SELL BUY PROPERTY

SELLERS: Michael Rapino and Jolene Blalock
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $2,975,000
SIZE: 4,710 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In late 2003, right about the time Live Nation Entertainment CEO and President Michael Rapino married petite and pin thin model/actress/accomplished Crayon artist Jolene Blalock (Star Trek: Enterprise), property records show he coughed up $2,850,000 for a micro-estate in L.A.'s lower Nichols Canyon that he and the missus listed last month with an only slightly higher price tag of $2,975,000. The price must have been spot on because within three weeks the mock-Med villa—built in 1979 with four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms—was put into escrow with an unknown buyer.

Live Nation Entertainment is a recent and somewhat controversial merger between Live Nation—a concert promoter—and ticket selling juggernaut Ticketmaster. Live Nation owns dozens of performance venues around the country and they produce, promote and sell oceans of often high-priced tickets to vast numbers of concerts and other events. According to online statistics—and you know how everything you read on the internets is true—Live Nation had nearly $5.5 billion in gross flow through revenue in 2011.

Some of the more eagle eyed and memory blessed children might recall that a few weeks ago Your Mama discussed some scuttlebutt then making its way around in the Platinum Triangle about former Live Nation Executive Chairman Irving Azoff shaking up his music mogul worthy real estate portfolio.
Anyhoo, active listing details show the walled and gated micro-estate encompasses: a sizable motor court with parking for five or more cars; a front-facing attached three car garage; several modestly scaled but lushly landscaped gardens and courtyards; a partly octagonal two-story residence that opens to an indoor/outdoor living/dining area with a built-in barbecue station; a heated salt water swimming pool ringed by hedges and one of those abominable child-safety fences; and, finally, a lighted tennis court overlooked by a tented and curtained pavilion stuffed full of body torturing gymnasium equipment. All that, children, is crowded like a Tokyo subway car during rush hour onto a compact .58 acre lot.

the interior spaces are—natch—wired for sound and security and include a proper entrance hall, a sunny great room with fireplace, a separate formal dining room with oddly angled walls and wood floors and a brooding, oak paneled den with vaulted ceiling and built-in wet bar. The center island eat in kitchen is certainly spacious and well-equipped with a built-in desk area and top-notch stainless steel appliances but there's something, well, a little too ordinary about it. Maybe it's the ho-hum blond Shaker style cabinetry, the buff colored tile floors and/or maybe its the too ubiquitous MacMansion-style beige and brown flecked granite counter tops? The second floor master suite, according to the listing descriptive, skews celebrity-style with a sitting area, fireplace, dual walk-in custom closets and an over-sized bathroom with spa tub and steam shower.

As it turns out, Mister and Missus Rapino—who currently have one toddler age child—have already acquired their next home, a two parcel compound in a particularly posh pocket of Brentwood in Los Angeles with a  a much larger, far more expensive and more family-friendly mansion and a separate guesthouse. Property records show they paid $14,750,000 for both parcels.

The main house, a gated and new-fangled East Coast-ish sort of traditional with black shutters, measures in at 11,213 square feet with five bedrooms and six full and three half bathrooms including a spacious master suite with private office, walk-in closet and dual bathrooms.

Although the property spans just .66 acres, there's adequate room for a parking lot-sized tree-shaded circular motor court at the front and out back a deep terrace that extends the full-width of the house as well as a fair swathe of flat lawn—where Your Mama would bet Mister Rapino soon installs a very expensive jungle gym—and a decent-sized heated swimming pool.

In addition to all the usual features—formal living and dining rooms that both have fireplaces, a roomy family room, a chef-friendly kitchen, etc.—the three-story mansion has a fully finished basement that contains a guest (or staff) suite, a fitness room, an office, a bedroom-sized temperature controlled wine cellar, a projector equipped screening room and a suburban kitchen-sized laundry room outfitted with two washers and two dryers, a center island folding table with marble counter top, inlaid tile floors and enough high gloss white cabinetry to stock every brand of detergent, fabric softener and bleach known to mankind. As can and ought to be expected in a nearly $15 million mansion in Los Angeles, the property is secured with a state-of-the-art closed circuit television system.

Included in the Rapino purchase was an adjacent but legally separate parcel that happens to butt up against the extensive, sculpture sprinkled grounds—see the coiled Serra piece in the lower right corner?—that surround the whackadoodle architectural confection that Frank Gehry conjured up for home building tycoon and deep pocketed art world patron Eli Broad and his wife Edye. Gehry's extravaganza makes a thrilling and geometrically complicated if not easily comprehensible amalgamation of very contemporary residential and museum-style vernaculars but, then again, what does Your Mama really know about anything?

Anyhoo, the L.A. County Tax Man Office—and other information we easily teased out of the interweb—shows the mostly wooded .66 acre property sits well well off the street up and around the bend down a long, shared driveway and includes a 2,365 square foot ranch style house with three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms in 2,365 square feet. Combined the two lots total 1.19 acres.

listing photos (Nichols Canyon): Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills South
listing photos (Brentwood): Partners Trust
aerial photo (Eli Broad): Google

SELLER: Joseph Plumeri
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $32,000,000
SIZE: 8,360 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms (plus an additional staff room and bath)

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen chickens, Your Mama was unexpectedly waylaid and re-routed this morning so we are all kinds of discombobulated, bent out of shape and plum worn out. Rather that prattle on about the slew of recent celebrity real estate transactions we haven't yet gotten around to discussing—or linking to—we thought rather than leave y'all high and dry it might be fun to veer off a bit for little afternoon delight in the form of some good ol' fashioned and very high brow New York City floor plan porn, shall we?

Even before we arrived home Your Mama very fortunately received a communique from our ever vigilant aide-de-camp Hot Chocolate who captured Your Mama's limited attention with a colossal, full-floor condop* spread at 995 Fifth Avenue in New York City that just popped up on the open market with a bell-ringing $32,000,000 asking price.

The children may recall that free-spirited and sartorially fearless beer heiress Daphne Guinness recently sold her outrageously dressed and art filled condop apartment at 995 Fifth Avenue, formerly the Stanhope Hotel. Miz Guinness sold her 4,100-ish square foot half floor unit in late November (2012) for $11,300,000—$435,000 less than she paid for the place in spring 2008—to some otherwise little known outside of Wall Street but obviously very rich portfolio manager named Matthew McLennen and his pixyish blond wife Monika. The children may also recall that Miz Guinness was involved in a very public legal dustup with her downstairs neighbors who successfully sued after their apartment was repeatedly water damaged after Miz Guinness somehow managed to overflow the bathtub in her master bathroom on four separate occasions. The court ordered the skunk-haired Miz Guiness to pay for the repairs of the damages but tossed out the neighbors request for financial compensation due to "mental anguish and emotional distress."

Anyhoodles poodles, a few short minutes research on the internets turns up clear and easy evidence that the behemoth, 8,000-plus square foot sprawler was purchased in March 2010 by insurance services fat cat Joseph Plumeri who coughed up just over $21,000,000 for the 15th floor residence that developers first listed in May 2007 with a significantly higher $33,000,000 price tag.

Maybe Mister Plumeri isn't a household name for all the celeb obsessed tabloid readers but in the banking and insurance industries he's a bone fide playa, babies. The Willis Holdings Group, the company at which Mister Plumeri is the CEO, is such a big deal that they were able to buy the rights to the old Sears' Tower in Chicago. That's why the 1,451 foot tall skyscraper is now, officially, called Willis Tower. 'Tis true.

As it turns out, Miz Guinness's neighbors weren't the only residents of 995 to file a lawsuit. Mister Plumeri actually filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the developer, Extell, after post-purchase renovations uncovered a hornet's nest of (alleged) issues and defects that "create a nuisance and/or danger to the 15th-floor apartment residents and other's life, health and safety." The issues were hardly trivial and were cited in the New York Post as "'numerous latent defects, including defective waterproofing, defective installation of floors and soundproofing...defecting fireproofing, [and] defective structural work.'"

The Stanhope building is austere and elegant and worth knowing something about if you care about such things but, in the interest of time, rather that fashion a new one, we're taking the easy way out toda. Here's how Your Mama described the Stanhope back in February 2012 when we discussed Daphne Guinness's apartment that was then listed at $14 million:

The Stanhope, a stately if somber limestone and brick edifice designed by preeminent New York architect Rosario Candela in 1926 stands directly across from the southern flank of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The building was converted to 26 (or so) luxury residences in the early- to mid-Aughts and offers its well-heeled residents white glove services (doormen, porters, valet parkers, etc.), a private library/conference room, access to the on-site (and very posh) La Palestra spa and fitness center, 24-7 concierge services accessible through a touch panel/video intercom, and wine storage space (plus sommelier recommendations and free delivery) at Acker, Merrill and Condit, a swank wine shop on the Upper West Side.


Listing information puts Mister Plumeri's palatial pad at 8,360 square feet and shows there are eight bedrooms and ten full and one half bathroom. We don't dispute the 8,360 figure but a brief scour of the floor plan included with current listing details and we came up 2-3 guest/family bedrooms lined up on the northern facade, a separate guest suite off the entrance gallery, a discrete—and discreet—staff bedroom with private bathroom tucked up behind the fire stairs and a multi-room master suite situated in the southeast corner. At best, that's a total of six bedrooms. We're not sure where the eight comes from. We also tabulated the number of bathrooms shown on the floor plan and we came up with not 10.5 bathrooms but seven full and two half bathrooms. Perhaps there are a couple of crappers we've over-looked?

We realize that 8,300 and some square feet might not sound large compared to a 35,000 square foot mega-mansion in Beverly Park or Alpine, NJ but by New York City standards, it's a whale-sized apartment for sure. Mister Plumeri's pad is so massive, in fact that it has three street frontages: Fifth Avenue, East 81st Street and Madison Avenue.

A quick comparison of the floor plan included with marketing materials from the time Mister Plumeri purchased the condop and the floor plan included with current listing details shows that Mister Plumeri made some minor but important alterations to the extravagantly proportioned apartment that still includes a 36-foot long entrance gallery with direct elevator access, a nearly 41-foot long living room with three gigantic windows that peer over the Met and beyond to Central Park.

About ten feet of the formal dining room was sliced off to make room for a walk-in temperature controlled wine cave; The corridor access to the old library was closed up and the library became the study that's now only accessible by traversing the new library—the old media room—and passing through a short hallway flanked by a half bathroom and convenient wet bar; In the 600+ square foot open-plan kitchen/family room Mister Plumeri had an ovale breakfast banquette built into an over sized window; An oddly located staff room just behind the family was incorporated into one of the guest bedrooms and a new staff room (with private bathroom) was carved into a space where a small guest bedroom (and bathroom) used to be.

The most significant changes were made at the rear, eastern flank of the apartment where the tail end of a 50-plus foot long corridor that links the public and family areas to most of the bedroom suites was softened with a circular vestibule. Two guest bedrooms, each with walk-in closet and private bathroom, line up along the northern side that overlooks East 81st Street and 998 Fifth Avenue, an even swankier co-operative with residents—or at least owners—who include Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, booze heir Matthew Bronfman, hedge fund honcho Mark Rachesky, media mogul Herbert J. Siegel, real estate scion Jordan Panzer and big tim businessman Paul Fribourgg. Because of the way doors can be closed around the circular vestibule, a third guest bedroom, also with walk-in closet and private facility, can easily be incorporated into the already vast master suite next door.

The master bedroom encompasses a wing of its own and includes a long entrance hall, sitting room with fireplace, bedroom, a pair of fancy bathrooms and two custom fitted bedroom-sized dressing rooms, one of which was created by absorbing an adjacent guest bedroom and bathroom. When compared to the old floor plan, it's clear both of the bathrooms in the massive master suite were reconfigured and expanded. One now has a spa tub, separate shower and a bidet while the other has a steam shower and a bar. Now, children, pleeze. How goddamn divine would it be to have a bar in the bathroom? It's perfect for an easy-peasy, pre-chompers scrubbing early morning pick me up and ever better for a late night nipper during a pre-bedtime steam.

A quick peek and poke around property records indicates Mister Plumeri has been in the mood to shake up his property portfolio the last few years. In August 2011 he sold a small one bedroom and 1.5 bathroom co-operative at The Pierre building on Fifth Avenue for $1,950,000 and at the tail end of 2012 he dropped $3,640,000 on a condo crib in an Old School ocean front building in Palm Beach, FL. At one point he owned a number of residences in New Jersey but it looks like most if not all of them—including an large house on two bay front lots and a smaller land locked one across and down the road in the seaside community of Mantoloking—were deeded over to his ex-wife in 2010.

*If you care about the differences between and condo, a co-op and a condop, have a look see at a 2005 article in the New York Times that parsed the distinction(s) so Your Mama don't have to.

listing photos and (current) floor plan: Douglas Elliman Real Estate
(former) floor plan: Corcoran via Street Easy

SELLER: Michael Symon
LOCATION: New York City, NY (Soho)
PRICE: $3,500,000 (list)
SIZE: 1,509 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: We've known for a while now that meat-centric James Beard Award winning chef Michael Symon and his wife Liz bought a two bedroom and two bathroom New York City penthouse apartment last March (2012) for $3,050,000, quickly caught an acute case of the Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped it back on the market less than a year later with a $3,500,000 million price tag.

Property records show Mister and Missus Symons purchased the petite penthouse from London restaurateur turned theater investor Laurence Isaacson who brazenly installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors on two walls of the living room, slathered one wall of the guest bedroom/sitting room with a very Ross Bleckner-esque random abstract pattern wall covering and obsessively used cobalt and navy blue as the only accent colors throughout the otherwise neutrally decorated.

Mister Isaacson—don'cha know—had the penthouse photographed in all its poppy, cobalt blue glory for the Wall Street Journal back in July 2011 when it was listed at $3,395,000. Your Mama suggests y'all steel yourselves with a nerve pill and/or a stiff cocktail of your choice before having a look see at that decoratively unwise fantasia of beige and blue. Listen, butter beans, Your Mama loves cobalt blue just as much as the next person but too much of a good thing is just too damn much of a good thing. Okay?

As far as we know—and we really know so very little about anything—Mister Symon does not currently own or operate an eatery in New York City.* He does, however, frequently appear on scads food and cooking related television programs, many of which are taped in New York: Melting Pot, Iron Chef, The Next Iron Chef, Cook Like an Iron Chef, Dinner: Impossible, Food Feuds and The Chew. It's a wonder the man has time to cook or run a damn restaurant. Anyhoo, getting back to the real estate discussion at hand...

Listing photos show Mister and Missus Symon didn't remove the mirrors in the living room (or the kitchen) but did otherwise de-Isaacson-ed the penthouse so they could add their own less strict decorative stamp and palette to the 1,509 square foot apartment that's accessed via a semi-private key lock elevator that unfortunately opens directly into the (open-concept) kitchen area.

To the right of the front door there's a 22-foot long main living space that makes for a generous living room but would most certainly be a bit crowded with the addition of a proper dining table. To its credit, the living area does have matte finish narrow strip wood floors, airy 12-foot ceilings and three over-sized west facing windows.

A snack counter peninsula divides the living/dining space from the compact but expensively equipped kitchen outfitted with butcher block and slab marble counter tops and back splashes, gray on putty-colored cabinetry with minimal hardware, high-grade stainless steel appliances and, curiously, more mirrored panels above the fridge and upper cabinets on the far wall. Where Mister Isaacson had a flat screen t.v. mounted to the wall, Mister Syman has added a new-fangled sort of pot rack from which hang a dizzying and dangerous looking collection of sauce pans and colanders.

The two bedrooms—small by suburban standards, adequate by urban standards—are situated side-by-side at the rear of the penthouse. The guest bedroom makes use of a hall bathroom that's covered floor and walls with mosaic tile and where there's a stacked washer and dryer. We're not sure how we feel about doing the laundry in the same room who—ahem—evacuate but it's definitely better to have private laundry at all than to not have it at all and we suppose in the bathroom seems a smidgen better maybe than having them shoved up under the counter in the kitchen as they often can be in New York City apartments.

The master bedroom next door, only slightly larger than the guest bedroom, has a small private balcony—too small to do anything by stand around and smoke, really—a walk-in closet plus a full wall of built-in storage in the bedroom area. The attached master bathroom has two sinks and a separate tub and shower set up. Decoratively speaking, we could definitely due without the extra shaggy shag rug—our house gurl Svetlana would have a violent conniption if we brought home a dirt and dog hair collector like that—but we do rather appreciate the padded bed frame and headboard that ensures Your Mama's boozy shins would stay bruise free on late night trips to use bathroom and candy cabinet.

The penthouse comes with a private, nearly 1,000 square foot roof terrace. For some reason it makes squeamish that you have to ride in the elevator to access the roof terrace but we do very much appreciate that the elevator opens into a private wet bar/butler's pantry. That means there's no need to navigate the elevator situation whenever you need to freshen up a drink or snatch a snack. The meandering roof terrace has several sitting/dining areas, some of which are decked and some of which have faux-grass underfoot.

The $3,680 per month common charges and taxes help cover the cost for the pet-friendly André Balazs-developed complex on the border between the SoHo and NoLiTa nabes that offers residents 24-hour doorman services, a fitness room, storage space and an on-site super/manager.

BUYER: Michael Symon
LOCATION: New York City, NY (Gramercy Park)
PRICE: $2,750,000
SIZE: 1,777 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It seems that Mister Symon had picked out his next penthouse even before he listed his old one. Last November, according to the details on Street Easy, Mister Syman and his wife put another penthouse—this one several blocks north and east of Gramercy Park—into contract that property records show the finally closed on in early February (2013) for $2,750,000.

Listing details show the Symons' new penthouse pad is, at 1,777 square feet, only slightly larger than their previous penthouse and also includes a semi-private key-lock elevator entrance plus lots of direct access outdoor space, two bedrooms well separated for privacy, two bathrooms and—the piece de resistance, perhaps—a private deeded parking space in the on-site garage.

Mister and Missus Symon's new penthouse also has a larger, loft-like open-concept main living/dining/cooking space with high ceilings and medium toned mocha brown wood floors and direct access to both the north and south terraces. The south-facing living area has a (gas) fireplace flanked by built-in book shelves and surmounted by a flat-screen television. A wall of floor-to-ceiling wood-framed doors slide open access to a 220 square foot south facing terrace that does have lovely over-the-rooftop city views but—sadly—isn't entirely private due to the windows of the upstairs apartment. There will be no nude sunbathing here unless Mister and/or Missus Symon don't mind their upstairs neighbor having a direct and up-close view of their naughty bits.

The living area merges seamlessly into the open-concept dining/kitchen space that also, technically, does triple duty as the foyer since the elevator entry opens directly into the dining room. Like in the living room a full wall of floor-to-ceiling wood-framed glass windows peel open to a second, north facing terrace that is larger than the one off the living room but not any less exposed to the upstairs neighbor.

The spacious but hardly huge kitchen and service areas are sleek but efficient with dark ashy brown cabinetry, a chunky solid-surface counter top that waterfalls over one end of the super-sized center island and cantilevers over the other end to provide a snack counter. The appliances are high end and while there's no overhead cabinetry for tableware and food storage there's a sizable butler's pantry with large pantry closet and a wine refrigerator. Beyond the butler's pantry there's a spacious and very convenient storage area and laundry room.

Each of the bedrooms has a roomy walk-in closet and direct access to one of the two terraces—the master to the south end terrace and the guest bedroom to the north side terrace. The guest bedroom has easy access to the hall bathroom—tucked discreetly behind the kitchen for property pooper privacy—and the master has direct access to a larger—but also windowless—marble-walled bathroom with double sink floating vanity and a separate soaking tube and glassed-in stall shower with built-in seat for taking a post hair washing break.

Common charges and taxes for the building come to $2,139, according to listing details, and additional creature comforts include custom window treatments, custom closet system and wiring for a surround sound system. The boutique building isn't much to look at—it's just a big grayish brown brick building with a uniform facade of over-sized warehouse-style windows—and it doesn't have a doorman but it does offer residents a private basement level storage areas.

*Mister Symon did open an upscale Greek eatery Parea in 2006 near Madison Square Park but it quickly closed its doors the following year. Mister Syman does, however, own numerous restaurants in and around Cleveland, OH, a mid-sized Midwestern city perhaps better known for its pierogies and sausage sandwiches but also posseses—so our research shows—a strong and epicurean streak partly underpinned by a few of Mister Syman's healthy handful of local dining establishments that include Lola, Lolita, Roast and B Spot Burgers.

listing photos and floor plans (Soho and Gramercy Park): Corcoran

BUYER: LeAnn Rimes
LOCATION: Hidden Hills, CA
PRICE: $3,000,000
SIZE: 8,642 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last December recently rehabbed country music queen—and Twittering trouble maker—LeAnn Rimes tweeted about how happy she was to finally close on her new house in the guard-gated, celebrity-stocked and semi-rural suburban enclave of Hidden Hills, CA.

It took awhile for details to surface about which house exactly she and her second husband Eddie Cibrian—the philandering ex-husband of foul mouthed and sometimes volatile Brandi Glanville of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—settled on but according to several sources the couple successfully purchased a privately situated short sale property.*

Property records show the two acre estate was sold in late December for an even-steven $3,000,000 and listing details we dug up on the internets shows the sprawling, two-story sorta-Spanish style McMansion was built in 2005, measures in at 8,642 square feet and contains six bedroom suites and nine bathrooms.

An extra-wide driveway at the front curls up to a compact motor court and four car attached garage that extends finger-like off the front of the stone-, stucco- and wood-faced residence. Tree shaded lawns surround the house that opens up to backyard entertainment areas that include several covered porches, a dark bottom swimming pool with inset spa, a poolside dining pavilion with built-in barbecue station and, set well away from the house, a separate guest house nestled into a steep slope.

As it turns out, the new residence of Mister and Missus Cibrian-Rimes is just a few doors down and around the corner from the house the couple leased the last few years. That house, a considerably smaller—and in our humble and utterly meaningless opinion, architecturally pedestrian—5,100 square foot mini-mansion on one acre with five bedrooms, six bathrooms and a two-stall stable has popped up for sale on the open market with an asking price of $2,595,000.

*Records Your Mama peeped show the seller—a merchant services company executive and his philanthropically inclined and athletic wife—purchased the property in late December 2006 for $5,575,000, which means someone—the seller? the lender?—lost almost 2.6 million buck on this deal.

listing photos (new house): Crescent Realty
listing photos (old house): Ewing & Associates Sotheby's International Realty

SELLER: Mickey Rooney
LOCATION: Westlake Village, CA
PRICE: $1,075,000
SIZE: 2,413 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: We don't know if it has anything at all to do with the scandalous allegations of elder abuse that he made in 2011 against his step-son but The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial whispered to Your Mama that nonagenarian actor Mickey Rooney popped his surprisingly modest lake front home in a 24-hour guard-gated community in the upscale suburban community of Westlake Village, CA on the market last December with a $1,075,000 asking price.*

Born in Brooklyn to vaudevillian parents and raised in Hollywood by a single mother, Mister Rooney has been in The Big Business of Show since before he could properly walk or talk. At 92, the still-working actor has appeared in—literally—hundreds of films, animated features, made for t.v. movies, television programs and stage productions including but hardly limited to the Mickey McGuire series (1927-1934), National Velvet (1944), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Sugar Babies (1980) The Fox and the Hound (1981), Bill (1981), Night at the Museum (2006) and The Muppets (2011).

The man may only be just barely more than five feet tall but, in case some of you youngsters don't know your Hollywood history, he's a goddamn giant in Tinseltown. He's recipient of an Emmy (and four more nominations), two Golden Globes and four Oscar nominations plus a Juvenile Academy Award and an honorary Oscar for his nine-plus decades long Showbiz career. He received a Tony nomination for his lead role in the Broadway musical Sugar Babies and has no fewer than four stars on Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for radio, another for television, a third for films and a fourth for Live Theater.

Mister Rooney, either a real cocksman or a terrible husband, has been married eight times including, ever so briefly, to Ava Gardner in the 1940s. He's the father of nine biological children and at least one step-child. It's his step-son, Chris Aber, the biological son of his current and long time 8th wife Jan Chamberlin Rooney, that Mister Rooney accused of elder abuse. Court documents and press reports show that Mister Rooney claimed his step-son—who also worked as his long time personal assistant—committed elder abuse over a period of years that deprived him of food and medication, stripped him of his small fortune and left him unable to make basic decisions about his own life. Curiously, Eighth Missus Rooney—that would be Jan—denied the claims of elder abuse by her husband, a sticky situation that surely must have made conversation a bit tense at dinner time.

Anyhoo, property records show Mister and 8th Missus Rooney, married 30-plus years now, purchased the humble if not exactly inexpensive abode way back in June 1981 for an unknown amount of money.

Listing details show the nondescript two-story 1970s contemporary has four bedrooms and three bathrooms in 2,413 square feet of updated—if  uninspired—interior space. There's one bedroom downstairs and the second floor master suite has a long and narrow balcony that cantilevers over the deck below and looks directly out to the narrow finger of Westlake Lake that runs along the backside of the .12 acre postage stamp-sized parcel.

Mixy-matchy beige and brown tile floors run throughout the main living spaces that include an open plan living/dining room with vaulted ceiling and a mottled red brick fireplace shoved uncomfortably up into the corner next to a wide glass door that slides open to a small deck that overlooks the lake.

The eat-in kitchen, according to listing information, is "newer with lovely cabinets" and has a curved breakfast counter, hausfrau-grade white appliances, flecked counter tops that may or may not be granite or some sort of quartzite and a large lake view window hung with those horrid vertical blinds that always make Your Mama shudder and shiver with decorative mortification. We know that vertical blinds are ubiquitous but—from a decorative stand point, as far as Your Mama is concerned—they're really no better than tacking up a cheap sheet.

A deck runs the full width of the back of the house and steps down to a wee patch of grass that ends at the bulk headed water's edge. Listing information indicates there is a private dock where residents and their guests can tie up their watercraft.

Property records indicate this isn't the first house in Westlake Village owned by Mister and Eight Missus Rooney. In March 1994 they sold a much larger 6,192 square foot mock-Med McMansion with six bedrooms and 7 bathrooms on just over half an acre for $735,000.

Current listing information available online shows Mister Rooney's residence is currently in escrow. Your Mama has no idea what Mister Rooney's future real estate plans may be and, even though Your Mama may not care for his rather righty-tighty politics when it comes to social issues, we very sincerely hope he's headed to comfortable circumstances where he'll be well provided for and taken care of by people he can trust.

*Most listings indicate the asking price if $1,075,000 but at least one digital listing shows it at $1,070,000. 

listing photos: Prudential California Realty

For those of the children who just can't bear silly discussions about the seemingly capricious real estate activities of a pregnant reality star with a Texas-sized backside and an annoyingly supercilious baby daddy Your Mama offers y'all something altogether more architecturally edifying and decoratively edumuhcational...

Last week Your Mama relayed the delicious—and entirely unconfirmed—Platinum Triangle real estate rumor that telecom tycoon Gary Winnick might be willing to part with his epic Bel Air estate, Casa Encantada, if some deep pocketed buyer comes along with $225 million.

Casa Encantada—sometimes referred to nowadays as the far more prosaic Bellagio House—was built in the late 1930s by a wealthy widow named Hilda Boldt who had the Hollywood Regency meet Georgian style mansion designed by premier architect James Dolena and decorated by the legendary T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings who created hundreds of custom pieces of furniture for the nearly 30,000 square foot main house and its various outbuildings.

Your Mama was recently informed by a kind and academically inclined gent we'll call Willem Wantsyoutosee that in December 1939, not long after Casa Encantada was completed, The Widda Boldt had the mammoth mansion and its extensive grounds photographed for posterity by the legendary but too little lauded architecture and garden photographer Maynard L. Parker.*

Fortunately for all us architecture, real estate and day-core obsessed looky-loos, an exquisitely preserves cache of 73 of Mister Parker's pictures of Casa Encantada in all its James Dolena dignity and and T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings glory are available to view online courtesy of the Huntington Library on The University of California's Calisphere site.

The photos show grandly proportioned public rooms wrapped in exquisite boiserie and furnished with streamlined upholstered pieces and dozens of eccentric—even campy—tables, consoles and a even white grand piano perched atop carved sphinxes, griffins and dragons. The photos also show soaring ceilings with heavy duty wedding cake moldings, fluted columns galore and plaster pilasters by the dozen, numerous marble and carved stone fireplace mantels, elaborate pediments over interior doorways and barrel vaulted corridors.

As we discussed last week and is well documented in both Jeff Hyland's pricey 2008 coffee table book The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills and Michael Gross's dishy 2011 non-fiction exposé Unreal Estate, gambling debts and bad investments forced The Widda Boldt to sell Casa Encantada in 1950 for the bargain basement price of $225,000 to hotelier Conrad Hilton who bought and kept most if not every bit of the spectacular Robsjohn-Gibbings furnishings.

Mister Hilton lived at Casa Encatada until he died in 1979 at which point the property passed to billionaire David Murdock who paid $12.4 million for the property and who retained much of the mansion's architectural detailing but sold off most of the custom Robsjohn-Gibbings pieces to make way for his own collection of 18th century English furniture. It was Mister Murdock who sold the property to Mister Winnick in the early Aughts for around $94 million in cash and property. Mister Winnick proceeded with a massive renovation, restoration and expansion of the property that, we've been told but can't confirm, honors and respects if not exactly cleaves to the original designs of both James Dolena and T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings.

*In addition to Casa Encantada, from the late 1930s through the 1960s Mister Parker snapped the Los Angeles homes of just about everybody who was anybody in Tinseltown including but far from limited to Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, Edith Head, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd, Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Eartha Kitt, Loretta Young, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Price and on and on and on...

Over the weekend Your Mama received a couple of covert communiques that each contained a bit of additional scuttlebutt as regards to the recent and much publicized real estate activities of behemoth-bootied reality t.v. star Kim Kardashian and her culture vulturing man-friend and baby daddy Kanye West.

Even the most casual of dabblers in the celebrity real estate gossip milieu know that Miss Kardashian very recently and quietly sold her approximately 3,800 square foot faux-Tuscan bachelorette pad in the Beverly Hills Post Office area in an off-market deal for an (as-yet) undisclosed amount of dough. The identity of the buyer is shielded behind a Florida-based corporate concern and—although we can't verify the assertion—according to our ever-savvy source Yolanda Yakketyak Miss Kardashian sold the walled and gated five bedroom and 5 bathroom house to a well known but not exactly famous married man described to Your Mama as a former college basketball player turned powerhouse sports agent turned successful sports industry executive turned Florida-based real estate mogul.

The second tidbit that unexpectedly landed in our lap via Your Mama's occasional but always spot on informant Patty Putsittogether pertains to the 9,000 (or so) square foot McMansion in Bel Air's guard-gated Bel Air Crest community that in early January the unmarried and procreating couple were widely reported to have purchased (shown above). Property records do indeed now reveal that in late January 2013 the couple—or at least Miss Kardashian through the same trust connected her former faux-Tuscan in the Bev Hills P.O.—coughed up an undisclosed amount of moolah for the big ol' Bel Air Crest crib in question that sits on three-quarters of an acre with scenic canyon and city views and was last listed with a $10,750,000 price tag.

Howevuh, hunny bunnies, don't count on K.K. and Kanye to gut or expand the five bedroom and 6.5 bathroom mock-Med McMansion, as was previously reported they planned to do. In fact, don't even count on them moving into the damn house because, according to Patty, they are already in escrow to flip the pricey pad for about a million bucks more than the still unknown amount they paid for the place just three weeks ago.

Such are the strange and wacky real estate ways of the rich and famous...

listing photos: Photos for Homes for Nelson Shelton & Associates