aerial photo(top): Jay Janner for Austin American-Statesman
other photos: Robert Reck for Architectural Digest
Archive for 2013-04-07
Matt Damon Dumps Miami Beach Digs
LOCATION: Miami Beach, FL
PRICE: $20,000,000
SIZE: 12,705 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama knows we're a little late to this party but perhaps a little late is better than never? If not and any of y'all already know all you need or want to know about Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon and former-bartender wife Luciana Barroso shoving their two lot bay front Miami Beach estate on the market with a $20,000,000 price tag then we kindly ask you sit tight until we have some other, newer and/or more exciting celebrity real estate morsel for you to chew on.
Property records reveal that Mister Damon picked up the first of the two water front lots that comprise the compound-like estate in April 2005 for $10,300,000. Once upon a time, the .55 acre property was owned by the late Maurice Gibb of Bee Gees super fame. Eight months later he scooped up the .46 acre property next door for $4,200,000. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads of Your Mama's trusty abacus shows that combined the compound encompasses a hair more than one acre and cost Mister Damon $14,500,000 not counting carrying costs, improvements, additions, alterations and real estate fees that could easily exceed half a million clams depending on what percentage of the sale price his real estate agents—a pair of high volume gals known around town as "The Jills"—are charging him.
Property records and current listing details show the fully updated and upgraded 1935 villa, dubbed Maravilla, has seven bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms in 12,705 square feet of contemporary interior spaces enveloped in the architectural skin of a Mediterranean villa. In addition to the perfectly ordinary formal dining room with one of those fake-candle chandeliers that make Your Mama's decorative skin crawl with Pottery Barn banality the main living/entertaining space is an over-sized living room with three sets of wood-framed glass doors that open to the water side backyard.
Listing details go on to reveal there's a custom-fitted den/library/office, a media lounge, a temperature controlled wine cellar and a roomy center island kitchen with all the customary high grade stainless steel appliances and lots of orange- and brown-hued marble counter tops and back splashes.
The second floor master bedroom appears to be as large as the super-sized living room downstairs and offers access to a private waterside terrace through three sets of wood-framed glass doors plus a spacious minimalist bathroom with dramatic lighting and twin vanities separated by a free-standing soaking tub.
In addition to the main house Mister Damon's digs includes a waterside guest house with two bedrooms and two bathrooms plus an open air poolside cabana with full summer kitchen/wet bar, changing facilities and a roof top terrace with unobstructed views over Biscayne Bay towards North Bay Village and downtown Miami.
The fully landscaped grounds also include a gated motor court, a courtyard entry with water feature, a soccer pitch-sized lawn and extensive waterside terraces for lounging, dining and sunbathing. A private dock and boat lift at the water's edge allows for direct boat access.
This is actually not the first house Mister Damon has owned in Miami Beach or even on this particular road. In May 2002 he coughed up $9.5 million for a 11 bedroom and 10 bathroom spread down and around the bend just one-third of a mile from his current estate that he sold in March 2005 for $13,900,000.
It's not entirely clear to Your Mama if Mister Damon still owns the 7,000 square foot duplex loft in lower Manhattan that he scooped up for about $2.4 in 2004—the one that allegedly has a private indoor basketball court—but we do know he and the missus have been on a multi-year hunt for a substantial, family sized apartment or townhouse in New York City with a budget in the $12-20,000,000 range. Despite their exhaustive quest for an urban spread large enough to accommodate Mister Damon, his wife, their three children, her child from a previous marriage and their retinue of live-in domestic help being well documented by all the New York-base property gossips, as far as Your Mama knows the Damons have yet to buy anything in The Big Apple.
Over on the West Coast, the actor and his wife bit the real estate bullet earlier this year when in January (2013) they plunked down $15,000,000 for a gated and high-hedged 13,508 square foot modern mansion on the same swank street in quietly posh Pacific Palisades (CA) community as b.f.f. Ben Affleck and wife Jennifer Garner.
listing photos: The Jills, Coldwell Banker Previews
Your Mama Hears...
...that rainbow haired pop music powerhouse Katy Perry is about to purchase three adjoining properties nestled into a sylvan hollow in the Hollywood Hills, high above the glittering lights and shattered dreams of Tinseltown. Miz Perry's plan—so it was tattled to Your Mama—is to merge the two existing mini-compounds into a almost four acre multi-residence situation worthy of a global superstar who—like her bubbly brand of bubblegum pop or not—reportedly earns more than forty million clams a year.*
Two separate, unconnected and trusted informants—they would be Patty Propertyseller and Lucy Spillerguts—have both tattled to Your Mama that Miz Perry is currently in contract to spent an unknown amount of dough to acquire the three parcels (that comprise two mini-compounds) all currently owned by a corporate entity easily linked to philanthropic HIV-positive oil heiress and former junkie Aileen Getty.
The larger of the two properties (above) spans 2.33 acre and has been substantially upgraded since it was last sold for $3,540,000 to the corporate concern connected to Aileen Getty in April 2004 by, according to property records, Wal-Mart heiress Sybil Robson Orr. As best as we can tell via various online resources, the mini-compound comprises a 3,800-plus square foot mock-Med main house, a semi-detached poolside guesthouse/cabana, equestrian facilities, a vast stone terrace around a slightly elevated swimming pool and expensively engineered terraced gardens linked by serpentine stairways and meandering paths.
The second, also gated and heavily secured mini-compound encompasses two adjacent residential parcels—one vacant and the other all but undeveloped—that combined come to 1.62 acres. The corporate entity linked to Miz Getty acquired both parcels in a single transaction for $2,950,000 in January 2011. The seller was house hopping drummer/bandleader Max Weinberg who had only acquired the modern minded mini-compound two years earlier for $2,888,000 from Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal's then feuding now-divorced parents, screenwriter Naomi Foner and television director Stephen Gyllenhaal.
Your Mama has no idea if Miz Getty—or, rather, the corporate entity connected to her—made any significant alterations to the property or existing residence but listing details from the time Mister Weinberg sold the property in early 2011 show the completely over-hauled single-story mid-century residence had three bedrooms and two bathrooms in 2,916 square feet of largely open-plan living space with an additional two bedrooms and a bathroom located in a semi-detached guest house connected to the main house by a breezeway. The back yard area has a good-sized patch of flat lawn, a wee negative edge swimming pool and a rustic-modern tree-shaded outdoor dining area with built-in fire pit.
In summation, the two properties combined come to just less than four acres with two gated entrances, two fairly modestly sized main houses, two semi-detached guesthouses, two swimming pools and spas and (what appears to be) equestrian facilities that, with significant financial input, would make an excellent sound and recording studio for Miz Perry.
There prolly isn't a property gossip alive that still hasn't written about the historic, multi-residence compound above the mouth of Laurel Canyon that Miz Perry bought with ex-husband Russell Brand bought in mid-2011 for $6.5 million and hoisted (just this week) on the open market by Miz Perry, who was granted full ownership of the property in her divorce, for $6,925,000.
For the record, Your Mama would like the children to note that neither of the mini-compounds in question was on the open market and none of the property record data bases Your Mama checked yet reflect a recent change of ownership. That means this ain't nuthin' but some celebrity real estate rumor and gossip, at least until one of the more reputable media outlets reports it as fact. Something else circumstantial to keep in mind is that a third informant, the inestimable Yolanda Yakketyak, recently whispered to Your Mama that word on the L.A.-based Heiresses Real Estate Street is that Aileen Getty recently spent a bit over $3.5 million to acquire a walled, gated and totally upgraded 1920s mini-compound with a Golden Age celebrity pedigree on a wide, tree-lined street that has more than once been described to Your Mama as the "Beverly Hills of West Hollywood."
aerial image: Google
listing photos (from 2009): Prudential California and Sotheby's International Realty (via Redfin)
Two separate, unconnected and trusted informants—they would be Patty Propertyseller and Lucy Spillerguts—have both tattled to Your Mama that Miz Perry is currently in contract to spent an unknown amount of dough to acquire the three parcels (that comprise two mini-compounds) all currently owned by a corporate entity easily linked to philanthropic HIV-positive oil heiress and former junkie Aileen Getty.
Your Mama has no idea if Miz Getty—or, rather, the corporate entity connected to her—made any significant alterations to the property or existing residence but listing details from the time Mister Weinberg sold the property in early 2011 show the completely over-hauled single-story mid-century residence had three bedrooms and two bathrooms in 2,916 square feet of largely open-plan living space with an additional two bedrooms and a bathroom located in a semi-detached guest house connected to the main house by a breezeway. The back yard area has a good-sized patch of flat lawn, a wee negative edge swimming pool and a rustic-modern tree-shaded outdoor dining area with built-in fire pit.
In summation, the two properties combined come to just less than four acres with two gated entrances, two fairly modestly sized main houses, two semi-detached guesthouses, two swimming pools and spas and (what appears to be) equestrian facilities that, with significant financial input, would make an excellent sound and recording studio for Miz Perry.
There prolly isn't a property gossip alive that still hasn't written about the historic, multi-residence compound above the mouth of Laurel Canyon that Miz Perry bought with ex-husband Russell Brand bought in mid-2011 for $6.5 million and hoisted (just this week) on the open market by Miz Perry, who was granted full ownership of the property in her divorce, for $6,925,000.
For the record, Your Mama would like the children to note that neither of the mini-compounds in question was on the open market and none of the property record data bases Your Mama checked yet reflect a recent change of ownership. That means this ain't nuthin' but some celebrity real estate rumor and gossip, at least until one of the more reputable media outlets reports it as fact. Something else circumstantial to keep in mind is that a third informant, the inestimable Yolanda Yakketyak, recently whispered to Your Mama that word on the L.A.-based Heiresses Real Estate Street is that Aileen Getty recently spent a bit over $3.5 million to acquire a walled, gated and totally upgraded 1920s mini-compound with a Golden Age celebrity pedigree on a wide, tree-lined street that has more than once been described to Your Mama as the "Beverly Hills of West Hollywood."
aerial image: Google
listing photos (from 2009): Prudential California and Sotheby's International Realty (via Redfin)
Lance Armstrong Sells Austin Estate
LOCATION: Austin, TX
PRICE: Unknown
SIZE: (total of) 9,439 square feet with 9.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Word on the Lonestar State's celebrity real estate gossip highway is that publicly disgraced cyclist and tireless cancer advocate Lance Armstrong has done sold his central Austin, TX estate for an (as yet) undisclosed amount of money to local oil and gas rights executive Al Koehler. The ever-so-sassy and chicly bespectacled Dallas-based property gossip Candy Evans reported earlier today on Candy's Dirt that the house was listed for around $10 million and the Austin American-Statesman revealed Mister Koehler took a $3.1 million mortgage out on the estate that the Travis County Tax Man set value at $3.9 million in 2012.
Property records show Mister Armstrong picked up the two-parcel property near Camp Mabry in 2004 in two separate transactions, both for an undisclosed amount of money. By our rudimentary and possibly inaccurate calculations the double gated mini-estate encompasses 1.7 landscaped acres and includes a 7,806 square foot Spanish Colonial main residence with an unknown number of bedrooms, 7.5 bathrooms and airy living spaces sprinkled with works by top-flight artists such as Andres Serrano, Antonio Más and Danny Lyon.
Mister Armstrong had the recent vintage abode photographed for the July 2008 issue of Architectural Digest and in one of the lush images seven of Mister Armstrong's Tour de France jerseys are seen hung in the upstairs media/game room. We don't know if he was even allowed to keep them but Your Mama imagines Mister Armstrong won't be so keen to hang those things on the walls of his next house—or any house—as a constant reminder of his reputation ruining conduct and professional shame.
Additional living quarters in a detached structure total 1,633 square feet and include another two bathrooms according to the Travis County Tax Man. The extensively landscaped grounds encompass a couple of motor courts, garaging for at least five cars, broad lawns and lots of meticulously clipped trees and hedges. A open air poolside cabana has a fireplace and a lovely view down a path lined with slender Italian cypress trees.
Avid celebrity real estate watchers may recall that back in 2008 Mister Armstrong received a mountain of bad press because of the vast amounts of water consumption. In June 2008, according to various reports, Mister Armstrong used more than twice the amount of water used by an average Austin household for an entire year. His water bill that month was reported to be just over $1,612.
According to the Architectural Digest article, in addition to his Austin estate the tarred and feathered former superstar owns (or owned) homes in New York, Spain, the Bahamas and Dripping Springs, TX, about 45 minutes outside Austin. At about the time he was being publicly pilloried for his rapacious water usage in Austin Mister Armstrong hoisted Mirasol Ranch—his 450-ish acre river-front spread in scenically scrubby Dripping Springs—on the market with an asking price was $12,000,000. By the spring of 2011 the price tag had tumbled to $8,500,000 and the impressive spread with its 7-plus miles of biking and running trails was later taken off the (open) market. Although we're not 100% sure a careful read through property records suggest Mister Armstrong sold his ranch property in August 2011 for an undisclosed amount of money to a corporate entity easily linked to the CEO of a Carrollton, TX property management software concern.
In addition to all the above mentioned residences, property records indicate Mister Armstrong continues to own a 5,683 square foot residence with five bedrooms and six bathrooms in the celebrity playground of Aspen that he scooped up in October 2008 for $9,175,000.
Your Mama Hears...
Property records show Miz Foster purchased the residence in April 1995 for an undisclosed sum of money from former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs who—as it turns out—has her current, Balinese-y residence in Bel Air on the market for $12,000,000.
Miz Foster is nothing if not private and not surprisingly her Tinseltown hideout is completely shielded from passers by and looky loos by an impressively thick and towering hedge. Your Mama would bet both our long-bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, that every square inch of the .29 acre spread is fortified with a state-of-the-art security system capable of identifying and mercilessly inflicting severe bodily damage to any potential intruder. There is no driveway in the front, just a bougainvillea enshrouded entry gate. Automobile access to the property is by way of a discreet, shared driveway around back.
Your Mama knows little to nothing about Miz Foster's residence other than what we can glean from a variety of interweb resources that may or may not be entirely accurate: It's a multi-winged single-story white stucco hacienda originally built in 1935 with four bedrooms and seven bathrooms in 5,367 square feet. Aerial images show a simple, rectangular swimming pool in the courtyard style backyard and a two car garage off the shared driveway where Miz Foster parks her speedy Prius.
Miz Foster's (alleged) decision to sell her house in The Birds isn't a surprise to celebrity real estate watchers and property gossips like Your Mama who surely recall that last June (2012) she shelled out $11,750,000 to very quietly acquire a walled, gated and high-hedged ridge line property privately perched above Franklin and Coldwater Canyons.
Back in July 2005 Miz Foster very quietly spent $8.1 million a large, Connecticut county/Cape Cod style ranch house in a prime section of Beverly Hills that was once owned by Dinah Shore.* We were told by a well-connected canary that Miz Foster planned to erect a new house to her custom specification but eventually had a real estate change of heart and sold the property, according to property records, in September 2011 for $8,300,000 to Doug Barnes, a lavish living budget eyeglasses mogul from Dallas.**
*We'll have no crude lesbian jokes here, hunties. Miz Foster may be a card carrying member of the Sapphic Sisters and lesbians from around the globe may gather in drunken droves in Palm Springs (CA) every year during the Dinah Shore golf tournament but—for the record—the late Dinah Shore was not a lesbian.
**In case anyone might be curious, Mister and Missus Barnes's primary residence is a 20,000-plus square foot behemoth that backs up to a petite semi-private pond with private sandy beach in the posh Preston Hollow area of Dallas. Some of Mister and Missus Barnes's nearest neighbors include Dallas-based bigwigs like investor Robert Haas who made a fortune when he bought an sold Dr. Pepper and 7Up and whose house has 10 fireplaces and a small private lake; Dee Wyly, the wealthy widow of businessman Charles Wyly who once owned the arts and crafts retail juggernaut Michael's; Susan Reese, the wealthy widow of Dallas developer Lou Reese; trial attorney Lisa Blue Baron, the widow of trial attorney Fred Baron, whose 15,000-plus square foot Robert A.M. Stern designed red brick Georgian sits on nearly nine landscaped acres and has its own website; and prolific contemporary art collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky who own an art-filled Richard Meier-designed tour de force that also has its own website.
aerial image: Google
Floor Plan Porn: Steve Cohen in New York City
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $115,000,000
SIZE: 9,000 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms (plus 2 bedroom and 1 bathrooms staff suite)
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last week Your Mama briefly discussed the art buying real estate doings of legally embattled billionaire financier Steve Cohen (last item) who just forked over $60,000,000 to buy a 6.5 acre ocean front spread in East Hampton (NY) that happens to be located just a couple doors down from the non-beach front house he already owns.
In our uncharacteristically brief discussion we repeated the much reported upper end celebrity real estate scuttlebutt about the multi-billionaire and his second wife Alexandra quietly shopping his duplex penthouse in Manhattan off market with an electrifying (and publicity ensuring) $115 million price tag.
Mister and Missus Cohen—who combined have seven children, four together, two from his previous marriage and one from hers—purchased the unusually spacious penthouse in 2005 for around $24,000,000. They engaged the no doubt hideously expensive services of now-deceased super-starchitect Charles Gwathmey who transformed the nearly 9,000 square foot glass-wrapped aerie into a sleek machine for urban living high atop the Bloomberg Tower/One Beacon Court building, one of Midtown Manhattan's most dynamic and expensive mixed-use towers.
Just off the main entrance Mister Gwathmey installed a two-room office suite with built-in desk and cabinetry and a separate, paneled reception room/lounge with full wet bar (sink, fridge, ice maker and wine fridge).
More casual, family quarters include a media room with over-sized t.v. set into a custom entertainment center and a colossal eat-in kitchen with breathtaking corner dining area and an almost entirely stainless steel center island kitchen with extra-thick slab stone counter tops. The refrigerators and freezers are located in a vestibule just off the kitchen where there's also a walk-in pantry that makes Your Mama swoon with envy.
Official online marketing materials show the penthouse has a total of six bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms, including the two bedrooms and one bathroom in the staff wing tucked up behind the media room on the lower level. A private guest wing on the upper level has a private den, a dry bar, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, loads of closet space and at least two televisions. A third guest bedroom with private bathroom (and television) opens off the upper level gallery as does the laundry room and the expansive master suite that includes a private sitting room (with t.v.), home office (with t.v. and wall of windows that overlooks the double height living room below), 28-plus foot bedroom (with yet another t.v.), two fitted closets and dressing rooms and a pair of bathrooms slathered in slabs of richly veined white statuary marble.
There is not, as far as we can see or surmise from listing details, even an inch of outdoor space.
Monthly maintenance and taxes ring up to a stomach churning $24,783, according to current listing information. That means Mister and Missus Cohen cough up $297,396 a year for their mansion-sized Manhattan penthouse pied-a-terre not counting maid service, repairs, upgrades and etc., an amount Your Mama's bejeweled abacus determined would take a New York State minimum wage worker a bit more than 1,025 weeks (or nearly 20 years) to earn.
In addition to his no-longer-wanted duplex penthouse atop One Beacon Court and his two houses in East Hampton, Mister Cohen's residential property portfolio bulges with an 8-story townhouse in the West Village he picked up last year for $38,000,000 and a self-contained, 17-plus acre compound-estate in Greenwich, CT with a multi-winged 35,000-plus square foot red brick Georgian mega-mansion, guard house, extensive formal gardens, a tennis court, private golf green, a monolithic Richard Serra sculpture next to the motor court. Property records show Mister and Missus Cohen also own the 4.5 acre spread next door that they bought in June 2006 for $5,000,000 and subsequently built a brand new residence with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms in just over 7,900 square feet. We have no idea why Mister and Missus Cohen would need another 8,000 square foot house right next to their already gargantuan 35,000-plus square foot mansion, but such are the sometimes inexplicable real estate ways of the super rich, right?
listing photos and floor plan: Corcoran
Nicollette Sheridan (Finally) Leases Upper Bel Air House
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $12,500/month
SIZE: 2,731 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a friendly French informant we'll call Monsieur Fahfah Froufrou and an assist from Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air, Your Mama has learned that, after more than six months on the market, actress Nicollette Sheridan has finally, at long last, found a tenant for her secluded, mid-century semi-Spanish rambler in the upper Bel Air of Los Angeles that was last available with an asking price of $12,500 per month.
Miz Sheridan, the British-born step-daughter of famously smooth-pated actor Telly Savalas (Kojak), has bounced around Tinsteltown since the mid-1980s when she was cast in the blessedly short-lived modeling drama Paper Dolls co-starring famously helmet-haired actress Morgan Fairchild and the de-voon, gravel-voiced Brenda Vaccaro. The blond bombshell's big Showbiz break came quickly in 1986 when she was cast on the long-running prime time soap super-drama Knots Landing on which she strutted her stuff in 181 episodes. Lots of forgettable movies (Spy Hard, Beverly Hills Ninja) and terrible tee-vee movies followed (Dead Husbands, The Spiral Staircase, Deadly Betrayal etc.) before she landed her to-date seminal professional gig as the cunning and conniving real estate agent Edie Britt on the (now canceled) campy prime time super-drama Desperate Housewives. Of course we all know how that ended for Miz Sheridan....
Anyhoo, property records show Miz Sheridan has owned the 1.5 acre hillside property since at least the mid-1990s. Listing details Fahfah Froufrou dug up out of the depths of the internets shows Miz Sheridan's single story main residence has three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 2,731 square feet of mostly saltillo tiled interior space. A detached structure with fourth bathroom provides additional living space as a guest house/home gym/media lounge or whatever. The house (and guest house) are well situated for celebrity style privacy on a plateau down a foliage lined semi-private driveway shared with two other homes, as far as Your Mama can tell, owned by non-celebs.
The sky-lit main living/dining space has a vaulted ceiling with exposed support beam and post, a massive red brick fireplace and two walls of French doors that open to a deep shaded loggia conveniently equipped with a curving, built-in bar and barbecue station. There's also a separate formal dining room (or possible den) just off the front door. A long, clerestory window lit galley kitchen with perfectly ordinary (possibly limed) pine raised panel cabinetry, white tile counter tops with extra-side grouting and top-grade commercial style stainless steel appliances that include a super-sized double over Viking brand range with eight burners and a damn griddle.
Listing information goes on to reveal there's a small bedroom (set up as a simple home office) and a larger bedroom furnished in listing photos as a t.v. watching lounge with a giant, roll-armed sofa with chaise kick out and a flat screen monitor mounted in the corner on and articulating arm. Of particular decorative note are the fur blanket—it looks like mink to Your Mama but what do we know about fur?—carefully laid across the sofa's chaise and a leopard print rug that may or may not be an actual animal hide.
The master bedroom has utterly impractical white wall-to-wall carpeting, a red brick fireplace set at an uncomfortable angle between the double entry doors and a row of high windows punished with a tone-on-tone beige bubble shade. There's also large walk-in closets, a vaulted ceiling with exposed ridge line support beam, French doors that join to a shrubbery enshrouded brick terrace with sunken spa—cue the cheesy romance music—and a roomy bathroom with pickled wood cabinetry, deep blue tile on counters, floors and walls, double sinks and make up vanity, glass-enclosed shower space and separate jetted tub that look large enough to host a small, 1970s-ish soiree. Once again the children will note Miz Sheridan's thing for animal hide. There are sheepskin rugs on the floor in the bathroom and in the bedroom as well as another leopard rug and a trio of fur pillows on a small settee that look like maybe they're made of raccoon?
Between the main house and the guest house there's a swimming pool surrounded by a used brick sunbathing and lounging terrace. A rolling lawn slopes down to a thicket of trees and other foliage that provide an enviable amount of privacy that would certainly allow Miz Sheridan and/or her tenets to run around naked without any nosy neighbor being the wiser.
We're not sure how long it's been since Miz Sheridan has actually lived in her Bel Air house but we do know that way back in 2008, when she was still rolling in Desperate Housewives clover, Miz Sheridan paid rock star Melissa Etheridge (and her ex-wife Tammy Lynn Michaels) just over $4.3 million to acquire a nearly 7,000 square foot mini-mansion in the equestrian and family oriented guard gated community of Hidden Hills in the far northwest suburbs of Los Angeles.
listing photos: Westside Estate Agency
It's Official: Katy Perry Lists Park Hill Compound
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $6,925,000
SIZE: 8,835 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 7 full and 4 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama has been hearing for months already that Miz Perry wants to unload her never-lived in L.A. compound, Park Hill, and—so the scuttlebutt went—she unsuccessfully had it shopped around off-market for a few months in the high seven millions before finally hoisting the grand estate on the open market today with an official (and notably lower) asking price of $6,925,000.
In June 2011, almost a year after nine time Grammy-nominated international pop music super star Katy Perry wed her now ex-husband—that would be raunchy and unkempt looking British comedian Russell Brand—in a lavish ceremony in India they dropped six and a half million clams on Park Hill, an historic, double-gated celebrity-style compound of nearly three acres nestled onto a private promontory just above the frequently traffic clogged mouth of Laurel Canyon in West Hollywood (CA).
According to the good people at Paradise Leased and The Movieland Directory, Park Hill was built in the mid-1920s for successful real estate developer C.F. DeWitt who lived in the house until shortly after his wife committed suicide in the house in the mid-1930s. Eventually the house was bought by Dan Laiken, the ex-CEO of National Lampoon who was put in the pokey in 2010 on a securities fraud conviction. It was Mister Laiken's people who sold the house to Miz Perry and Mister Brand.
Alas, the erstwhile couple broke up in a blaze of tabloid publicity and speculation just a few months after purchasing Park Hill. Mister Brand chivalrously granted complete ownership of Park Hill to Miz Perry who—so we've been told by someone in the position to know—never actually occupied the property. (She moved, instead, to a modest if hardly inexpensive rental in a storied West Hollywood apartment house and he snatched up a contemporary crib at the tippy-top of the Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip where all the streets are named after—you got it—birds.)
Current listing details reveal Miz Perry's unwanted real estate albatross looms over a parking lot-sized motor court, stands three stories high at the back, measures in at a roomy but hardly humongous 8,835 square feet and contains a total of seven bedrooms, seven full and four half bathrooms. There are also two fireplaces—living room and library—and loads of original architectural detailing and vintage fixtures such as the silhouette chandelier that hangs in the stone-walled and marble floored front foyer and stair hall.
The mansion's public rooms are nothing if not baronial and include a capacious, 45-foot long double-height living room with dark-stained wood floors, a heavy beamed wood ceiling, massive carved stone fireplace that originally warmed an Italian castle and a towering Palladian window that opens to a small terrace with big city view. The room's quirky pièce de résistance is an old timey minstrel's gallery from where musician once serenaded residents and party attending guests. The partially panelled dining room isn't exactly the size of a royal banquet hall but is absolutely impressive with its hand-stenciled honeycomb pattern wood ceiling.
Some of the other living and entertaining spaces include a library with fireplace, media lounge, and spacious, center island country kitchen with snack counter, built-in banquette seating, high grade appliances and fixtures and an adjoining breakfast room with a hand-painted groin vaulted ceiling. All in all it looks like the kitchen in a suburban macmansion but anyone who pay seven million for this place can surely afford to replace the existing kitchen with something more stylish and/or suitable for a house of this magnitude.
The bulk of the property's landscaped grounds are at the front of the house where's there's a giant circular drive but there are balconies and terraces all around, some with city views, and tucked back into the steep, planted hillside there's a lagoon-style swimming pool with waterfall.
In addition to the main manse, the impressively scaled compound includes a two story detached structure with a three car garage upstairs and a caretakers apartment plus art/music studio below. A second detached guest house sits high on the hillside above the swimming on a legally separate lot and includes a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom according to listing details.
listing photos: Teles Properties
Hop On Over to the Playboy Bunny Hutch
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $11,000,000
SIZE: 6,690 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama is nine kinds of terrified of the dentist. We really are. In fact, we are so freaked out by the idea of having our teeth touched that we have to load up on prescription medication just to get through the office's 1970s modern front door. Just ask our bossy but beloved Sister Woman who—bless her heart—will actually sit in the exam room as Your Mama's eyes, ears and insurance that our dentist—deftly skilled and rakishly handsome but still a dentist—will not purposely inflict harm on our ever-so-tender chompers. Unfortunately for the children, an early a.m. visit to said handsome dentist has left Your Mama at the woozy mercy of a heavy duty Valley Girl* and the pesky residue of laughing gas so we have to ask that y'all try to forgive us our celebrity real estate transgressions and digressive story telling tangents today, such as the one some of you just suffered through reading this paragraph...
Anyhoo, even before we left for the dentist at the crack of dawn this morning Your Mama had already received several missives and communiques from a handful of informants who let us know about the newly listed Bunny Hutch in Los Angeles's high fallutin' Holmby Hills area that just hopped on the market with an $11,000,000 price tag.
We call it the "Bunny Hutch" because the South Mapleton Drive mini-mansion, located a short hop down and across the the street from the back door service entrance to the illustrious Playboy Mansion, is where, for more than a decade, octogenarian playboy Hugh Hefner has housed dozens of bouncy and unnaturally busty young women who put on their pouty and/or sultry faces and pose butt-ass naked for the racy men's magazine and its various other digital soft-core porn products.
As best as Your Mama can tell the Bunny Hutch was picked up by a corporate entity in June 2001 for $4,500,000. If Your Mama is being totally honest—and we always are—we'd confess that we're not sure if the property is owned directly by Mister Hefner or—more likely—if it's an asset of Playboy Enterprises, much or all of which has been owned by a private investment outfit (Icon Acquisition Group) since 2011. We're sure there are about 49,000 people out there who could more accurately articulate the ownership nuances of this property and perhaps one of them will be so kind to send Your Mama and email to let us know.
Listing details show the 6,690 square foot two level 1950s ranch-style residence sits on 1.3 acres and, in addition to all the usually living and dining rooms, has five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms. The bed/bath count definitely includes the two master suites and may or may not include the staff bedroom and bathroom that—natch—adjoins the laundry room.
Regardless of the number of bedrooms Your Mama imagines they are all done up dormitory style with stuffed animal and hair extension strewn bunk beds and twice-patched air mattresses in the bedrooms and a couple of uncomfortable camping cots pushed up against the wall in a dark hallway where the naughty or less favored hares are made to sleep by the house's big bunny who sets and upholds the house rules. Gawd, children, can y'all imagine if it really was that political up in the Bunny Hutch? The potential for on-going, daily drama would be thick and damp like a steamy, late summer afternoon in Okalona, Mississippi. (No thank you but thank you, Bobbie Gentry.)
An upper level living room/lounge has wall-to-wall carpeting—ew!—plus a red and white abstract pattern rug that looks like it could be from Ikea and is grossly under-scaled for the room. There's a built-in bar with two styles of bar stools including four with Playboy logo bunny head backs and, in front of a wide, slightly bowed window, a silver leather polka-dot sofa that might possibly be a super-sized George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa although never in all Your Mama's many days have we ever seen one that long.
On the lower level, a second living room/lounge opens directly to the backyard entertainment areas and has more wall-to-wall carpeting—and more ew!—a wide banks of nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and at least one, arcade grade video game machine and at least one pinball machine because, let's be honest children, is there anything hotter than a bikini clad bunny working the paddles of a pinball machine? Is there? And, although it's way, way, way under proportioned for what appears to be a fairly large space, the one saving decorative grace, based on all that's shown in the single listing photograph of the room, is the Space Age-y sputnik light fixture.
The lagoon-like swimming pool and spa has trendy beach entry and a man-made rock waterfall situation that's clearly second fiddle to the major pile of (faux) boulders that form the (in)famous grotto at the Playboy Mansion. We're not saying every single one of those bunnies and their house guests aren't squeaky clean top to bottom and front to back but let's just say Your Mama wouldn't dream of swimming in that pool or even walking barefooted around the damn thing. It may be unnecessarily crude to mention this but, children, pleeze, imagine the fluid swapping that has gone on in and around that pool and spa the last dozen years that house has been Playboy's bunny hutch.**
In addition to the large, double-gated motor court at the front, the 1.29 acre estate also has a second motor court—a parking lot, really, to accommodate all the bunny's automobiles—that's also accessible from an electronic gate at the rear of the estate. Presumably the next owner will convert the parking lot to a tennis court and additional gardens. That is, unless the next owner also plans to use the house as a dormitory for under-employed hot babes with glitter for dreams and.... Well, y'all get where that's going, right? Chill out, bunnies, we tease. Imagine, children, stepping off the bus from Kansas or R-Kansas (or wherever it is all these corn fed exhibitionists come from) with deep dreams of Playboy super stardom only to realize you'll be shacked in a house where pinball machines and logo-fied bar stools make a sorry, frat-house like substitute for proper day-core.
To be honest with y'all the property looks a bit on the scungy side for a house in this particular neck of hoity toity L.A. The neighbors probably hate it. The privacy hedge at the front looks a little unkempt—and not in the good way; The driveway gates looks like they would benefit from a coat of paint; the black top driveway and motor court appears to be in need of some attention and the landscaping at the front (and back) the house has neither pizazz nor even any real aesthetic value. Did y'all take note the broken down vertical blinds in the upper level windows at the rear of the residence? Do we even need to say they're utterly and unspeakably tawdry? No, we didn't, did we? Who puts vertical blinds in a house in Holmby Hills? Seriously? That is just wrong on every level. Never-the-less, lackluster landscaping and vertical blinds aside, Holmby Hills is still one of the most expensive and prestigious nooks in all the upper end crannies of Los Angeles and Your Mama would guess the land alone is worth a substantial portion of the current asking price but we'll let the local real estate experts duke out the value of the land in the comments. One, two, three...go!
*That's old-school street talk for Valium, children.
**In all truth Your Mama has no idea if there have ever been any body fluids swapped in or around this swimming pool. For all we know the Bunny Hutch By-Laws forbid any interaction between any two people that would involve the exchange of bodily fluids.
listing photos: Shirley Lovitt
