SELL BUY PROPERTY

Your Mama has just received a friendly missive from a New York-based public relations lady who thoughtfully let us know that The Jills released a jazzy, 2.5 minute long promotional video for Casa Casuarina, the extravagant former Miami Beach (FL) mansion of deceased Italian fashion designer and sartorial icon Gianni Versace.*

The glitzy and garish but—come on! —still fabulously dressed, 23,000 square foot Mediterranean mansion, located across the street from the beach on bustling and often loud Ocean Drive in South Beach, was put up for sale earlier this year with a too-sunny $125,000,000 asking price. Today, according to the missive from the N.Y. P.R. lady, the price tag for the 10 bedroom and 11 bathroom behemoth plummeted by 20% to $100,000,000.**

The children will recall that Mister Versace was brutally gunned down by that creep Andrew Cunanan in July 1997 on the front steps of this very mansion as he returned home from his morning jaunt to News Cafe a few blocks to the south, a place we too appreciate and occasionally patronize. His heirs and estate executors sold the sumptuous—and some might say meretricious—mansion in September 2000 for $19,000,000 to self-promoting telecom tycoon Peter Loftin.

The fastidiously maintained 1930s Mediterranean stands three floors above street level and is privately oriented around a flamboyantly embellished central courtyard with a 54-foot long mosaic-tiled swimming pool. Inside Mister Loftin has retained much if not all of Mister Versace's famously and cacophonously colorful and deliberately decadent day-core.

We're not sure of the specifics but Mister Loftin apparently faces—or faced—foreclosure on the property.*** Several years ago Mister Loftin leased the property to big time event designer Barton G. Weiss who reportedly has 6 or years remaining on a 10 year lease with an option to up for another ten. Mister Weiss operates the premises as The Villa By Barton G. a super-luxe restaurant, swank event space and 10-suite boutique hotel where rack rates we dug up online start at well over $1,000 per night.

In the promotional video one of The Jills rather brazenly suggests the next owner can access "instant celebrity" status—if they want it—simply by dropping a hundred million deuces on this globally renown residence where tourists still stop and snap pictures of themselves standing on the very spot where Mister Versace bled to death.

We really couldn't say how long this supposed celebrity status might last for the next owner but Your Mama is pretty dang sure that if bajillionaire comes along and snaps this place up to use as a crash pad/party pad for a few weeks or weekends a year The Jills can be assured that all us property gossips all around the world will wag our tongues about it for a few days, maybe a week. Maybe two.

Oh! Look at that! We're already doing it now.

*The Jills are a couple of high-powered and internationally recognized real estate brokers in Miami who are both named Jill and who work together under the Coldwell Banker umbrella.

**The P.R. lady in New York did not, of course, make use of the word plummet in any form or tense.

***We're not sure of the exact status of the reported foreclosure process.

SELLER Jeff Lewis
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,450,000
SIZE: 2,368 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: On the currently airing sixth season of the reality program Flipping Out, sometimes temperamental house flipper and sassy-pants Bravolebrity Jeff Lewis bought a 1940s traditional on Spring Oak Drive in Los Angeles, CA without telling his much younger and punctiliously primped live-in man-friend—and employee—Gage Edward who at least acted for the cameras as if he were none too pleased with the behind-his-back acquisition.*

Property records show the Spring Oak Drive domicile, located on narrow cul-de-sac in the Bronson Canyon area of Los Angeles, was acquired by Mister Lewis—and only Mister Lewis—in April (2012) for $1,350,000. Yesterday—sixth months and an extensive and expensive renovation later—the property is back on the open market with an only slightly higher asking price of $1,450,000.

Current listing information shows the stucco-sided house—set hard up on the narrow street like many houses in the canyons that twist up out of the L.A. and now painted an au courant shade of cement—has three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 2,368 square feet of fully renovated and systems-upgraded interior space. The house sits atop a tight but coveted by canyon dwellers street level two-car garage.

The open plan main living/dining/cooking space has putty-colored walls set off against gleaming white trim work, milk chocolate hued hardwood floors and a thick cluster of quasi-masculine chocolate brown leather sofas and armchairs. Both the bay window in the living area and the double bank of French doors that open to a Juliet balcony in the dining area have a minor city view broken—as seen on recent episodes of Flipping Out—by an unfortunate, eye-level lace of telephone wires and power lines. There's also a surprising amount of track lighting.

The Shaker style cabinets in the center island kitchen appear in listing photographs to be two shades darker than the walls and the slab counter tops—of unknown material—several more shades darker yet. The well-equipped has two sinks, a four-burner commercial-style range and convenient access to the backyard.

The master bedroom—the brown and beige and a little bit blue one—has an all-new attached bathroom with his and his sinks, a sizable soaking tub and a separate glassed-in shower stall.** There's also, according to listing information, a "walk in diva closet"—a term that, quite frankly, makes Your Mama squirm with discomfort at our fragile core. A hall bathroom is shared by two more bedrooms including what we think is Zoila's bedroom, the one with denim-colored walls, direct backyard access and a deep brown faux-fur blanket draped over the end of the bed. The last bedroom, with French doored access to a hedged patio on the front-side of the house, was used by Misters Lewis and Edward and office space.

Also used as office space is a spacious lower level area with separate side entrance, custom-built floor-to-ceiling storage cabinets—dee-voon!—and a large room with gray walls, gray wall to wall carpeting, white trimwork and a chunky brick fireplace that Mister Lewis doused in high gloss black paint. Listing information suggest this might make a nice media room and it probably would.

Just as he did with the house, Mister Lewis waved his house flipping wand over the terraced outdoor living areas that include a spacious concrete patio that wraps around the back of the house with separate dining area and lounging areas. A wide, gated stairway climbs up to the next level where there's a newly installed swimming pool and sunbathing terrace. A few more steps on either end of the pool curve up to a narrow but flat and grassy are and elevated spa with lovely if hardly spectacular view over Bronson Canyon.

Presumably Misters Lewis and Edward—and Zoila too—have finally moved to their big new house in Los Feliz , bought July 2011 for $1,625,000, where there may or may not soon be the and incessant wailing of a small child to go along with the onslaught of barbs and jabs for which Mister Lewis has become (in)famous.

*A little back story for those who don't watch the program: Mister Edward has made it clear he wants to make babies with Mister Lewis and was—so the story line went—under the impression they would move from their cramped West Hollywood rental to a much larger, family-sized house in the Los Feliz area that they were in the process of renovating at significant effort and expense. 

Besides Mister Lewis buying a million dollar plus house without consulting him, Mister Edward's primary concern with the Spring Oak residence was that it's simply not large enough to accommodate three full-time human residents (Misters Lewis and Edward and house maid Zoila), five pets (three dogs and two cats), two part-time domestic workers (Lupe and Nancy) and three full-time employees of Mister Lewis' design firm (Jenni, Vanina and that hot mess Andrew) plus a baby and—presumably—a live-in nanny because you know these two busy, high-maintenance queens will get a live-in nanny.

**Question for Mister Lewis: Why not a steam-equipped shower here? Do you not care for them? Too costly to install and maintain? Just curious because if Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter had your dough—and we don't—we'd most certainly have a steam situation in the master bedroom.

***We've never actually heard that. Just a a little, harmless literary license. 

listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty 

SELLER: Kimberly Guilfoyle
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,595,000
SIZE: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to the good and hard work of our ever-intrepid volunteer researcher Hot Chocolate, Your Mama has learned that attorney turned cable news personality Kimberly Guilfoyle recently pushed her roomy pre-war pad in New York City's Upper East Side on the open market with an asking price of $1,595,000.

The smokey voiced brunette—who bears a strong resemblance to former supermodel Janice Dickenson—won't likely be a household name for those who don't watch one of the many cable new channels. Before she hosted Both Sides on Court TV in 2004 and appeared as a legal analyst on Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), Miz Guilfoyle toiled in the District Attorneys' offices in both Los Angeles and San Francisco where she successfully prosecuted at least one high-profile case that involved a deadly dog mauling. For the last five or six years the stylish Miz Guilfoyle found her professional niche, primarily, on the Fox network as a regular, rotating co-host on The Five and a contributor of legal analysis to a few other pundit-driven programs like The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity.

In 2001 Miz Guilfoyle was married in a glitzy and much-discussed wedding to California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, then the beau-hunky lefty liberal city supervisor and later mayor of San Francisco. In 2004 she moved to New York City to pursue a television career and the pair publicly split in 2005, no doubt at least in part due to the obvious difficulties of their bi-coastiality.

In late May 2006, three months after her divorce from Mister Newsom was finalized, Miz Guilfoyle hitched her wagon a second time to multi-disciplinary designer and style arbitor Eric Villency. Four and a half months later she/they produced a boy child, an heir to the New York-based Villency furniture fortune, one presumes. Alas, just about three years after baby the couple went their separate romantic ways.

In July 2009, right about the time she and hubby number two parted ways, Miz Guilfoyle Newsom Villency spent $1,300,000 on a three bedroom and two bathroom bacherlorette pad on the 11th floor of a fine but too far east of Park Avenue to be fashionable, full-service pre-war co-operative building with 24-hour doorman services, full-time elevator operators, a live-in super, a bike room and a landscaped roof terrace that's available to residents year round.

Current listing information for Miz Guilfoyle's spread shows the monthly maintenance fees—including the property taxes—come in at $2,464 and that some of the extra-special features include a total of 10 closets plus a walk-in closet sized sleeping alcove or home office, a spacious foyer that does double duty as a dining room, a dry bar with mini-fridge, a mud room service entry and a living room furnished with an remote controlled electric fireplace described in marketing materials as "hip," whatever that's supposed to mean.

Listing photos the show the girlishly sophisticated, high-glam day-core features a palette of creams and soft pastels, tons of high- grade finishes, cute crystal door nobs and numerous glittery chandelier including a Sputnik-style stunner in the living room similar to those that glimmer gloriously in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House.

The luxuriously windowed and expensively outfitted kitchen has white, crystal-knobbed cabinetry topped with slabs of white marble and the full complement of top-grade stainless steel appliances. There's additional storage in the bench of the built-in breakfast banquette that's lit—natch—by a shimmering crystal chandelier.

A short corridor off the living room leads to the two larger bedrooms. While one bedroom is larger and has two instead of one closet, neither is—technically—a master suite as they share a windowed hall bathroom with Calacatta gold marble finishes. The third bedroom, a jail cell sized accommodation off the mud room, has a tiny but attached and windowed private bathroom.

Property records show that Miz Guilfoyle is on a bit of a real estate roll lately. In January 2012 Miz Guilfoyle sold a small Edwardian-style apartment building in San Francisco's Mission District that she co-owned with her father for $1,200,000 and a few months later they sold a couple condos that father and daughter co-owned in an adjacent building for a total of just over $1.6 million.

In May 2012, perhaps evidence she plans to remain on the East Coast indefinitely, Miz Guilfoyle coughed up $995,000 for an almost 2,000 square foot, barn-style three bedroom and 2 bathroom house with a heated salt water swimming pool on a secluded acre near Crooked Pond in the quietly hoity-toity Hamptons community of Bridgehampton.

listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Douglas Elliman

Since at least March 2011 rapper, songwriter, music producer and televised singing contest judge Cee Lo Green* (The Voice) leased a 4,200-ish square foot residence just above the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, CA owned—as it turns out—by actor, race car driver and indie pop rock band drummer Frankie Muniz (Malcolm in the Middle, the Agent Cody Banks franchise).

Howevuh hunnies, according to our always so freakishly well-informed friend and aide-de-camp Lucy Spillerguts Mister Green recently decamped Mister Muniz's updated 1941 traditional for a smaller, more contemporary crib in the so-called Bird Streets 'hood** high above the Sunset Strip.

Listing information Your Mama teased out of the interweb shows the house in question, tucked privately into the top of a quiet cul-de-sac, was last listed as a fully-furnished lease in early September (2012) at $18,000 per month. Of course, we don't know what the agreed upon rental price actually is and/or if the house was let completely, partially or un- furnished.

Property records show the current owner—well-known L.A.-based interior designer Darryl Wilson—paid $1,500,000 for the Bird Street nest in April 2007. The seller? None other than chisel-chinned hairdresser to the stars, beauty industry entrepreneur and occasional reality t.v. star Jonathan Antin (Blow Out, Shear Genius).

Marketing materials and online listings from when Mister Antin first heaved the house onto the market in March 2007 with an asking price of $1,699,000 show the single story mid-century residence measured 1,423 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms.

As interior designers are inclined to do, Mister Wilson gave the post and beam contemporary a full face lift, nearly doubled its size and returned it to the open market in February 2011—according to documentation thoughtfully provided by Our Fairy Godmother Above the Sunset Strip—with a puffy price tag of $3,200,000. The sleekly angled dwelling now has 3 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in about 2,700 square feet.

The open plan main living space has stunning, matte-finish hardwood floors and a new-fangled retro-style wood paneled wall that gives a strong over-note of Scandinavian dry sauna that's effectively downplayed by the myriad of artworks hung salon style. The slightly pitched and heavily beamed ceiling is counter-balanced by long banks of floor-to-ceiling windows and glass sliders in the living, dining and cooking areas that toy with the eyeball's perception between indoors and outdoors.

A slight, angled kink to shape the living/dining space injects a Cubist's kind of movement to the room that opens on one end to a compact and more intensely and awkwardly angled but expensively finished and equipped sky-lit kitchen. At the other end, through a door set into the paneled wall, there's direct access to the window-wrapped master bedroom with city views. The attached master bathroom isn't particularly large but it does have a daring, kneecap to ceiling window behind the shower and tub that injects a toe-curling sexual tension into a room typically used for far more mundane—and even ugly—but necessary purposes such as flossing, dipilitating and evacuating.

The glassy rear façade spills out to a compact but well organized, stone-paved courtyard-like terrace with plunge-sized swimming pool, elevated spa, bathroom-less but boob-toob equipped poolside cabana and a spectacular, over-the-shrubbery view beyond the towers of Century City towards LAX and the Pacific Ocean.

Mister Antin and his former wife Sescie moved from his former Bird Streets bachelor pad to a much more child-friendly, 2,800-plus square foot ranch style residence in the upscale enclave of Toluca Lake that they bought in April 2007 for $1,980,000. We're not exactly sure when the couple went their separate ways but we do know that they unsuccessfully attempted to sell their Toluca Lake ranch house in November 2009 when it was listed for $1,999,000. In 2011 they tangled with Mister Foreclosure and in January 2012 the property was taken off their hands by a mysterious corporate entity.

Mister Muniz is well known among celebrity property watchers and real estate gossips as a relatively frequent shuffler of the cards in his property portfolio. He once owned a house just above the Sunset Strip he sold to Halle Berry in 2005 for $5,995,000 and in 2004 he spent $4,650,000 on a low-slung modern on Blue Jay Way that he sold the following year for $3,900,000.

In the early days of 2006 Mister Muniz dropped $3,499,000 for the Sunset Strip house that, until recently, was rented by Cee Lo Green but is now back up for sale at $3,195,000 and is also listed to lease at $14,000 per month. As best as we can tell Mister Muniz also owns a faux-Tuscan mini-mansion in Scottsdale, AZ he bought in May 2008 for $2,782,000—and made available for lease in November 2011 for $7,250 per month—as well as a much more contemporary four bedroom and four bathroom crib in Phoenix, AZ that he picked up in August 2010 for $2,650,000.
 
listing photos: John Aaroe Group / Darryl Wilson Design

*A Texas woman that Mister Green has dated on and off since early in 2012 claims the entertainer drugged and sexually assaulted her after they had dinner in July in downtown L.A. Unnamed sources tole the celebrity gossips at TMZ "both took Ecstasy and stayed up all night," and that "the woman fabricated the story because she's involved with someone back in Texas who got wind she was in L.A. with Cee Lo and she was just covering her butt." Make of that what y'all will.

**The Bird Streets are so-called because, obviously, all the streets are named after—you got it—birds.

For now this ain't nuthin' but a juicy morsel of high end real estate scuttlebutt but Your Mama hears from the impeccably informed Charlie Chitchatter* that the colossal, hilltop contemporary compound in the hoity toity hills of Bel Air that Robb Report named as their Ultimate Home in 2011 is very quietly being shopped around with a blistering $150,000,000 price tag by—somewhat curiously—a Montecito, CA-based real estate broker well known in real estate circles to work with a very well-heeled clientele.

The village-like residence—an interconnected collection of structures designed by Richard Landry and composed mostly of glass, steel, smooth stucco and rough-cut sandstone—sits high and tight tight tight on just over 1.5 acres and surrounds a fully-enclosed, piazza-like central motor court. Combined, the civic center-sized behemoth measures in at around 40,000 square feet and contains a staggering number of bedrooms—28—and God only knows how many bathrooms. It's gotta be several dozen, right?

A few of the interior features include: numerous rooms for formal and informal entertaining; a zebra wood lined library; a home theater and separate recording studio; and a mini-mansion sized master suite with dual dressing areas and at least one bathroom sheathed almost entirely in white onyx; a complete spa facility with gym and private massage rooms.

Outdoor amenities include: a roof terrace with views from downtown to the Pacific Ocean; a deep and heated loggia for comfortable outdoor living even on cool winter evenings; a resort style negative edge swimming pool with tanning shelf; terraced fruit orchards. Below the pool there's a titanic terrace with outdoor kitchen and sand stone fireplace perched atop a roomy recreation room outfitted with media lounge area, billiards table and a built-in leather-clad bar.

For more delicious pictures and more detailed information about the house, we suggest you stop in with the Robb Report.

The current owner—we've been told it's one Saudi prince or another, but we're not sure—purchased the property back in November 1993 though a corporate entity for $1,875,000 from legendary pop music composer and producer Burt Bacharach who—irrelevantly to the topic—worked with two of Your Mama's favorite ladies: Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry.

We don't know what the property taxes were back in 1993, but the peeps at Blockshopper reveal that in 2010 the current owner was ranked as the 21st highest residential real estate property tax payer in Los Angeles with a bill that came to a mouth drying $359,432 and eighty damn cents. A few quick and unscientific tabulations on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that—based on a standard 40-hour work week at the current $8.00 per hour minimum wage rate in California—it would take 21.6 years for a minimum wage worker in California to earn the equivalent amount of money. Whatever your politics, children, that's a staggering statistic.

photo: Erhard Pfeiffer for Robb Report

*We've since also heard it from a second and also impeccably-placed source, let's call him Ben A. Fisshel, a real estate mover and shaker who operates deep inside the cut throat Platinum Triangle real estate game.

SELLER: Bruce Makowsky and 
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $26,500,000
SIZE: 15,193 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It was jut five short months ago that ladies' accessories tycoons Bruce Makowsky and Kathy Van Zeeland—married designers and purveyors of boat loads of mid-priced ladies handbags and shoes—paid comedian Martin Lawrence $17,200,000 for his 7 bedroom and 9.5 bathroom mansion on 2.2 gated and landscaped acres in the unapologetically showy Bevelry Park enclave in Beverly Hills, CA.
 
Well, dontcha know booter beans, yesterday Mister M. and Miz V.Z. flipped the 15,000+ square foot pile—current listing information describes it as a "newly renovated...Neoclassical estate"—back on the (open) market with a far more voluptuous $26,500,000 price tag.*

We're not sure what all exactly the Makowsky-Van Zeelands did to justify the astonishing $9.3 million increase in value that their current asking price suggests. However, a quick comparison of current listing photos to those from June 2012, when the property briefly popped up on the the rental market at a sphincter-clenching rate of $200,000 per month, shows the couple did—at the very least—hire Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota to get her decorative claws up in there to re-dress the spacious house in a more streamlined and generically contemporary manner. 

The recent renovations clearly included a minor face lift in the kitchen. The bull-nosed seal gray granite counter tops that look to our boozy eyes like the exact same material as the shiny stone floor  were not replaced but the maple-colored cabinetry were painted a crisp, snow white and the hardware was switched to a chrome-colored material** Mister M. and Miz V.Z., to their decorative credit, also replaced the godawful, circa-1982 panel-style light fixture over the massive center island with a far more elegant, if slightly under-sized pendant with a silver-lined matte black shade.***

The double height foyer appears mostly unchanged with gray-veined white marble floors, a curved staircase, elaborate wrought iron railings and a vast stained glass ceiling. Also mostly unchanged, as far as we can tell, is the wood paneled formal dining room outfitted with a green marble topped table and glittery crystal chandelier that we have to admit is pretty terrific as far as Old School chandeliers go. We can only hope it's some priceless Austrian thing or, maybe, an impressively pedigreed stunner plucked at auction from a 18th century chateau in the Loire Valley. Anyhoo... The current dining room has an adjoining, temperature-controlled wine cellar that we're not sure was or was not there at the time the Makowsky-Van Zeelands acquired the estate.

Multiple living and entertaining rooms include a formal living room with fireplace and an adjoining pub-room with sunken bar and built-in fish tank. A kooky, completely tufted sectional sofa faces an imposing carved stone fireplace in the ballroom-sized family room that also has pale blond hardwood floors and numerous, heavily draped and prominently valanced windows and French doors that extend luxuriously all the way to the heavy-duty ceiling moldings. At the far end of the family room, a carpeted sunken t.v. viewing lounge is set into a curved wall of windows and equipped with a custom-milled media cabinet and a bespoke semi-circular sofa that wraps around a coffee table shaped a tad bit too much like a giant terlit seat for Your Mama's partickaler decorative tastes.

The home theater has disturbing, blood red carpeting, blood red fabric panels set into vaguely Art Deco style columned archways, eight or more chocolate brown leater recliner seats and a marble-floored concession center with a generous selection of candy, a commericial-style popcorn popper and—just as every self-respecting home theater in a grandiose Beverly Hills Macmansion should—a built-in soda dispenser.

The second floor master, entered—natch—through double doors, has beige wall-to-wall carpeting, curvaceous-looking beige walls, a fireplace, and (at least) four sets of arched French doors that open to a wrap around Juliet balcony. There's also his and her bathrooms—at least one of them is lined with not-particularly-private floor-to-ceiling arched windows and has white marble floors, marble-topped make up vanity and a small chandelier hung ominously above a chunky, sarcophagus-shaped free standing soaking tub.

There are additional guest suites and "ample staff quarters," according to current listing information, plus another 1,000 square feet guest house/gym and an outdoor kitchen. At the north end of the property there's a second, rear motor court, a four car garage and a sunken and lighted tennis court with a viewing platform. Down in the sunny south eastern corner of the estate, there's an octagonal pool house—that may or may not be the aforementioned 1,000 square foot guest house/gym, we're not sure—and a broad stone tile terraces for dining, lounging and sunbathing around the swimming pool and elevated spa. We can get pretty snarky about this house—its exactly the sort of house that gives Your Mama nightmares—but, let's be honest children, the view across the pool and beyond the dozen padded sun loungers that flank a vivid yellow and white striped cabana to the distant mountains and palm tree interrupted sky line looks like a too-pricey boo-teek hotel that Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter might like to stay in once or twice.

We're not quite sure where Mister Lawrence moved but a reasonably thorough perusal of public and property records available on the internets Your Mama tells Your Mama that Mister Makowsky and, by extension, his wife Kathy Van Zeeland are newly minted real estate ballers of the highest order and with a strong emphasis in Beverly Park. 

According to the well-worn beads of Your Mama's trusty bejeweled abacus, in the last two or three years Mister Makowsky and/or Miz Van Zeeland have shelled out more than $80,000,000 on a heavy duty handful of humongous and hugely high priced residential properties in Beverly Hills and Malibu. That's right, eighty million clams. That means, through their various outlets that include scads brick and mortar retailers as well as at least one major home shopping network, Mister Makowsky must unload more than 300,000 metallic Goodwin Satchels that retail at $268 bucks apiece on at least one online retailer we consulted in order to recoup their combined investments. Looked at another way, Miz Van Zeeland needs to pawn off more than 1,145,000 imported, giraffe-printed synthetic leather zip over satchels**** now available sale on the same-as-above online retailer for $69.99. That is, to be sure, a lot of goddamn satchels.

*Current listing information shows the Lawrence/Makowsky-Van Zeeland mansion encompasses 15,193 square feet while marketing materials from June 2012, when the palatial—if decoratively outdated—property was put up for lease at $200,000 per month, show the bulky X-shaped structure measures 16,178 square feet. Even more perplexing, perhaps, is that at least one property record data base Your Mama accessed shows the "Neoclassical" manse measures 13,835 square feet as does the Los Angeles County Tax Man. Make of those spatial discrepancies whatever y'all will.  

**We have no idea if the hardware is chrome, stainless steel, nickel or nickle-plated. We can only surmise from the listing photos the hardware is, as we described, "chrome colored."

***Your Mama has no idea when the pitiful panel-style light fixture was actually installed. It could have been 1982, 1992, 2002 or any other year before, after and in between. 

****Although we highly doubt they come from Italy—Italians, as a general rule, don't do synthetic leather—Your Mama doesn't know from whence the satchels came. We also are not at all positive that  actually is or was intended to be a giraffe print. 

listing photos: Coldwell Banker

BUYER: Dr. Dre and Nicole Threatt
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $15,400,000
SIZE: 9,696 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Late last week Your Mama received an rapid fire cluster of covert communiques from an obviously well-informed fellow—let's call him Freddie Finefellow—who thoughtfully sought to let us know that his thorough research turned up evidence that wickedly rich* rapper/producer/audio headphone tycoon Dr. Dre—real name: Andre Romelle Young—dropped  a very A-list $15,400,000 on an I-have-arrived style mansion high above the Sunset Strip near the high-priced apex of the celebrity-chic Bird Streets neighborhood** of Los Angeles, CA.

Property records Your Mama peeped and poked around show the off-market deal went down very quietly way back in December 2011 and that the huge hilltop house was purchased through an opaquely named trust that we were easily able to connect to Mister Dr. Dre's real name as well as to several other properties he owns in the Los Angeles area.

The deluxe but architecturally ambiguous house—we'll call it a soft contemporary because we don't know how else to categorize it—wasn't officially on the open market at the time of Mister Dr. Dre's acquisition but older older listings from mid-2009, when the city view estate last sold for $12,800,000, shows the 9,696 square foot house was "newly built in 2001" and "recently cosmetically buffed." 

Listing information from 2009 also indicates the gated and privately situated residence is powerfully sited on a broad, private promontory at the tail end of a quiet cul-de-sac with extraordinary, eyeball shredding 280-degree views that—on a clear day—stretch beyond downtown, over the Baldwin Hills and across the Pacific to the outline of Santa Catalina Island. There are—or were in 2009, according to listing information form the time—six bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

The primary public entertaining spaces include—again, as per 2009 marketing materials—an impress-the-guests style foyer with floating curved staircase, a formal dining room that seats 10 or more and a decidedly grand, double-height formal living room with fireplace, high-gloss wood floors and a towering, two-story wall of windows and glass doors that connect to a shaded veranda that over looks the unusually flat backyard.

Listing photos from 2009 show a giant greenhouse window floods the sleek and shiny center-island eat-in kitchen with natural light and a spacious "garden room" outfitted with a booze hound friendly built-in wet bar.

A view like this—of the sprawling, semi-suburban metropolis of L.A.—might not be every person's preferred cup of property tea but that doesn't take away from the fact that a view like this, from the back veranda of a private mansion in the center of a gigantic city, is goddamn spectacular. You can hate Los Angeles—and heaven knows there are loads of people who loathe Los Angeles for a variety of both justifiable and precocious reasons—but it's just plain boneheaded not to be able to appreciate a view such as this property possesses.

The second floor master suite offers a soaring ceiling and a full wall of city view windows, a sitting area with fireplace, a small private terrace with big views and boutique-sized walk-in closet/dressing room. In 2009 the attached master bathroom was equipped with a shower stall lined on two exterior walls with hip high windows so a person can take in the city views whilst washing their coochie-coos.
 
Wide stone terraces and a deep covered veranda extend the living areas outside and step down to a flat grass pad plenty big enough for a good-sized Rover or two and a dark-bottom, T-shaped negative-edge swimming pool and spa.

In addition to his new, I-have-arrived-style digs above the Sunset Strip, Property records show Mister Dr. Dre owns a number of other properties including a 13,748 square foot mansion with 8 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms tightly wedged onto a wedge-shaped parcel in an affluent gated community in proto-suburban Woodland Hills, CA that he picked up in May 1999 for $2,375,000. For what it's worth, former teen idol, actor and reality show denizen Scott Baio owns a 5 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom mini-mansion on the same street he and his missus bought in November 2010 for $1,850,000.



In October 2010, property records suggest Mister Dre dropped $4,750,000 on a four-story, 8,843 square foot ocean front house on Malibu's swish and swanky Carbon Beach. The 6 bedroom and 7 bathroom house was—as it turns out, on the open market for most of 2011 and part of 2012 with little or no tongue wagging by the property gossip. As best as we can tell from old listings we squeezed out of the internets, the property was first listed with an $11,000,000 price tag that inexplicably increased to $12,500,000.

*In 2011, Forbes estimated Dr. Dre had a net worth of a quarter billion bucks and last month, they estimated, he'll haul in another $110 million in pretax earnings in 2012. Kaching!

**So called because all the streets are named after—you got it—birds.

listing photos (Sunset Strip): Hilton & Hyland
listing video (Malibu): Areté Estates