiling and an even more distressing industrial-looking pot rack hung over the center island with only a handful of pots and pans.
The walls of the adjacent breakfast room are papered in the same distinctive, Don Loper-designed Martinique banana leaf pattern as is installed on the walls of the fab Fountain Coffee Shop downstairs at the perennially-iconic and impossibly-chic Beverly Hills Hotel, a hotel, incidentally, Miss Hilton's family neither owns nor ever owned.
Additional rooms and amenities, according to current listing information, include a family room/den with fireplace that does not look like it's been given a once over by Miz Resnick or anybody else for that matter; a gym and sauna; interior laundry facilities; and a master suite described in current listing information as "Dramatic" with 2 huge closets and 2 bathrooms, at least one of which has multiple mirrored walls, double sinks set into some sort of burnt orange colored counter top material, and an oval soaking tub.
Many rooms off the back of the house open to a narrow, tree-shaded backyard nestled into a steep slope with meandering, multi-level Mexican paver tile terracing, lagoon-style swimming pool, spa, waterfall and outdoor fireplace.
Current listing information also lets it be known Miss Hilton would is also willing to lease the property at a rate of $15,000 per month.
listing photos: Hilton & Hyland
