SELL BUY PROPERTY

BUYER: Elizabeth Hurley and Shane Warne
LOCATION: Donnington, Ledbury, Herefordshire (U.K.)
PRICE: £6,000,000 (list price)
SIZE: 13,445 square feet, 12 bedrooms, 4 full and 2 half bathrooms (plus additional guest and staff quarters)

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The newest celebrity real estate scuttlebutt out of the pastoral countryside in the U.K. is that stunningly beautiful English "actress" and spokesmodel Elizabeth Hurley and her blond, beefy and beau-hunky retired Australian cricket player fiancée Shane Warne have scooped up Donnington Hall, an historic, 187-ish-acre country estate 50-some miles southwest of Birmingham near the scenic and literary-minded town of Ledbury. We can't pinpoint their exact purchase price but our research reveals the stately and august estate was last listed on the open market earlier this year (2012) with a £6,000,000 guide price; That's a listing price in British real estate speak. A few quick clickety-clacks on Your Mama's currency conversion contraption shows the last asking price translates, at today's rates, to a $9,684,900.

Miz Hurley, according to her resume on the Internet Movie Data Base, has been shaking her svelte yet magnificently curvaceous Showbiz money maker on both t.v. and the big screen since the late 1980s. She didn't really get her big break—if it can be called that—until 1994 when she showed up the premiere of the sappy, silly and screamingly successful romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral with her then-boyfriend Hugh Grant wearing a slinky black Versace dress dangerously held together by a series of very strategically placed, over-sized gold safety pins. It wasn't long after that foxy Miz Hurley was hired as a spokesmodel by cosmetics colossus Estée Lauder—a long-standing and no-doubt lucrative professional relationship that continues today—and was cast as the gun-toting sex kitten Vanessa Kensington in the Austin Powers movies. Since her silver screen salad days in the mid- to late-1990s she's appeared in a number of other movies too terrible to mention and currently—and kind of randomly—designs a line of high-end swim- and beachwear.

Your Mama knows next to nothing about cricket except that it's a beloved and hotly contested athletic activity in places other than the United States. Our brief online research did reveal that the sometimes-controversial and ill-behaved Mister Warne—he's (allegedly) had a lurid thing in the (recent) past for sexting women who are not his wife or girlfriend—is widely regarded as on of the best bowlers to have ever strapped on the pads and swung the cricket bat. Post retirement he's played some more professional cricket, worked as a cricket commentator, played some professional poker and focused on his eponymous philanthropic foundation.

Until recently both Miz Hurley and Mister Warne were married—she to Indian textile heir and software entrepreneur Arun Nayar—but were both quickly divorced when a minor scandal erupted in tabloids after the the two of them were photographed in late 2010 at a London hotel engaged in what appeared to be a little extra-marital canoodling. Oh, what a tangled web some people weave. For the record, both claim their marriages were kaput months before they hooked up and started macking on each other in public places.

Their rather scandalous romantic entanglement aside, the comely and recently engaged couple have—so the gossip goes—spent some seriously big bucks to acquire the very serious and high-maintenance Donnington Hall where they'll bunk down in baronial splendor with their newly blended family that includes three children from Mister Warne's previous marriage and Miz Hurley's one boy-child sired—in case anyone cares—by progressively politicked real estate heir, business tycoon and movie producer Steve Bing who denied paternity until a DNA test proved otherwise. How very Jerry Springer! Anyhoodles, poodles, we digress...

Donnington Hall dates back to the late 17th century, according to marketing materials with pinched from the interweb, but the existing residence, an imposing if slightly squat-looking Grade II-listed Georgian-style pile with 13,455 square feet, was designed in 1909 by quad-monikered architect Gilbert Francis Molyneux Ogilvy for its then-owner, the gloriously-named Admiral Sir Arthur Dalrymple Fanshawe who commanded the Royal Navy Fleet from 1910 to 1913.

By our assessment of the floor plan, the massive, lilac wisteria-draped main house, accessed by an exceptionally long driveway that winds through the sprawling estate's parklands before it arrives at a parking lot-sized gravel forecourt, has 12 bedrooms and 4 full and 2 half bathrooms divided into four large principal bedrooms and five smaller secondary bedrooms on the second floor that share three hall bathrooms, a separate second floor guest suite with sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, and two additional bedrooms and a single shared bathroom on the third floor.

Guests have access to a compartmentalized half bathroom and cloak room discreetly situated just outside the library and live-out staff have access to a tiny water closet nestled into a quiet corner of the service area.

Staff quarters are notably generous with a one bedrooms housekeeper's suite with separate kitchen and private loo near the kitchen on the main floor and a two room nanny suite with separate sitting room and private loo tucked up under the eaves on the third floor.

The capacious public rooms, according to the floor plan included with online marketing materials for the estate, include an immense, 35-foot long reception hall with beautifully worn polished oak floors, a wood-burning fireplace, heavy-duty plaster moldings, paneled walls lined with sturdy carved pilasters and inset window seats. There's also a 750-plus square foot formal drawing room with oak parquet floors, a fireplace with ornate, carved marble mantelpiece, a formal dining room that easily seats 16 and is located a sufficiently long distance from the kitchen that ensures the waitstaff will mentally curse formal diners even as they smile and set down a perfectly cooked plate of roasted rabbit. A gorgeous, groin-vaulted hall leads back from the reception room and main stair hall to a nearly 30-foot long library with fireplace and original built-in Georgian-style display cases.

A more intimately-scaled sitting room off the kitchen has glass doors that connect to the east-side gardens would make a cozy family room or sun-lit morning room. The adjacent, 400-plus square foot farmhouse-style kitchen, according to marketing materials, is expensively equipped with an Aga-brand range and a pair of built-in ovens and complimented by a nearby larder/pantry and walk-in freezer room.

The service areas of the house are completed by a mud-room entrance with back staircase and, just off the reception all a couple of connected vestibules off of which open a small office and—this being hunting country—a walk-in gun cupboard.

There are a two staircases that ascend to the upper levels. The main, double-wide stair case climbs to an extra-wide landing that's more than 40 feet long and a back staircase that connect the ground level service areas to a back landing and a warren of corridors off of which open three small bedrooms, a two-room guest suite with private bathroom and the somewhat petite laundry room.

There are also two separate staircases that climb from the second to the third floor, both of which are located off the second floor back landing and zig-zagging corridor. One staircase switches back and provides access to the aforementioned nanny suite. The other makes a sharp right turn as is joins to a long, narrow passageway that passes a pair of attic storage rooms before it descends a few steps and makes a hard left turn into an even longer hallway off of which open a nursery/playroom/potential bedroom with fireplace, two good-sized bedrooms, also with fireplaces and, at the far end, a substantial, bifurcated bathroom.

The numerous outbuildings include an L-shaped, Edwardian-era equestrian barn, a number of garden maintenance storage buildings and potting sheds, a 16th-century coach house and tithe barn with automobile storage capability, a pair of historical staff cottages and four tenant-occupied cottages. At least one report in the British media says the new owners—that would be Miz Hurley and Mister Warne—have no plans to toss the current tenants.

In addition to thick coppices, expansive pasture lands that explode with wild daffodils in the spring and pristine park lands dotted with mature specimen trees, Donnington Hall's 187-ish acre grounds include broad flagstone terraces, various gardens (formal, sunken, walled, vegetable and etc.) and greenhouses connected by gravel foot paths, a variety of fruit trees, vast lawns that tumble down to a one-acre, carp-stocked spring-fed lake, a full-sized tennis court and—as all great country houses in Britain probably should—a croquet lawn. There is not, as far as we can tell from a perusal of the marketing materials available online, a swimming pool, spa or cricket pitch, the latter of which Your Mama fully expects will be installed tout de suite.

In addition to their fab new country estate Mister Warne owns a major house in the exclusive Melbourne suburb of Brighton—that's Australia, puppies—that he may or may not have quietly on the market for $15-20,000,000 and Miz Hurley maintains a townhouse-type residence on a cherry tree-lined street in southwest London as well a 72-acre Cotswald farm in the hamlet of Ampney Knowle new Barnsley.

listing photos and floor plan: Hayes

BUYER: Britney Spears
LOCATION: Thousand Oaks, CA
PRICE: $8,500,000 (listing price)
SIZE: 8,456 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Hold on to your britches, y'all, because Your Mama has recently and repeatedly had scuttlebutt slip down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine that still-conserved international pop star and twang-talking X Factor judge Britney Spears has done bought herself a new mansion. And it's not, not surprisingly, that bluff-top, ocean-view spread in Malibu (CA) those wily X Factor people tried to pass off as her house last week when small groups of the show's hopeful contestants were invited to belt their wannabe pop star hearts out at one of the four judge's homes.

Property records don't yet reflect a transfer of ownership—which makes this all just a juicy little tidbit of celebrity real estate rumor and gossip for now—but all signs and several unsolicited sources point Your Mama towards Miz Spears purchasing a sprawling, Hacienda-style casa in sleepy and upscale Thousand Oaks, CA that was last listed on the open market in April (2012) with an asking price of $8,500,000.

Listing information we managed to brutishly inveigle out of the internets shows the multi-winged, single-story red tile-roofed residence in question, located behind the 24-hour guarded gates of the prosperously peopled Sherwood Country Club, was completed in 2010 and measures 8,456 square feet with five bedrooms and 7 bathrooms.

The unfortunately tennis-court-free mini-estate comprises two separate and slightly elevated parcels that total more than 1.4 mostly flat acres and allow for long, unobstructed views over the mansion-dotted hills and painstakingly manicured Jack Nicklaus-designed 18-hole golf course that weaves and winds its way through the super-swank ex-urban development like the tentacles of an unnaturally green octopus.

An arched, wood front door set deeply into an also-arched portico opens into a tremendous center hall entry that will certainly impress guests and the pizza delivery person too with its soaring ceiling, sumptuous limestone tile flooring and high-arched window that mirrors the arched front door and perfectly frames a distant, craggy outline of the surrounding mountains against the almost always clear blue southern California sky.

An architecturally thrilling and vaguely ecclesiastical parabolic colonnade runs alongside the airy formal dining room that's expensively outfitted in with wide plank oak floor and a high wood-beamed ceiling. An adjoining semi-circular wet bar with enough seating for at least six bleary-eyed booze hounds to sidle up to the thick slab marble counter top—or maybe it's granite—and get a good, glassy-eyed look into the also semi-circular, glass-fronted and temperature-controlled walk-in wine room.

The luscious custom oak floors extend into the immense, L-shaped open-plan family living space that includes a double-island chef-friendly kitchen with gray-veined white marble counter tops, top grade appliances and adjacent butler's pantry that we imagine is probably far larger and better equipped than most kitchens. A dizzying but sturdily impressive system of exposed beams and trusses stretch across the almost ludicrously lofty great room that's decoratively divided into a large breakfast area and even roomier family room space with fireplace and giant glass pocket-doors that glide open and disappear into the walls, allowing for an all-but-seamless merging between indoor and outdoor living areas.

Other public and semi-private rooms, according to online listings we dug up, include a library—that Your Mama is cynical enough to think will always suffer from a dearth of actual books, a pair of separate offices and a home theater/bonus room.

Listing information isn't specific as to whether each of the guest/family/domestic bedrooms have access to a private john or not but does state the spacious master suite is complete with two massive walk-in closets and a pair of bathrooms, one for the lady of the house and one for her live-in manager/mister/co-conservator.

The vast limestone tiled outdoor living spaces encompass a lounge area with fireplace, separate dining area and, in between, a semi-circular built-in barbecue center. The deep, covered verandas that extend off the back of the house give way to a (mostly) flat and fully-landscaped backyard with liberally watered and perfectly clipped lawns, rose gardens and ample sunbathing terraces on the long sides of the infinity-edged swimming pool and spa. Listing information goes on to declare the house has a five car garage plus a separate bay for golf cart storage accessible through a porte-cochère that connects the driveway at the front of the house through to an nearly enclosed rear motor court.

Miz Spears has a long, long, loooong history of house hopping—see next paragraph—and it remains to be seen how long she'll stay put in the Thousand Oaks mansion she's (allegedly) just acquired. Given that she's now living a much more stable—if still conserved—life with Mister Trawick, Your Mama hopes—selfishly, for our own sanity, natch—this is the last move for the (in)famously peripatetic Miz Spears for a very long time.

Shortly after she dumped Kevin Federwhatever, her free-loading second husband and father of her two children, Miz Spears fled the couple's marital mansion in the guard-garted Serra Retreat in Malibu (CA) and bounced around to several high end rentals in The Bu including—so the celebrity property gossip goes—a land-side cottage situated behind the illustrious gates of Malibu's Colony that Shabby Chic high priestess Rachel Ashwell sold to sitcom star Peri Gilpin in the summer of 2010 for $3,550,000.

In January 2007, well into the all-to-public unraveling during which she fraternized with some pretty unsavory sorts, repeatedly flashed her pudenda for the paps, shaved her hair off in a random beauty parlor in the San Fernando Valley and wound up being involuntarily committed the mental ward and Cedar Sinai, Miz Spears impulsively shelled out $6,750,000 for a fully-furnished 7,400+ square foot mock-Tuscan-style mansion in the guard-gated Summit community just off Mulholland Drive on the ridge between Beverly Hills and Studio City.

Sometime in late 2008 or early 2009, on the mental mend and beyond ready to leave the house in the Summit where she lived during much of her jaw-dropping and—let's be honest—downright sad downward spiral, Miss Spears decamped to the so-called Chateau Suenos, an approximately 10,000 square foot Macmansion in The Estates section of The Oaks community in Calabasas, the same neck of L.A.'s proto-suburban woods where the slickly produced tweenage heart throb bubble gum pop star Justin Beiber now lives in an almost-as-large Spanish-style mansion he bought in April 2012 for six-and-a-half million smackers.

In early 2011 by then romantically attached to her current fiancé, Tinseltown bigwig talent agent Jason Trawick, Miz Spears and clan high-tailed it to the guard-gated, celebrity-choked and equestrian-oriented Hidden Hills enclave where she rented a ginormous, 19,107 square foot multi-winged pseudo-Tudor mansion/compound with a total of 10 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms on 3.39 landscaped acres.

Hidden Hills is, of course, the same community where Jennifer Lopez owns a home as do Melissa Etheridge, Nicolette Sheridan and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne who have become so desperate to unload their Hidden Hills house they put it out for lease earlier this year at fifty grand a month and moved it to a plush, rented hacienda-style casa located on a wide, tree-lined street in the flats of Beverly Hills.

Apparently Miz Spears didn't cotton much to the Tudor-style pile in horsey Hidden Hills because by the end of 2011 she'd once again packed up her two tots and collection of Daisy Dukes and settled into yet another rented mansion, this time a 10,567 square foot architectural ugly duckling inside the 24-hour guarded gates of the hoity-toity Sherwood Country Club where initiation fee were reported last year by the folks at The Hollywood Reporter to be around $160,000 and some of the deep pocked members are said to include Mel Gibson, Will Smith, Kevin James and Justin Timberlake.

Located far far far from the maddening crowds and ever-present paps in Tinseltown, the Sherwood Country Club is none-the-less a coveted location with all sorts of celebs and other high-profile peeps looking for a luxurious suburban country club sort of lifestyle. Disgraced former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo recently sold a red brick Georgian-Colonial mini-manse that backs up to the community's 2nd fairway and Hollywood scion turned reality t.v. star turned baby factory Tori Spelling and her actor husband Dean McDermott leased a 2.45 acre estate with an approximately 9,000 square foot main house inside the Sherwood Country Club gates in April (2012). To be honest, chickens, we're not sure if they remain in residence.

Avid celebrity real estate watchers will recall the verdant and affluent Sherwood Country Club is the same golf-centric community where financially-embattled former professional baseball player Lenny Dykstra lost the 6.6+ acre estate and neo-Georgian mansion he bought from former professional puck pusher Wayne Gretzky to the salivating maw of foreclosure in the fall of 2010 and it's also the same gated enclave where tennis titan Pete Sampras custom built a hulking, 13,000-ish square foot contemporary with a separate 1,200 square foot guest house and 2,000 square foot fitness facility and, even before the paint was dry, caught a classic case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped it on the market in March 2010 with a $25,000,000 price tag. The sprawling Sampras estate, pretty much right next door the Brit and Jase's new digs, is still for sale with a reduced asking price of $19,950,000.

listing photos: Re/Max Olson via Zillow

SELLER: Alan Poul
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $989,000
SIZE: 1,784 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: As we sipped on a tall gin & tonic and perused some of the less expensive listings in the Los Angeles area the other day Your Mama ran across a low-slung 1964 contemporary in the Hollywood Hills renovated in 2002, listed at $989,000—downright cheap by Showbiz real estate standards—and owned, according to property records, by out, proud and community-minded television producer/director Alan Poul.

Mister Poul's resume on the Internet Movie Data Base shows he's toiled in Tinseltown as a producer since at least the mid-1980s with a respectable list of credits that include the mid-90s teen drama My So-Called Life, all three of the separate mini series cycles based on Armistead Maupin's eight Tales of the City novels, the super-hit dark comedy Six Feet Under in the early to mid-2000s and the only season of Swingtown, a 2008 t.v. turkey about a group of affluent Chicago suburbanites grappling with the 1970s sexual revolution.

Mister Poul, always the bridesmaid but never the bride when it comes to the Emmys, has been nominated seven times—for both Tales of the City and Six Feet Under—but has yet to bring one home. Some of his more recent credits include directing a couple of episodes of the The Big C (in 2010) with the always phenomenal Laura Linney and he currently executive produces the The Newsroom, an Aaron Sorkin-created drama that Your Mama tried to watch and quickly found well-intentioned and smartly produced but self-righteously high-minded and tiresomely melodramatic.

Anyhoodles poodles...property records show Mister Poul picked up his hillside home near the tippy-top of the Hollywood Hills a decade ago, in May 2002, for $750,000 from a fella named Mark Werts whose name vintage- and fashion-minded Angelenos may recognize as the founder behind the perennially popular apparel and lifestyle shopping emporium American Rag Cie.

Current listing information shows the two-story residence spans a modest 1,784 square feet with three bedrooms and three bathrooms and like many houses in the Hollywood Hills—including the one Your Mama and The Doctor Cooter just sold for a bit over the asking price—Mister Poul's pad sits almost right up on the narrow and little-trafficked street with only a sliver of what might generously be called a front yard.

A slender porch hugs the front facade and connects the barely-there driveway to the front door that opens directly into the upper level main living space outfitted with maple wood floors, a gas fireplace and custom-built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, some with actual books in them. Two wide banks of wood-framed glass doors swing open to a balcony deck that runs almost the entire width of the back of the house and from which there are expansive views down the rugged canyon and over the flat and vast expanse of the San Fernando Valley.

The dining area of the living/dining room area blurs to a not-optimally compact, u-shaped kitchen that's nicely if fairly ordinarily finished with cherry—or mahogany—stained cabinetry and a full suite of higher-grade stainless steel appliances that include a six-burner range, convection oven, built-in microwave, silent running dishwasher and under-counter wine refrigerator.

Just off the living room area there's a guest bathroom with stall shower and the neighboring bedroom has direct balcony access through more wood-framed glass doors and—in lieu of, it seems, a proper closet—a built-in entertainment center with flat-screen t.v. that allows the room to easily convert to a den or media lounge.

Downstairs, a desirable-sized second guest/family bedroom has built-in cabinetry and easy access to an adjacent, windowless hall bathroom with two-person steam shower. The children will note on the floor plan included with online marketing materials that the stacked washer/and dryer are tucked into a squeezy closet in the lower level guest bedroom. This isn't the best scenario, obviously, particularly when you have a house guest and need to launder your underthings. However, according to Your Mama and The Doctor Cooters' imperious house gurl Svetlana, it's still far batter than the clothes cleaning machines being wedged into the attached but tight two-car garage just off the kitchen.

Anyhoo, the hotel suite-style master bedroom stretches more than 28-feet long with fireplace, separate sitting area, fitted walk-in closet and private—if windowless—facility with spa tub, separate fully-tiled stall shower, crapper cubbie and an space-efficient but stylistically puzzling twin sink vanity situation.

Both of the lower level bedrooms open to a large deck that's cantilevered over the hillside and  conveniently accessible from the upper level balcony by a sturdy-looking outdoor stair case. Mister Poul—or maybe it's Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota—did up the deck as a party-encouraging outdoor living and dining space with a suite of matching slip-covered slipper-style sofas and chairs arranged around a concrete and glass coffee table. A rectangular glass-topped and steel-legged dining table surrounded by six, white, molded plastic Panton chairs was tucked into the intimate niche formed by the staircase.

Dog walkers and urban hiking enthusiasts will take note that the house is just a few minutes walk from the upper, Mulholland Drive entrance to Runyon Canyon where oodles and caboodles of famous folks of all stripes and regular people alike hike and walk their dogs.

A quick spin through property records does not immediately turn up any other property in Los Angeles—or anywhere else—owned by Mister Poul.

listing photos and floor plan: Keller Williams Beverly Hills

BUYER: Harry Styles
LOCATION: London, UK
PRICE: £3,000,000
SIZE: 2,300 square feet (approx.), 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Word on the international celebrity real estate street is that shaggy-haired and baby-faced 18-year old Harry Styles of the epically successful and au courant English boy band One Direction has splashed out somewhere in the neighborhood of £3,000,000 for a free-standing house in North London's semi-urban and partly pastoral Hampstead Heath area. A few quick clickety-clacks on Your Mama's currency conversion contraption shows that's a very grown up 4,816,740 U.S. dollars, at today's rates.

Celebrity real estate watchers—and shrieking tweenage girls and gays around the globe—may recall that 18 year old Mister Styles was spotted by the paps peeping property over the summer after, it would seem, he decided it was high time to move out of Princess Park Manor*, an elaborately ornamented Italianate-style complex in suburban North London originally built in the mid-19th century by Queen Victoria as a lunatic asylum and converted recently to luxury apartments. Mister Styles and his barely post-pubescent band mates were recently reported by no-less than The Wall Street Journal to have once shared a architecturally dramatic five floor unit in the vast apartment complex with a private elevator and a high-domed octagonal living room with 360-degree views. They later moved to their own pieds-à-terre in the complex, according to The WSJ.*

Anyhoo, listing information we located on the interweb shows the approximately 2,300 square foot white stucco house Mister Styles is rumored and reported to have recently acquired sits hard up on the street and stands three stories high with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.

The house, well situated on a high point with verdant views of Hamptead Heath from the upper levels, has no street-side ground floor windows and is high-walled and gated for maximum privacy and security. Your Mama imagines Mister Styles will have exterior security cameras installed razor sharp shards of glass affixed to the wall's top to ensure that any brainless fanatic who thinks it might be cute to roll buy and hop the wall will be video-taped as their hands are ripped to bloody shreds.

A gated opening that looks just barely wide and tall enough for a mid-sized vehicle opens to a compact motor court that's decadently and expensively equipped with a double car lift that makes it possible to park four cars behind gates and off-the street.

Floor plans included with still-accessible online marketing materials for the modestly-sized but hardly inexpensive residence show French doors open from the motor court directly into a spacious dining room/lounge with blond wood floors and a titanic, shed-roof sky light. The adjacent sitting room—we in America call it a living room—also has blond wood floors as well as a fireplace flanked by glass doors that connect directly to a terraced and fully landscaped, geometrically-minded rear garden. A small, oddly configured room just off the sitting room—it's marked as a family room on the floor plan—also opens through French-style doors to the backyard.

The ground floor also includes a very contemporary but unfortunately windowless eat-in kitchen with hardwood floors, specked slab stone counter tops, sleek and lustrous snow-white cabinetry, over-sized rectangular glass-tile back splashes and top-grade integrated appliances.

Tucked back behind the kitchen and stair hall there's a convenient and well-placed but claustrophobic powder pooper and what the floor plan shows as a sky-lit home gym and neighboring utility room that Your Mama hopes and presumes has laundering capabilities.

Two small bedrooms with built-in wardrobes on the second floor share a large hall bathroom and a third, considerably larger bedroom is a small, private and window-free loo. The stairs continue to corkscrew up to an almost non-existent third floor landing that opens to an approximately 14-foot square roof terrace and the far-from-huge master suite that's comprised of bedroom, dressing hall and spacious en suite with soaking tub, separate shower stall and two windows for proper (and necessary) ventilation.

The fully landscaped back garden, which may or may not be at least partially visible from the upper level of the historic pub next door, has a petite, pie-shaped patch of grass, a smaller pie-shaped water feature and a multi-level terrace for grillin' and chillin' with his boy band homies between the exhaustive tour dates, umpteen photo shoots and numerous publicity junkets that make up the hectic—and extraordinarily lucrative—lives of the teenaged superstars.

*There have been various reports in the celebrity-based blogs and gossip glossies that state Mister Styles lives—or lived— in a "swanky East London flat" and not in North London but since Your Mama lost Mister Style's private mobile phone number last week we're unable to dial him up and ask him directly. 

listing photos and floor plan: Bargets via Zoopla

...from Anita Tellyousomething—one of our better connected celebrity real estate canaries deep inside the Platinum Triangle real estate game—that Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon and her hot shot talent agent husband Jim Toth have been on a serious hunt for huge, secluded and blended family-friendly new house in Los Angeles.

This isn't such a surprise to celebrity real estate watchers given that the in-demand and exceedingly well compensated movie star recently put her gorgeous ranchette in Ojai, CA on the open market with an asking price of $10,000,000 and quietly made a 2.5-plus acre vacant parcel in L.A.'s rustic and affluent Mandeville Canyon area available off-market with an asking price of $7,995,000.

The children will recall that when Miz Witherspoon purchased the Mandeville Canyon spread in August 2010 for $6,900,000 from eccentric action-flick actor Steven Seagal there was a substantial residence and additional equestrian facilities that she's since razed, presumably to make way for a custom-built compound that—we presume—she and her mister decided against building, after all.

Anyhoo, when we queried our dear tattletale Anita further about the Witherspoon-Toth's near-future real estate plans might be she told us they're looking for something significant and secluded in the $15-20,000,000 range. We mentioned that we'd recently heard through the celebrity gossip grapevine they might already be in escrow on a property ol' Anita snitched that the escrow was cancelled.

Anita went on to reveal that the posh pad they almost but didn't purchase is a very privately situated multi-acre estate tucked into a very swank but bucolic pocket of Pacific Palisades with a "big white traditional" mansion and is owned by Susan Harbert, the the ex-wife of Showbiz bigwig Ted Harbert, the current chairman of NBC Broadcasting. According to Anita, ex-Missus Harbert allows one of L.A.'s more successful real estate brokers to quietly shop the 9,000+ square foot mansion to qualified buyers with an asking price in the neighborhood of $20,000,000.

So, their search continues. Your Mama wonders if the long-time West Siders have considered a move to the east side of town where we heard from another extremely well-connected real estate insider that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might be willing to part with their extensively and expensively renovated multi-parcel compound in the celebrity-stocked Los Feliz area.

All just some juicy celebrity real estate rumor and gossip, kids, rumor and gossip.

BUYER: Kristen Stewart
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $2,195,000
SIZE: 3,361 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Before fame averse actress Kristen Stewart was caught stepping out on her equally publicity eschewing—and possibly faux six-packed—Twilight co-star and boyfriend Robert Pattinson, the young, superstar couple shacked up in unmarried bliss and sin in a double-gated, privately situated and heavily fortified Spanish-style residence in a particularly posh pocket of Los Angeles' Los Feliz neighborhood that Mister Pattinson acquired in September 2011 for $6,275,000.

Soon after the errors of Miss Stewart's illicit fling with married director Rupert Sanders was exposed in the tabloid media spectral actress reportedly packed up a small U-Haul and decamped for parts unknown. Your Mama didn't have any idea where Miss Stewart moved until this weekend when, out of the blue, a trusted and realiable informant—let's call her Lucinda Looselips—rang Your Mama's bell to tell us that the famously reclusive actress very quietly purchased a house of her own, also in Los Feliz, just about 1.5 miles from the one she shared with the publicly cuckolded Mister Pattinson.

Natch, Your Mama did some digging around in the property records and, lo' and behold, we quickly sussed out that in late August 2012, in the chaotic wake of the tabloid circus that surrounded her lusty liason, a generically named trust paid $2,195,000 for house in a much-coveted gated enclave long favored by famous folks and other Showbiz denizens. The trust's recorded address happens to be a nondescript red brick office building in Van Nuys (CA) owned—according to records—by Miss Stewart's mother. Of course, chickens, it could be this house was bought by Miss Stewart's parents, but a second, also wickedly reliable source says that's not the case and that the new owner of the house is indeed Miss Stewart.

Listing information from the time of the purchase that we managed to tease out of the internets shows two-story hillside house—a questionable but not completely unsuccessful architectural potpourri of southwestern and contemporary styles enshrouded in dense tropical landscaping—measures 3,361 square feet with four en suite bedrooms plus an additional half pooper for guests.

Many of the living spaces have Saltillo tile or wide plank wood flooring and open to deep, shaded verandas conducive to quintessentially California indoor-outdoor living. The center-island eat-in kitchen juxtaposes high-grade stainless steel appliances with rustic wood cabinetry and wall-mounted plate racks and country-style butcher block counter tops. Frankly, we think the kitchen is a country house hot mess but to each his or her own decorative preferences, right?

The back of the house opens on both levels to covered porches with long and wide, over-the-tree-top vistas over the gritty streets of Hollywood. Set well below the house, the terraced and tropically landscaped back yard includes broad sunbathing and lounging terraces, a dark-bottom lap-length swimming pool with integrated spa, a couple flat patches of grass and and a built in stacked stone fire pit.

Miss Stewart and Mister Pattinson are said to have reconciled—they were photographed together over the weekend at a somewhat under-the-radar dive bar not far from their respective residences in Los Feliz—but it's not known if they plan to once again cohabitate and if they do if they'll opt for Mister Pattinson's place or Miss Stewart's new digs.

Other well-known owners of home's behind the gates of Miss Stewart's historic and exclusive enclave include actors Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, British pop star Natasha Bedingfield, actor Casey Affleck and his former actress wife Summer Phoenix, and recently married actress Natalie Portman and her toe-twinkling dancer/choreographer husband Benjamin Millepied who coughed up $3,250,000 in  for her house with a long history of celeb owners including now-divorced Tinseltowners Catherine Keener and Dermott Mulroney.

listing photos: Hilton &Hyland

BUYERS: Molly Sims and Scott Stuber
LOCATION: Wainscott, NY
PRICE: $5,495,000 (last listing)
SIZE: 8,026 square feet, 5 bedrooms 6 full and 3 half bathooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Way back in August 2008 bathing suit model turn boob-toob actress Molly Sims (Las Vegas) put her 1930s Spanish style residence in the hills above Hollywood on the market with an asking price of $2,999,000. Finally, in September 2011, not quite a year before she pushed out her first baby sired bythen boyfriend and now husband, television and movie producer Scott Stuber (Whitney, Ted, Love and Other Drugs, You, Me and Dupree), she sold the 3,043 square foot residence for $2,780,000.

We're not sure if the newly wedded new parents officially relocated to the East Coast but we do know, thanks to the NY Post, they've recently splashed shelled out several million clams for a sweet, stylish and recently completed shingled cottage in the Hamptons—in low-key but very posh Wainscott, to be precise. Not for lack of effort but Your Mama was unable to locate an digitally accessible record of the transaction that might reveal the exact price paid but, according to the Post, the house was last listed at $5,495,000.

The desirable, south-of-the-highway location puts the fully-landscaped, three-quarter acre corner spread just a brief, 1.4 (or so) mile bike ride from one of the Hamptons' most exclusive beaches that runs between gorgeous Wainscott Pond and the even more fah-fah-frou-frou Georgica Pond.

Listing information still floating 'round the interweb shows the newly constructed residence—a low-profile, contemporary take on a classic shingled cottage with a deep and charming covered porch entry—contains a total of 8,032 square feet with a total of six bedrooms and six full an three half bathrooms. That's 5,032 in the two above-ground living levels and another 2,500 in the finished basement.

The luxurious and luxuriously under-stated interior spaces have top quality finishes—think rift-sawn antique oak floors, hand-brushed tongue-and-groove mill work, 8-foot solid core doors, vintage industrial lighting fixtures and exquisite English-made water fixtures—and include a massive combination living/dining room with stone fireplace and a full wall of south-facing French doors that connect to the broad, partially covered terrace that runs the full width of the house. A fully paneled library/media offers a cozier, more intimately scaled room to hunker down in when the weather turns nippy.

The party-and family-friend eat-in kitchen has a box car sized center island with snack bar, custom, snow white Shaker-style cabinetry with marble and walnut counter tops, open and glass-fronted shelving for dish and kitchen knick-knack display, and a walk-in pantry. A side-entry mud room with half bathroom allows for easy access to the pebble-stone driveway and detached two-car garage while the adjoining breakfast area opens out to a shaded terrace with an outdoor, raised-hearth fireplace.

A main floor junior suite offers lucky guests a walk-in closet and a private bathroom and the master suite, privately situated in its own wing on the second floor, includes a private south-facing mahogany deck that overlooks the backyard and a vast, spa-style bathroom with radiant heat tile flooring, a free-standing soaking tub, double vanity, and a party-sized stall shower. There are three more guest/family bedrooms on the second level—each have private en suite facilities, plus a (second) laundry room and a second mahogany deck that overlooks the backyard.

The massive, 2,500 square foot finished basement includes a staff suite with private bathroom, a 1,200 bottle wine cellar, a dedicated exercise room with a fully mirrored wall the vanity-fueled among us will love, a large laundry room and additional space with in-place wiring for a home theater.

The the backyard, tree-ringed and high-hedged for maximum privacy from nosy neighbors, has a pair of covered stone terraces off the back of the house—one with outdoor fireplace—and a 45-foot long, heated swimming pool elegantly sunk into a lush, soccer pitch sized lawn and girdled with a strikingly simple stone coping and sunbathing apron.

Other high-end summer home accessories and amenities include a central vacuum, security, irrigation, multiple-zone central air conditioning and gas-fired hot air systems.

Property records and other online resources reveal Missus Stuber continues to own a much more modest cottage on a thickly wooded acre in the ho-hum expanse of land between East Hampton and Sag Harbor that she picked up in May 2000 for $655,000.


Property records also show Mister Stuber has owned a home in the same Beverly Hills (CA) 'hood as supermodel turned reality television mogul Tyra Banks since 2003 when he paid $2,665,000 for a 3,910 square foot residence with four bedrooms and four bathrooms. Documents we dug up online show Miz Sims was added to the deed a few months before they hitched their wagons in the yes of God and government.

listing photos: Corcoran

SELLERS: Tamar Braxton and Vincent Herbert
LOCATION: Hidden Hills, CA
PRICE: $7,595,000
SIZE: 12,402 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6 fulland 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Oh lowherd, children, buckle your real estate stafety belts because we got a classic case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle coming your way. It was only last September (2011) that R&B singer-songwriter/reality t.v. denizen Tamar Braxton—the younger sister of singer six-time Grammy winner Toni Braxton—and her famously rotund music executive husband Vincent Herbert—he's often credited with discovering international alt-pop phenom Lady Gaga—acquired a nearly new mansion—let's call it a faux French Country-style pile—set high on a low rise in the guard-gated and star-studded equestrian-centric community of Hidden Hills, CA.

Well, dontcha know, butter beans, the oft-bickering couple, whose new reality television program (Tamar & Vince) premiered this month, have had a real estate change of heart and this week hoisted their 12,402 square foot behemoth back on the open market with an asking price of $7,595,000.

Your Mama's research on the internets turns up a discrepancy as to the amount the Braxton-Herberts actually paid for the humongous house in Hidden Hills: The MLS shows the property went for $6,900,000 in September 2011 while at least two other public data bases we perused show it sold for $3,400,000.

Current and previous listing information we dug up on the interweb shows the hulking, two-story mansion sits prominently and heavily on 1.31 acres and includes an ostentatious Macmansion-style double height entry with twin curved staircases, a large formal living room, a smaller library/study with custom paneling and fireplace, and a formal dining room with open beamed ceiling and adjoining wine cellar.

Less formal entertaining area include an expensively equipped center-island kitchen and adjacent family room with fireplace, a media room/home theater with titanic 125-inch wide screen and 7.2 surround sound, and a pub/game room with hand-carved built-in wet bar.

Listing information currently available online does not include any photographs—the listing photos above are from the time of the Braxton-Herberts' purchase—but does indicate the "extravagant master suite" includes a voluminous ceiling, dual custom-fitted closets, an all-stone bathroom with steam shower and spa tub, two fireplaces—one in the bedroom the other in the bathroom—and a private "walk-out balcony" with "forever views."

The back of the main level opens to numerous covered porches that give way to various stone patios, a built-in barbecue center, a fire pit ringed by semi-circular built-in seating, a fountain or two, and a swimming pool with elevated spa set into a lush strip of lawn. The hillside behind the house drops off to allow for long vistas across the scrubby, rolling hills of the far western suburbs of Los Angeles.

Other notable amenities of the property, as per current and previous listing information, include an attached, four-car side-entry garage, an "invisible" speaker system—whatever that is, an "expresso center" [sic], multiple security cameras, a safe room, and—ahem—a mirrored elevator.

listing photos: Re/Max Olson & Associates

We don't watch X Factor—or any of those other gawd-awful, long-past-their-prime televised pop music contests for that matter—but apparently, last night, the hopeful and over-excited X Factor contestants were invited to sing at one the four celebrity judges houses around the country.

Howevuh, kinderkins—as exposed by the celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ—turns out at least two of the extravagant homes shown were not even owned by the judges. Mister Cowell owns numerous luxury homes around the world including a sumptuous, custom-built mansion in the flats of Beverly Hills, a couple of low-slung mid-century moderns in the trendy Trousdale Estates 'hood, a large house in London's Kensington and a beach front getaway on the Lesser Antilles island of Barbados but, as far as Your Mama know, he does not owns any real estate in south Florida. In fact, the massive, über-modern Miami, FL mansion they claimed was sassy Simon Cowell's actually belongs to professional baseballer Alex Rodriguez who has it on the market for a stomach-churning $38,000,000.

Contestants who who were picked to perform at Britney Spears's house did so at a sprawling, six-plus acre bluff-top estate near the tail end of Carbon Mesa Road in Malibu (CA). Thing is, Miz Spears hasn't lived in Malibu for years...years, we tell you. She did live there back when she was married to Whatshisface, the  father of her children, and for a short bit after they split. But, after shacking up in Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Hidden Hills, Miz Spears currently resides in 10,000-plus square foot rented mansion behind the 24-hour guarded gates of the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks.

Since we didn't see the show itself we can't say if the homes of L.A. Reid and Demi Lovato were their real homes but we suspect they, too, were not. For the record, until sometime in late 2010 or early 2011 the eminently likable but sometimes troubled Miss Lovato and her family leased a Spanish-style house in L.A.'s celeb-stocked Los Feliz area. The house is now owned, as it turns out, by actress Olivia Wilde who put it up for lease recently at eleven grand a month.

In late 2010 Miss Lovato dropped two-an-a-quarter million clams on a hillside compound in the more suburban L.A. community of Sherman Oaks that, in late 2011, she told gossip blogger turned budding media mogul Perez Hilton, she shared with her parents. Your Mama recently heard through the real estate gossip grapevine the former Disney darling may have decamped for a home of her own but—sorry, Charlies—we haven't got any inside intel on that real estate rumor.

As for L.A. Reid, we're not exactly where the influential music mogul actually lives but we do find evidence on the interweb that he and his Missus, Erica, own a 5,000+ square foot spread on Park Avenue in New York City, a multi-acre estate in super-swank Sagaponack (NY), and several residences in and around Atlanta, GA.

This X Factor real estate fakery shouldn't be all that surprising given that celebs do have a thing for protecting their real estate privacy and, more importantly, everybody with a goddamn brain ought know by now that most reality television involves a whole lotta smoke and mirrors meant to obscure what's really real.

SELLERS: Mark and Dina Waters
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $5,199,000
SIZE: 6,508 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a covert communique from Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air Your Mama has learned that low-key movie and television director Mark Waters and his low-profile and under-appreciated, stage-trained actress wife Dina Waters have put their elegant faux-French chateau in Los Angeles' historic and hoity toity Hancock Park 'hood up for sale with a $5,199,000 asking price.

Mister Waters is best known, perhaps, as a director for hire who steered the Showbiz ship for the quirky, low budget bomb The House of Yes with Parker Posey as well as a couple of successful pre-tabloid-trainwreck Lindsay Lohan vehicles (Freaky Friday and Mean Girls). More recently he directed the Jim Carry-comedy Mister Popper's Penguins and he's credited as the director of first season of the currently airing television program Made in Jersey, a series Your Mama has not seen with our own boozy and judgmental eyeballs but suspect may have missed Tinseltown's quickly fading obsession with all things New Joizee.

In addition to her theater credits that include the Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh with Kevin Spacey in the late 1990s, Missus Waters (nee Spybey) won a Daytime Emmy in 1993 for her starring role on Lifestories: Families in Crisis. Since then has appeared in—but not starred in—a slew of movies and television programs including Striptease, The First Wives Club, Remember WENN, Freaky Friday, Men Behaving Badly, Six Feet Under, Greg the Bunny and Just Like Heaven. Most recently Missus Waters lent her voice to the short-lived animated series Neighbors From Hell with Will Sasso and Molly Shannon.

According to our entire unscientific research on Redfin, the current, $5,199,000 price tag for Mister and Missus Waters' Hancock Park residence makes it the third most expensive property currently on the open market in the 90020 zip code, the most expensive being the fabled Dorothy Chandler estate that was listed since May (2012) at $11,250,000.

If a real estate rabbit gets pulled out of a hat and the Waters' house gets sold at full price it would only be the fourth most expensive property to sell in the 90020 zip code in the last three years, the most expensive being the 11,000-plus square foot mansion former sit-com star David Schwimmer sold in June 2012 for $8,865,000 and another being a 5 bedroom and 8 bathroom corner compound that oddball musical innovator Beck picked up in June 2007 for $6,750,000, foolishly listed a year later for $9,000,000 and finally unloaded in August 2010 at a dramatic loss for $5,600,000 to power house hospital drama-centric creator/writer/producer Shonda Rimes (Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice).

So—and sadly for Mister and Missus Waters bank accounts—while the $5,199,000 price tag is most certainly on the high side for comparable properties in the neighborhood it is, none-the-less, a purse-punching $400,001 less than the $5,600,000 property records show the couple coughed up for the fully packed if somewhat compact estate seven years ago, in August 2005, at the electrified apex of the most recent but long-ago-burst real estate bubble.

Current listing information shows the un-gated and stately, two-story faux-chateau was originally built in 1927, sits on a pancake flat .71 acre lot and measures a spacious 6,508 square feet with a total of 6 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms, plus a separate apartment privately located atop the attached two-car garage that's tucked discreetly down a long driveway at the side of the house and perfect for over-night house guests or live-in domestic worker.

The simple, unoffensive and fastidiously maintained landscaping at the front of the house is mirrored in the updated and upgraded but decidedly traditional interiors that include a grand, impress-the-guests-style double-height foyer with semi-glossy espresso-colored wood floors, white walls and a quietly theatrical curved staircase with tightly banister-ed wrought iron railing. The deep brown wood floors extend into the spacious formal living room with fireplace and soft gray walls set off against high-gloss white moldings, trim work and wall frames. Listing information indicates the Water's residence also contains a formal dining room and a wood-paneled library with built-in book cases and a second fireplace.

The horizontal strip wood floors change to a haughtier Parquet de Versailles pattern in the center island kitchen that's outfitted with white Shaker style cabinetry, speckled beige and brown granite counter tops and and expensive collection of top-grade, commercial-style stainless steel appliances. A wide but shallow archway separates the kitchen from the family room, also finished with Parquet de Versailles-style floors and outfitted with a third, corner fireplace plus a built-in entertainment cabinet and what appears to be—but may not actually be—a surround sound system.

The master suite occupies its own wing on the second floor and offers the homeowners a private sitting room and separate bedroom that overlook the backyard, a fourth fireplace and impractically pale gray wall-to-wall carpeting and lustrous, pewter and silver satin curtains on the over-sized windows and French doors that amp up the glam quotient and open to a wrought iron-railed Juliet balcony.

Several rooms on the main floor open to a covered loggia or multi-level entertainment terrace with pergola-shaded dining area, built-in outdoor kitchen and sun-exposed lounging area that butts up to but doesn't exactly overlook the lighted, north/south aligned tennis court. A wide sweep of lawn extends off the back of the house—and the side of the entertainment terrace—and around to the swimming pool and spa that's unfortunately, uncomfortably and somewhat inexplicably squashed into the rear corner of the property between a towering privacy hedge and an almost as high but far more penal-looking chain link fence that separates the slender sunbathing terrace from the basketball hoop-equipped tennis court.

Your Mama has no idea what Mister and Missus Waters' future real estate plans may be, and it seems unlikely they'll move their young family into a comparatively puny condo, but property records do reveal than in June 2011 the couple dropped $399,000 on a fairly contemporary, two bedroom and two bathroom, loft-style live-work condo in downtown Los Angeles, located just a few blocks from the shimmering, clover-shaped Westin Bonaventure Hotel and just around the corner from the perennially popular eatery Botegga Louie. It seems unlikely they'll move their young family into this comparatively puny and far more urban condo, but stranger things have happened, right?

listing photos: Coldwell Banker

SELLER: Hassan Nemazee via The United States of America
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $19,500,000
SIZE: (total of) 6 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: After a brief hiatus from the open market—and a change from a VP/Associate Broker at Sotheby's to a much more prominent SVP/Managing Director at Brown Harris Stevens—the U.S. Marshall's Office has re-listed the art- and objet-filled New York City duplex of convicted and jailed financial fraudster Hassan Nemazee with an asking price of $19,500,000.

Mister Nemazee—for those of y'all who don't pay attention to the financial news and/or read the New York City gossip columns—was arrested in 2009 on scandalous charges of bank fraud. He later plead guilty to multiple charges that he sought and/or obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans secured with non-existent or value-inflated assets. He is now serving 12-and-some years in the clink.

Born into a wealthy Iranian family who fled to the U.S. during the run up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Mister Nemazee wasn't just any multi-millionaire white-collar crook. No siree Bob. Before his nefarious loan-seeking ways were exposed, prosecuted and proven Mister Nemazee was a major donor to and fundraiser for the Democratic Party. He was the New York finance chair for John Kerry's failed presidential bid in 2004 and the national finance chair to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2006. In the late 1990s then-president Bill Clinton nominated Mister Nemazee to be the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. The nomination was withdrawn after a blistering and unflattering expose in Forbes magazine about some of Mister Nemazee's shady-seeming business dealings but that didn't stop Bill's wife Hillary Clinton from appointing him her national finance chairman when she made her own run for the presidency in 2007-8.

Anyhoo, as part of his plea agreement, Mister Nemazee agreed to surrender ownership of his Park Avenue apartment to the office of U.S. Marshall who took possession in the fall of 2009. In 2010, Mister Nemazee's Missus, Sheila, made a valiant but failed legal attempt to retain ownership of the apartment—as well as other real property assets—for which, she claimed, she provided the approximately $1,500,000 down payment.

Mister and Missus Nemazee purchased their posh and traditionally decorated duplex pad located on a high floor in a notably swank, pre-war Georgian-style dowager on Park Avenue in 1989 for around $5,800,000. The mouth-watering floor plan (above) and current listing information shows the palatial 14th and 15th floor apartment contains a total of 14 rooms with four family bedrooms, five full and 2 half bathrooms plus an additional staff suite with one bathroom and two cell-sized bedrooms. Listing information goes on to point out the three exposures, 28 windows, two terraces and substantial but certainly not unusually high common charges of $11,505 per month.

The lower level living spaces include a compact entry vestibule with adjoining powder room; a bedroom-sized foyer/stair hall with elaborate, geometric inlaid wood floor and faux-finished trim work; a just-about-baronial, 29-plus foot long double exposure formal living room with fireplace and peach brocade wallpaper; a more intimately-scaled 20-foot long library with inlaid herringbone wood floor, second fireplace, built-in cabinetry and forest green brocade wall coverings; and a formal dining room with built-in china and linen closets at one end and blood red brocade wallpaper all around.

A windowed and well-equipped butler's pantry connects the corner dining room—and the stair hall/foyer—to the spacious eat-in kitchen that, in turn, connect through a rear stair hall/mud room to a family room with adjoining half bathroom.

The rear stairs lead up to the aforementioned two bedroom and one bathroom staff quarters that also include a full-sized laundry room and three large closets. The main staircase in the front foyer curls elegantly around to the tail end of a T-shaped corridor off of which open four family/guest bedroom suites. Two of the family/guest bedrooms have walk-in closets and private poopers as does a third that also offers private access to a slender but still much-coveted set-back terrace. The two-room master suite encompasses a private study/sitting room with built-in cabinetry and direct access to a second, larger set-back terrace plus a separate 20-plus foot long bedroom, two walk-in closets and two additional standard-depth closets, and a pair of small but properly ventilated bathrooms.

This is not, it should be noted, the first time the U.S. Marshall's Office has been to the real estate rodeo with this particular Park Avenue apartment. In March 2011, more than a year after the apartment was seized, it was pushed on the open market with an overly-enthusiastic $28,000,000 price tag. Seven months later the price plummeted to $23,000,000 and in March of this year (2012) it was slashed to $19,500,000 before being taken off the market in mid-August.

It might also be interestingly noted that the most expensive apartment ever to trade hands at 770 Park Avenue was in October 2007 when private equity bigwig Robert Niehaus and wife Kate dropped $20,000,000 on the duplex apartment owned by Washington, D.C.-based businesswoman and real estate tycoon Connie Milstein, another shamed hot-shot Democratic mover and shaker, some of the politically-minded children may recall, who was (in)famously caught on camera attempting to bribe homeless potential voters in Wisconsin with cigarettes.

A few of the other real estate assets Mister Nemazee agreed to forfeit—but that his wife Sheila sued to retain—include a 2 bedroom and 3 bathroom fifth and sixth floor (5H) duplex apartment at 101 Warren Street purchased in both their names in April 2008 for $3,008,623, seized by the U.S. Marshall's Office in March 2010, listed the following month for $3,300,000 and sold for $3,105,662 in October of the same year. The apartment was reported by the kids at Curbed to have been previously occupied by one of the Nemazee's five children.

The pampered couple also maintained a 12.5-plus acre compound just north of New York City in the bucolic and supah-swank Westchester County community of Katonah, the same neck of the woods where Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren both keep sprawling, high-maintenance country spreads. Records we peeped are a tad bit vague but it looks to Your Mama like Mister and Missus Nemazee acquired the two-parcel property—with multiple structures, swimming pool and tennis court—sometime in the late 1980s for around $1,500,000. The databases we scoured aren't clear when exactly the U.S. Marshall took posession but they do show the tony estate was sold in February of this year (2012) for $3,650,000 to a corporation linked to a man named Allan S. Gordon who appears to be the producer of a slew of Broadway barn burners like Rent, Hairspray, Spamalot, The Pee-Wee Herman Show and the current revival of Evita.

A May 2010 article in (and on) Forbes noted that the couple also maintained a luxurious apartment in Rome and a 14th-century farmhouse in Italy that Mister Nemazee "agreed to forfeit to federal prosecutors as part of a plea deal." Presumably those have already been or will soon be seized and sold.

listing photos: Brown Harris Stevens

BUYER: Amanda Bynes
LOCATION: Calabasas, CA
PRICE: $1,879,000
SIZE: 4,618 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: After a series driving mishaps that include—but are not limited to—one DUI arrest, a couple of moving violations and two hit-and-runs plus a mountain of unpaid parking tickets that resulted in the revocation of her driver's license, the apple-cheeked and newly raven-haired former child star Amanda Bynes (What I Like About You, She's the Man, The Amanda Show, All That), who declared her retirement from the Show Business via Twitter in June 2010 at the age of 24, decamped for the taxi-cab strewn streets of Manhattan where she says she'll pursue a career as a fashion designer.

Your Mama doesn't have even the remotest of notions where Miss Bynes beds down in The Big Apple but three separate and all very reliable informants snitched to Your Mama this week that young (and amok) Miss Bynes still owns a quintessentially suburban mock-Med mini-mansion in an affluent gated enclave in Calabasas, CA that she quietly scooped up last November (2011) for $1,879,000.

Almost two million bucks might seem to like a whole lotta dough for a 26-year old Showbiz retiree to spend on a large house in suburban Los Angeles in which she no longer plans to live. Believe it or not, butter beans, for a number of years in the mid-Aughts Miss Bynes was one of Tinseltown's top teen-aged earners and in early 2007—then just past her teen years at 20—Forbes declared her the fifth highest under-21 earner in Hollywood with an estimated 2006 take of around $2,500,000.

Listing information from the time of her purchase that Your Mama easily conjured up out of the interweb shows the "(mostly) one story)" stone and stucco tract house was built in 2005 with 4 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms in 4,618 square feet of indisputably luxurious if almost entirely brown and beige interior space.

The expensively upgraded and customized interior spaces include an airy living/dining room with wood-burning fireplace, high beamed and bead-boarded ceiling, Travertine tile floors laid in a Versailles pattern, and a trio of transomed, 10-paned French doors that open to the compact, resort-style backyard.

The fancy Travertine flooring treatment continues into the large and expensively equipped—if very ordinary—center island kitchen with distressed wood beams on the ceiling, dark chocolate-stained wood cabinetry, an on-demand hot water system, the expected collection of high-grade stainless steel appliances, pale beige-colored granite counter tops and beige tile back splash.

One end of the kitchen open to a breakfast room with French doors that access the walled and gated entry courtyard and the other end opens to a family room with more distressed wood beams on the ceiling, a second fireplace, a built-in entertainment center and direct access to the backyard entertainment areas.

The main floor master suite has heavy-duty crown moldings at the ceiling, more Versailles pattern Travertine tile on the floor and private access to the backyard and swimming pool. The suite is—or at least was at the time of Miss Byne's acquisition—complete with a double-sized closet and a private pooper with dual sinks, separate make-up vanity, lots of mocha-colored cabinetry for lotions and potions storage, a jetted bath tub and a separate steam-equipped shower.

We don't know to what use Miss Bynes put the second floor loft space but the previous, non-celebrity owners filled it with all manner of exercise equipment.

The .37 acre grounds—a good portion of which is lost to a steep, landscaped hillside behind the house—include walled and gated courtyard with splish-splashy fountain at the front of the house and several flagstone  terraces at the back that are connected by stepping stone paths. An elevated stone terrace just off the family room has a built-in barbecue station and tented cabana that overlooks the free-form swimming pool that's nestled into the hillside with what listing information calls a "beach entry."

Now children, use yer noggins here. The listing photos show the house as the previous owners had it decorated. We don't care for for the day-core—it's far too wannabe English country house meets Shabby Sheek meets Pier One—but it's absolutely no indication that young Miss Bynes decorative tastes run towards chintz-covered couches and/or white-washed and faux-distressed buffets and armoires.

If the downright filthy condition in which she keeps the interior of her late-model 5-series BMW is any indication, Your Mama would bet both our long-boded bitches, Linda and Beverly, that the inside of Miss Byne's Calabasas crib looks like a post-party frat house with mis-matched, cigarette-burned couches, sheets thumb-tacked over the windows, bongs in the bathrooms and a plastic, 50-gallon garbage can in the kitchen over-filled with beer bottles and fast food containers. Ouch! Did we say that out loud? We tease, children. It's probably immaculate.

listing photos: Prudential California Realty (via Redfin)

Word on the celebrity real estate street is that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were out peeping on some posh and pricey properties in Miami Beach, FL yesterday.

Your Mama—who does not know a a Gerbera Daisy from the Gerber baby—has no idea if the perpetually pap-trailed publicity magnets are just looking for a little free press to keep their fame flame aglow, if their just looking for a multi-million dollar part-time love shack or if they plan to settle their high-maintenance selves down and make babies (or whatever) in the high-energy, multi-culti mosh pit that is Miami Beach.

Call us a cynic—and we have been called far worse—but would any of the piglets be surprised if this here house hunt was taped for Kourtney & Kim Take Miami, one of Kimmy K's several reality program? Or of, instead of a nest to feather with K.W., she was just looking to lease a big ol' house to camp out in while filming said reality program? Well, we certainly wouldn't be surprised but, truth is, trying to figure out the difference between what is real and what is reality t.v. with these two—particularly with her—is like a trout trying to solve a damn Rubic's cube. It just can't be done.

Anyhoo, we spent a few minutes looking around to see if we could suss out which property or properties the couple toured—they reportedly checked out four water front properties priced between 7 and 10 million clams—but turned up empty handed. We'll have another look around and see what we can turn up or—better yet—maybe one of the better informed children down in Miami Beach will give Your Mama a ringy-dingy and clue us in. How's that sound?

The big-bootied amateur porn star turned gossip glossy staple and reality television supernova Kimmy K. owns a faux-Spanish mini-mansion in Beverly Hills she bought in February 2010 for $3,400,000 and the even bigger ego-ed Mister West owns an art-filled, multi-story hillside residence just above Hollywood that he bought in December 2003 for $1,750,000 and briefly had on the market in spring 2010 with a $3,995,000 price tag. Since at least the mid-Aughts fashion-obsessed Mister West has also maintained an apartment in New York City where he combined a two modestly sized units in a swank SoHo apartment house that he had worked over in an aggressively minimalist fashion by conceptual Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin.

SELLER: Billy Bob Thornton
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $9,995,000
SIZE: 11,012 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a covert communique we received late last night from Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills, we've come to learn that Oscar-winning screenwriter and actor Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade, A Simple Plan, The Man Who Wasn't There) hoisted his mansion in the flats of Beverly Hills on the (open) market this week with an asking price of $9,995,000.

Property records reveal Mister Thornton and his then third wife, Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie, purchased the property in August 2000 for $3,750,000 from former Guns 'n Roses guitarist Slash who had purchased the property just four years earlier for $2,100,000. As best as we can tell, around the time Mister Thornton and Miz Jolie put a legal end to their highly publicized and rather bizarre union in May 2003, the deed was signed over to Mister Thornton.

Property records and listing information show the walled, gated and high-hedged
1920s Spanish Hacienda-style mansion sits on a 27,699 square foot corner lot just below Sunset Boulevard and measures 11,012 square feet with a total of 9 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms.

Current, publicly available listing information doesn't have much in the way of photographs—we got our aerial photo from the folks at Pacific Coast News—but does indicate the hulking, U-shaped residence includes a two-story living room with fireplace and beamed ceiling, a "large formal dining room, huge kitchen" and "enormous family room." There's also, as per listing information, a library, a master suite with sitting area, a fitness room/gym, and recording studio—Mister Thornton started in Showbiz as a musician before he became an actor, dontcha know, and once opened for Hank Williams Jr.

The completely landscaped grounds, according to listing information, include circular driveway at the front, additional off-street parking and two-car garage at the rear, covered loggias, fountains, a swimming pool and spa and a lighted paddle tennis court.

Mister Thornton also owns a house in Malibu that's not on the beach—it's on the mountain side of Pacific Coast Highway, actually—that's 2,544 square feet with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms and cost him $2,350,000 in April 2007.

aerial photo: Pacific Coast News

Listen kittens, we found ourselves burdened with some entirely unexpected and unavoidable issues that we have to grapple with so we have only a few minutes to provide the children with some links to a few recent celebrity real estate stories we didn't get to earlier...

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Celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ reported early last week that sit-com star John Krasinski and his movie star wife Emily Blunt recently splashed out $2,150,000 on a new, eco-friendly country spread in Ojai, CA. Although it's closer as the crow flies, the 5.17-acre property is just over 1.5 miles by car from the ranchette Reese Witherspoon and husband Jim Toth heaved on the market a few weeks ago to much media hoo-ha and hullabaloo with a $10,000,000 price tag.

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TMZ also reported last week that recently widowed Taylor Armstrong from The Real Housewife of Beverly Hills—she's the one with the really big lips—will soon have to vacate her rented 4,814 square foot faux-Spanish casa that her landlord listed last week for $3,695,000.

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The long-legged gal at Trulia Luxe Living revealed late last week that genuinely talented Oscar-nominated actor Albert Brooks (Drive, Broadcast News, Defending Your Life, Taxi Driver) listed his long-time residence in upper Bel Air for $6,995,000

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Actors Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart recently filed suit against Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan after a huge eucalyptus tree on Corgan's property, directly across the street, was felled by high winds and, according to the peeps at E!, "landed on the Danes' house, breaking power lines and a sprinkler system."


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The 6,000-ish square foot London duplex penthouse of Grammy-winning pop singer Duffy, estimated to be worth around £12,000,000, was destroyed in a fire last week. The singer, who was reportedly preparing to move out, managed to escape the conflagration with her housekeeper, two cats and dog.

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Does outspoken comedienne/chat show host Rosie O'Donnell really want to buy a new house for Honey Boo Boo?


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Not that it matters mean much, but did y'all know that presidential hopeful Mitt Romney personal property portfolio contains five homes with a total of 25 poopers while current president Barak Obama owns just one home with five?