Mister Kavanaugh probably isn’t a household name in Peoria, Poughkeepsie or Paducah but in Tinseltown everybody–and we mean everybody in The Industry–knows Mister Kavanaugh operates as a high-powered player in the highly competitive game of movie making. Few may know his name but most regular movie goers and watchers have likely seen at least one if not a handful of the dozens of movies in which he’s had a financial hand in getting made

According to a January 2009 article in Malibu Magazine, in the early Noughts Mister Kavanaugh was living large as a brash and baby-faced 20-something year old venture capitalist with a multi-million dollar house and a douche baggy Ferrari. Yes, that’s right. We said it and we meant it too. Take note Justin Bieber: Twenty-something year old men with more money than life experience who scoot around in attention demanding Ferraris always, always, always look like hardcore douche bags. The only people who don’t find it to be silly and tacky are the twenty something year old moe-ron men who drive Ferraris and that certain kind of woman who finds douche baggery sexy. Even more stupefyingly ridiculous? A teenage boy driving a Ferrari. Gwaawd. Gag Your Mama with a damn spoon. We’re not jealous of Little Boy Bieber people, so don’t even waste your time and energy to go there. We do not want to hear it.

Anyhoo, Mister Kavanaugh’s venture capital business went bust, he lost all his money and eventually turned his hard-charging attentions to The Big Business of Show. He founded Relativity Media in 2004 and in the six or seven years since has executive produced scads of hyper-successful movies that include (but are far from limited to): Cowboys & Aliens, The Fighter, Salt, Nine, Little Fockers, Frost/Nixon, Burn After Reading, Mamma Mia!, Pineapple Express, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. A long list of projects in the works (and in the bag) include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and an as yet untitled Snow White film staring hotsy-totsy baking soda heir Armie Hammer as the prince and Oscar winning actress (and fellow Malibu resident) Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen.

Relativity Media has agreements with half a dozen major studios to co-finance films and has begun to snatch up various film production and distribution operations. It seems, puppies, that Mister Kavanaugh–a whippersnapper just in his mid-thirties now–is well on his way to being the next Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Along with Mister Kavanaugh’s rocket to showbiz success came a Hollywood Big Baller lifestyle that included a lavish and controversial commute from his home in Malibu to West Hollywood by helicopter. That’s right, he commuted by helicopter. We do not begrudge Mister Kavanaugh his money or success. We really don’t. However, a lot of people bristle and squirm with inequality and righteous indignation when they hear of such naked extravagance, particularly during the current and terrifying volatility of the economy that has a lot of folks wondering how they’re going to pay for four dollar a gallon gas to get to their near-minimum wage job where they perform various services for the rich people who spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars every day to fly themselves to and from work by helicopter. But, poodles, we digress and that is really another topic for another blog.

Before moving to Malibu prop records reveal Mister Kavanaugh owned a secluded contemporary crib on Beverly Ranch Road, just off twisty and famous Mulholland Drive and up a private shared driveway high in the hills above Sherman Oaks, CA. In December 2007 he sold his house on Bev. Ranch Road for $3,100,000. We’re not sure where he went from there but records indicate he eventually landed in a 1930s Spanish-style casa on the sand in Malibu where in February 2009 he shelled out $5,850,000 for an ocean front residence at the western end of Malibu’s celebrity-lined La Costa beach. Mister Kavanaugh quickly caught a case of the Real Estate Fickle and flipped the house to director/producer Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Starsky & Hutch) for $9,000,000. The house sits sandwiched between David Spade’s house and the 1930s cottage that Oscar winner Charlize Theron sold to Glee creator Ryan Murphy in May 2011 for $6,562,500.

In October 2009, a number months before he sold his house to Mister Phillips, Mister Kavanaugh splashed out another $7,000,000 for another oceanfront pad, this one also on La Costa but down at the opposite end not so far from the house Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne have been trying to sell for an eternity and is currently on the market for $9,500,000.

Property records reveal that Mister Kavanaugh acquired the property from spectacularly successful class-action trial attorney Thomas W. Girardi, the real life attorney who litigated the Anderson vs. Pacific Gas & Electric case that inspired the Erin Brockovich movie that won Julia Roberts an Academy Award. Mister Girardi’s eponymous firm reportedly took in “at least $120 million” in legal fees for that case.

Listing information for Mister Kavanaugh’s current crib in the Bu states that it’s been “recently renovated and updated.” Presumably these recent renovations and updates account for the toe-curling 50% increase in asking price over the $7,000,000 he paid for the place less than two years ago. At it’s current $10,500,000 asking price, Mister Kavanaugh’s house is the most expensive house currently listed on the open market on La Costa beach.

The listing, held by Mister Kavanaugh’s Beverly Hills-based real estate agent mother, states the tile-roofed sort of-Spanish/quasi-contemporary beach abode was originally built in 1955, measures 2,791 square feet and in includes 2 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.

A gated and walled entry courtyard puts a grassy buffer between the perpetually busy Pacific Coast Highway and the glass front door. Inside the open plan living/dining/kitchen area has white washed hardwood floors and a full wall of floor-to-ceiling wood framed glass windows and doors that marries the cozy interior spaces to the sea side outdoor entertainment area.

The mildly but unmistakably feminine and unexpectedly Shabby Chic-inspired day-core makes Your Mama wonder if Mister Kavanaugh actually lives (or lived) here or if all of his things were removed and replaced with a truckload of white slip-covered sofas and wood coffee/end tables from Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota’s giant warehouse of banal staging furniture. Whatever the case, the sky-lit living area has shallow vaulted ceiling, built-in bar counter, and a double-wide fireplace flanked by display niches and wood-storage boxes. A kick-up-your-feet white slip-covered sectional sofa that faces away from the ocean encircles a beachy wood coffee table. On the wall opposite the ocean, a giant over-sized mirror makes it possible for someone on the sofa to view the ocean even though not facing it. Blech! Gack! Maybe we’re just funny this way but Your Mama would much rather turn the damn sofa around so the ocean can be seen directly rather than through the dizzy-making reflective artifice of a mirror.

Behind the dining area the deluxe but design-wise fairly ordinary center-island kitchen with breakfast bar has white Shaker-style cabinets with glass-fronted uppers, grey-veined marble counter tops and high-grade commercial style stainless-steel appliances. Upstairs, at the road end of the house a sizable family/media room has a wood-beamed vaulted ceiling, corner fireplace, sand-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, and another white slip-covered sectional sofa wrapped around a wood coffee.

A notable–and we think successful–architectural effort was made in the second floor master suite where the ridge line of the wood-beamed vaulted ceiling was replaced with an angled sky light that runs the full length of the room. The room faces the roiling Pacific Ocean through an entire wall of wood-framed glass windows and doors that open to a petite private terrace with glass railing and up-close and personal view of the waves and whitewater. The attached bathroom also has a vaulted wood ceiling pierced by at least one dramatic sky light and includes double sinks and a soaking tub separate from the two-headed (and sky-lit) shower area.

A decent size for Malibu but far from huge entertainment deck off the main living area hangs over the sand and, as per listing photos, offers enough square footage to accommodate a few sunbathing beds at one end, a teak dining table for eight at the other and, in between, yet another white slip-covered sectional sofa curled around a wood coffee table. High-powered heaters mounted in the eaves ensure the salty aired deck can be used even when the weather gets a bit cool and coastal.

Your Mama has no knowledge of where Mister Kavanaugh plans to decamp but iffin we were the wagering type–and we’re not–we’d bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly and our mean ol’ pussy Sugar he’s headed someplace more expensive and more impressive. We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.

Property records also show that in July 2008, Mister Kavanaugh spent a total of $1,290,000 for three 625 square foot apartments in a newly constructed apartment building walking distance to Rao’s in New York City’s can-be-sketchy East Harlem ‘hood. Rao’s, for those who don’t already know, is a teeny-tiny old-school Italian eatery well-known as the most difficult–near impossible–restaurant at which to secure a reservation in all of New York City. ‘Tis true. Check it out.

listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty / Beverly Hills

Now, puppies, have some common damn sense here. Miz Lopez did not ring Your Mama on our bedraggled and bedazzled princess phone and tell us with her own lip-glossed lips that she plans to sell any of her homes and/or buy a new one. For all we know she and her wire-thin soon-to-be-third ex-huzband are going to stay living up under the same roof. Who knows? Not Your Mama, that’s who. We are simply guessing on the what might happen based on our entirely unscientific and otherwise useless long-term study of the fickle real estate habits of the rich and famous. Miz Lopez in particular has come under our celebrity real estate microscope because she’s a wildly wealthy showbiz phenom who buys and sells real estate about as often as she gets in to and out of long-term relationships and marriages, which is–let’s be honest hunnies–fairly frequently.

There are three fancy-pants pads in that Mister Anthony and Miz Lopez share, at least there are only three we know about. There were oodles reports in the fall of 2010 that they’d peeped a penthouse pad at the controversial mixed-use Paseo Caribe complex in San Juan, Puerto Rico but we have no direct 411 about whether or not they moved forward with a purchase on La Isla del Encanto.
photo: Icon Brickell

We do know that sometime in 2009 Mister Anthony bought a minority stake in the Miami Dolphins football team and in September of the same year he told the peeps at People that he’d bought a condo in Miami. He went on to say that when the decoratin’ was done the condo would be “the sexiest place in town!” Your Mama was unable to parse the property records to reveal the details of said purchase but most reports from the time state they picked up a penthouse at the newly constructed Icon Brickell (shown above), a glittering 10 acre forest of 50-story smoked glass and steel towers that cleave to the edge of Biscayne Bay. In October of 2009 it was revealed by a blogging Miami real estate agent that Mister Anthony and Miz Lopez placed 10–yes, hunnies, ten–additional units under contract at the Icon Brickell but iffin we’re being honest–and we always are–we’d confess we really haven’t any idea if that’s accurate or not.

Mister Anthony and Miz Lopez both previously owned property in the Miami area. In October 2003, shortly before he divorced former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres Delgado–mother of two of his five children–he laid out $750,000 for a 4 bedroom and 3 bathroom mock-Med inside the gates of the Doral Country Club. Mister Anthony quit-claimed the property over to his ex-wife in 2005 and she sold it in late 2009 for $750,000.

In May 2002, about the time she bailed on her second marriage to former back up dancer/choreographer Cris Judd and famously hooked up with actor Ben Affleck, Miz Lopez dropped $9,500,000 on a lavish water front mansion on Miami Beach’s celebrity-lined North Bay Road. Miz Lopez’s massive Miami mansion was originally built in 1929, sits on more than 1 acre with 200 feet of bay frontage and has a waterside swimming pool and private boat dock. It was here where she reportedly holed up in the fall of 2003 after she and Mister Affleck called off their highly anticipated and much ballyhooed wedding in Santa Barbara, CA.

Miz Lopez floated her Miami manse on the market in late 2004 and sold it in March 2005 for $13,900,000, a substantial $4,400,000 profit not counting renovation, decoration, carrying costs and real estate fees. The buyer was health care industry tycoon and venture capitalist Mark Gainor and his wife Elyse. As it turns out Mister and Missus Gainor, who gave the estate complete and very expensive overhaul, have the magnificent mansion on the market with a staggering asking price of $34,500,000.

But we digress. Back on the west coast…

The 10-acre Calabasas, CA estate where Miz Lopez and Mister Judd were married in September 2001 was recently quietly placed on the market with an asking price of $8,850,000. Miz Lopez did not, however, own the lush suburban spread. It’s our understanding she merely leased the deluxe digs for her nuptials.

As far as Your Mama knows–and we really know so very little–the first house Miz Lopez owned in Los Angeles is a sprawling 9,000-plus square foot contemporary privately situated at the tail end of an approximately 250-foot long gated drive in the 24/7 guard gated (and celeb-friendly) Summit community perched in the rugged mountains that tumble down to the flats of the San Fernando Valley.

Property records indicate Miz Lopez snapped up the posh, low-slung pad in February 2000 for $4,297,500. Presumably she unleashed a squadron of smart architects and nice, gay decorators on the property because she managed to flip the airy California contemporary at a significant profit. In October 2004, shortly after making it official in the eyes of God and government with Mister Anthony, Miz Lopez sold the sleek residence to hotelier/restaurateur/nightclub impresario Sam Nazarian for $10,950,000. A few flicks of the well-worn beads of Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus shows the former Fly Girl–here she is doing her thing in a pair of mom jeans–took in a heart stopping $6,652,500 profit not counting renovations, decorations, carrying costs and real estate fees.
photo: Sotheby’s International Real Estate

Mister Nazarian, for those who might be curious, held on to the 4 bedroom and 6.5 bathroom house only until August 2006 when he sold to rockstar/fashion maverick Gwen Stefani and her musician man-mate Gavin Rossdale for $13,250,000. At the time he sold to them the property included an infinity edge swimming pool, tennis court, screening room, and–natch–state-of-the-art security systems. The photo above shows the house as it appeared when Mister Nazarian sold it to Miz Stefani and Mister Rossdale who recently completed a massive renovation of the entire property that included the addition of an additional structure that may (or may not be) a guest house, staff quarters, recording studio, home office space and/or etc.

When the salsa singer–a winner of two Grammys and three Latin Grammys–married the entertainment industry juggernaut that is Jennifer Lopez in June 2004, h already owned a secluded estate about 30 miles outside Midtown Manhattan in the high-brow Long Island enclave of Glen Head (NY), sometimes referred to as Brookville. Property records Your Mama perused indicate Mister Anthony paid $3,700,000 for his 6.25 acre spread in Glen Head and Nassau County tax records show the tree-shaded estate features a 16-room red brick Colonial built in 1941 that measures 10,084 square feet and includes garage parking for at least 6 cars, 7 fireplaces and an unlucky 13 terlits in 8 full and 5 half bathrooms.

Of course we don’t know an A-bomb from and iPhone but presumably Mister Anthony occupied the genteel residence at least part time in the early 2000s when he was married to and making babies with former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres Delgado. Mister Anthony and the beauty queen reportedly split in October 2003 and finalized their divorce just days before he married Miz Lopez in June 2004 in a secret ceremony at her Beverly Hills home.

At the time Mister Anthony Miz Lopez married she still owned a giant house up in the Summit community, the one now owned by Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale. However, since this was where Miz Lopez lived during her ill-fated and much-publicized affair with Ben Affleck, we highly doubt it was at her house in the Summit where she and Mister Anthony were married.

We seem to recall that the star-crossed (and ultimately ill-fated) lovers were married at a massive mansion in Beverly Hills, CA that, as it turns out, was just heaved on to the open market with an astonishing $40,000,000 price tag. We also seem to recall reading that Miz Lopez once leased the house but–and this is a huge but, children–we have no confirmation other than previous reports that Miz Lopez ever had anything to do with the house in question.

What we do know about that house–for what it’s worth–is that it occupies two lots in a prime section of the flats of Beverly Hills. Silver screen legend Jimmy Stewart lived in a large but comparatively modest mansion on one of the two lots but his house was knocked down in the late 1990s to make way fora lavish 13,885 square foot Mediterranean mansion that contains a total of 9 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms divided between the main and guest houses. Records shows the owner as a mysteriously named corporate entity that links back to Mary Ann Sigler, the CFO of billionaire Tom Gores’ multi-billion dollar Platinum Equities. However, the owner, as per two of Your Mama’s impeccable tattletales is neither Miz Sigler nor Mister Gores but rather mergers and acquisitions honcho Johnny O. Lopez, a founding partner at Platinum Equities.

There we go digressing again…

Mister Anthony proved the exception to Your Mama’s celebrity real estate theory about how rich and famous folks tend to trade properties when they trade spouses and/or procreate. It seems that Mister Anthony bucked that trend and simply packed up the beauty queen’s pageant gowns and tiaras and moved in Miz Lopez’s gold records and booty shorts.

photos: www.thomfelicia.com

Soon after they hitched their wagons, the newlyweds hired nice, gay decorator Thom Filicia to replace Dayanara’s day-core with the sophisticated and shiny decorative dreams of Miz Lopez. Mister Filicia, those y’all tee-vee watchers older than 35 surely recall, appeared on the boob-boob in the mid-Noughts as one those sassy Fab Five gays on Queer Eye who used to race around New York City in an SUV saving heterosexual men from making bad fashion choices and installing foos ball tables in their living rooms.

Mister Filicia bathed the elegant and pleasantly pared down interiors with crisp white walls in the formal living room and entrance hall where we swoon for the abstract landscape hanging on the wall. He preserved or installed rich wood paneling in the cozy and more masculine-vibed library and wrapped the formal dining room with some sort of shimmery gold, silver or platinum leaf. A doorway on one side of the fireplace gets perfectly balanced by an architecturally to-die-for arched niche with scalloped apse.

She may be a gal with a ghetto-fab booty from the Bronx but beehawtcha has a bazillion professional irons in the fire, knows how to turn it out like a real damn celebrity and, dontcha know, Miss Thing has an Andy Warhol soup can lithograph hanging on the wall in her gleaming Long Island kitchen. And it’s probably the real damn shit, too, not some poster crap you can buy at the MoMa gift shop.
photo: Real LI

In 2008, right about the time rumors and reports of marital friction surfaced over Miz Lopez moving her momma Guadalupe in to their Long Island mansion to help take care of newborn twins Max and Emme, the spicy Puerto Rican sensations spent $2,050,000 for an adjacent 2.24 acre estate.

We really haven’t an iota what was done to or with the property but at the time of purchase it included a stately but undistinguished 5 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom clapboard-sided center hall Colonial (shown above) perfect for housing (Grand)Momma Lopez, domestic staff and/or security personnel. The purchase was reportedly (and logically) motivated by security and privacy concerns since the two estates share a single entry gate and a short stretch of of a long Belgian block-lined bluestone drive way. Your Mama would bet our long-bodied bitches Linda and Beverly the entry gate has since been fortified Fort Knox-style and is probably manned by an firearm-brandishing sentry in a seriously bad mood who will unceremoniously turn any moe-ron right around who has the hair-brained audacity to slowly roll their hoopdy up the sleepy lane towards the gate.

Back on the west coast…

In January 2005, half a year after their June 2004 wedding, Mister and Missus Lopez dropped $6,250,000 on an English country-house style mansion on nearly three-quarters of an acre tucked behind fortified gates and high hedges on supremely swank St. Pierre Road in the the trés hoity-toity Bel Air ‘hood in Los Angeles, CA.
photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

The couple hired L.A.-based interior decorator/designer Michelle Workman to work the place over into a rustic-fancy French farmhouse (shown above) with casually elegant interior spaces that married (and juxtaposed) the patinated sophistication of a 18th-century chateau, the romance of a country cottage, the glamour of Old Hollywood and the kick up your feet comfort of Shabby Chic. We do love all the luscious textures and the pair of table top chandeliers in the foyer are dee-voon but the pervasive muted pastel palette and the proliferation of self-consciously distressed bits and pieces feel a bit over-femified for Your Mama’s personal taste in day-core.

About four years after buying Miz Lopez and Mister Anthony listed their Bel Air spread with an asking price of $8,500,000, which was later slashed to $7,900,000. Listing information from the time indicates the property encompasses a 7,357 square foot main house with 4 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms surrounded by extensive mature gardens, swimming pool with adjacent pool house and an additional guest house/studio. Property records show Miz Lopez and Mister Anthony sold the property, which backs up to the sometimes very busy North Beverly Glen Boulevard, in early December 2009 for $6,200,000. That’s a fifty thousand dollar loss not counting renovation and decoration, carrying costs, and real estate fees. They sold, as per prop records, to a hedge hogger named Mark Spitznagel who runs a so-called Black Swan fund and is reported to be making money hand over fist during this period of intense stock market volatility.
photo: Pacific Coast News

With their house in Bel Air on the market and two twin babies in tow, the Lopez-Anthony’s went on a house hunt in 2009. They finally settled on a massive bi-winged mansion in the swish suburban equestrian enclave of Hidden Hills (shown above) where the bucolic streets are lined with large mansions owned (and leased) by a large number of high profile Hollywood types.

Melissa Etheridge owns a home in the gated community where until recently she lived with ex-wife Tammy Lynn Michaels and their brood; Britney Spears leases one of the largest estates in the Ashley Ridge section of the community; And agéd rock star Ozzy Osbourne and his very ambitious manager/wife/chat show hostess Sharon own a sprawling Martyn Lawrence Bullard designed mansion they recently heaved on the open market with an asking price of $12,999,000

Property records reveal Mister Anthony and Miz Lopez paid $8,200,000 for their Hidden Hills residence in mid-January 2010 and listing information from the time of purchase shows the behemoth brick-faced mansion sits on two lots that total 3.04 acres, wraps around a massive rear motor court and measures in at a whopping 17,129 square feet with a total of 9 bedrooms and 11.5 bathrooms. Mister Anthony and Miz Lopez, feeling the house needed a few decorative nips and tucks once again brought in L.A.-based decorator/designer Michelle Workman who did the whole thing up in a nearly monochromatic pastel palette of blues, grays, pinks, and peaches that exudes a sleek old school Tinseltown brand of Silver Screen glamour.
photos: Veranda

Photos of Miz Lopez and Mister Anthony’s Hidden Hills house recently appeared in Veranda magazine (shown above). Images show a double height entry with white walls and dark wood floors where a curving staircase wraps itself around a lunette settee and drool-worthy cocktail table on top of which sits a vase with a spray of pussy willows. According to a recent cover article in Vanity Fair, the nearby powder pooper is outfitted with hand towels monogrammed with an “M” for Muniz, the actual last name of Mister Anthony and his children.

The formal living room–which she confessed in a recent cover article in Vanity Fair that she rarely uses–pushes cool elegance towards classic showbiz camp with a white grand piano. White pianos are just never good, children. They always seem like a gimmick and a good old-fashioned ebony Steinway would have been a better choice in our book. Then again, this wasn’t our book to write. The blush pink dining room gleams and glimmers with a boxy chandelier crafted from super-sparkly cystals and a cozy book-lined library has rich wood paneling in the library.

We have no idea if Miz Lopez or Mister Anthony actually cook. We suspect they say they do when asked by the press but probably still employ a well-paid private chef. Either way the commodious eat-in kitchen was outfitted with every bell and whistle to make a chef’s knees turn to jelly including a faboo black and brass Aga range that Your Mama can assure the children cost more than an American minimum wager worker earns in an entire year. The Tiffany blue raised panel cabinets are topped with glossy milk-white counter tops and the breakfast area looks more like the opulent private dining room in a swank eatery than the sort of place where twin toddlers eat Cheerios and slurp up SpaghettiOs.

On the second floor, in addition to their expansive master suite and hallway hung portraits of various Tinseltown icons, there is what Vanity Fair called a “spa” area that Mister Anthony had installed for Miz Lopez as an anniversry gift. The “spa” includes “two massage tables with glittery pillows” and a gigantic closet/dressing area lined with full-length mirrors, rows and rows of color-coordinated shoes, and racks filled with red carpet worthy clothes. Mister Anthony’s man-cave portion of the mansion occupies a separate wing and is reported in Vanity Fair to include a bar, 20-seat screening room, recording studio and a mini-putting green.

The three-acre estate has panoramic views over the horsey community and in addition to tons of off-street parking where their extensive retinue of family, friends, staff and hangers-on can park their cars, the property includes double-gated drive way, a swimming pool and spa encircled by one of those awkward but necessary child-protection fences, several outdoor living areas and covered patios, a built-in barbecue station, expansive tree-ringed lawns and, where a tennis court once was, a multi-hole putting green with sand trap that doubles as a sand box for the kiddies.

Jenny may have come from the block in the Bronx, butter beans, but, to co-opt the parlance of The Jeffersons, she done moved on up to the proverbial East Side. Yes, hunties, she most certainly did. No matter what you think of her easy to digst pop songs about Christian Louboutins, the flood of downright awful rom-coms in which she starred in the early Naughts–Gigli? Maid in Manhattan? Uhm, no. Just, no–or the near-ceaseless merry-go-round of her romantic life that gets played out in the pages of all the gossip glossies, the lady is here to stay. She has a new album out entitled Love? with at least one well-performing single, she’s got a couple of (not very promising sounding) movies in the hopper, she inked an unprecedented deal with mass-market retailer Kohls that will put an estimated $7-10,000,000 in her pocket for the next 21 years and she’s reportedly signed on for another (exceedingly lucrative) season on American Idol.

What all that means to Your Mama and the children is that newly single Miz Lopez probably has another half dozen or more luxe and lavish homes to buy, renovate, decorate and sell on to the highest bidder. We can barely wait for her to get started.

As for Mister Anthony…a little celebrity real estate snitch told Your Mama that he’s leased an approximately 10,000 square foot ivy-covered Italianate mansion just above the Sunset Strip that was listed with an asking price of $23,800 and made famous as one of the houses featured on mock-reality boob-toob program Entourage.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

P!nk’s Pad on the Block

SELLER: P!nk and Carey Hart
LOCATION: Sherman Oaks, CA
PRICE: $4,000,000
SIZE: 4,435 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.25 bathroomsYOUR MAMAS NOTES: Just before Baby Jesus’ birthday last year Your Mama dissed and discussed a 5 bedroom and 6 pooper Balinese-y-contemporary/quasi-Craftsman mansion in Malibu for which 3-time Grammy winning rocker-chick P!nk and professional motocross racer Carey Hart had coughed up a very a-list $11,850,000 a few months earlier.

A celebrity real estate snitch whom we call Sherman Oaks told us then that the tatted-up couple would soon put their San Fernando Valley love nest on the market. Two-thirds of a year later, the new Malibuans have pushed their walled and gated Sherman Oaks, CA mini-estate on the open market with a $4,000,000 price tag.

Property records show Lady Pink–née Alecia Moore–paid $2,000,000 for the suburban estate in December 2002, long before she hitched her wagon to Mister Hart’s motorcycle in 2006. The couple were close to dee-vorce in 2008 but eventually patched things up, bought a big house in the Bu and made a baby. And of course, for rich and famous folks, a bun in the oven makes a new multi-million dollar house as necessary as a $1,200 baby buggy.

Listing information shows Lady P!nk’s two-story Spanish-style casa, situated in a prime South of Ventura Boulevard ‘hood, was originally built in 1946, sits on a flat .69 acre lot, measures a 4,435 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms and 4.25 bathrooms. A quarter bathroom, for the chitlins who don’t know, isn’t really a bathroom in the bathing sense of the word but rather a facility that contains only a terlit, no sink and no shower or tub. They are often dismal and claustrophobic cubbyholes located in basements, garages and/or services areas. Your Mama’s Midwestern besties Chow-Lee and The Laundress have one of these lone terlits in a dark corner of their Minneapolis basement surrounded by a wood-built stall pretty much exactly like in a public restroom. It’s more than a wee bit scary to pull your pants down in this compact stall-space but in a house filled with a trio of electrified rugrats who think it’s funny to pick the lock on the door the pooper when you’re–well–pooping, it’s a welcomed haven of dirty bizness privacy.

Anyhoo, a concrete, brick and wrought iron wall shaded by thick privacy-making foliage runs across the front of P!nk’s property. The double-gated driveway curves tightly in front of the house and leads to antique hand-carved double front doors. The gorgeous doors are probably not original to the house but do lend a smidgen of much needed architectural gravitas to the house, which looks to Your Mama on the inside more like a modern-day suburban mcmansion than a old-timey vintage hacienda.

The voluminous impress-the-guests type has a double-height ceiling, staircase with perplexingly paltry wrought iron banister, some sort of stone floor (perhaps it’s Travertine?), and walls bathed in a gawd-awful flesh colored faux suede paint treatment that Your Mama hopes and prays the new owner will change to something less faux and far less corporeal.

Lady P!nk and Mister Hart certainly seem to like their faux suede paint treatments as evidenced by the worrisome wound-colored formal dining room lit by a high-glam black crystal chandelier and the tobacco-stained honey-colored formal living room that features near-white wall-to-wall carpeting, a vaulted ceiling with exposed beam and a fireplace flanked by built-in book cases that reach from floor to ceiling and pleasantly enhance the vertical visual experience of the room.

Although Your Mama’s Big Book of Decorating Dos and Dont’s is explicit about faux paint treatments meant to give the walls the textured look of suede: They are to be used only sparingly–if at all–and should always be installed by a faux-paint treatment professional as opposed to a weekend home improvement warrior who thinks they were born with a decorative green thumb.

Family and informal entertainment spaces includes a game room with vaulted ceiling, built-in window seat and fireplace with imposing flagstone chimney breast and a carpeted family room with a few built-in book cases and another imposing flagstone chimney breast. The generous gore-may eat-in kitchen is anchored by a Toyota Camry-sized center island with breakfast counter and has white cabinetry with glass-fronted uppers, granite counter tops, commercial-style stainless steel appliances and direct access through French doors to the dining and entertaining terrace that extends off the rear of the residence.

Since the house sits towards the front of the long narrow lot, the thickly planted and (mostly) private backyard seems particularly expansive and includes lots of entertainment amenities that include broad terraces, a covered patio (outfitted with a ping-pong table in listing photos), an angled swimming pool, grotto-style spa, built-in fire pit, built-in barbecue center for year-round grillin’ and chillin’, and a football field-sized lawn. Although listing photos show much of it has been removed, aerial photos of the house show the grassy area was once dotted with a swing-set, trampoline, and mini half-pipe where the mister and mistress of the house could practice their skateboarding tricks.

Listing photos show the furnishings (and day-core) are spare and the cabinets empty so clearly Lady P!nk and Mister Hart have completed their move from Sherman Oaks to Malibu where they are frequently photographed around town with baby Willow in tow.

listing photos: Rodeo Realty

Posted by Your Mama at 7:24 AM 20 comments

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Sheryl Crow Just Wants a New House

BUYER: Sheryl Crow
LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $5,225,000
SIZE: 6,784 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 7.5 bathroomsYOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a celebrity real estate canary down in Nashville (TN) Your Mama learned yesterday that folk-rock singer-songwriter/sometimes actress/fearsome breast cancer survivor/single mommy of two tots Sheryl Crow went and bought herself a new mansion down in Music City.

According to reports by local celebrity real estate gossips and confirmed by Your Mama with Davidson County property records, in late July (2011) nine time Grammy winning Miz Crow dropped a total of $5,225,000 on three contiguous parcels that total 50.69 acres in the affluent and semi-rural Forest Hills area due south of downtown Nashville.

Your Mama did not, we regret to inform the puppies, turn up an official listing for the property…yet. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?

A long celebrity-style driveway winds through an open pasture, curls around and cuts through a thick wood to a wide clearing where a dour stone mansion looms dramatically over a massive circular drive and motor court. Property records and other online sources reveal the imposing 18-room mansion, with its ecclesiastical-like architectural flourishes, was built in 2005, measures either 6,784 or 7,769 square feet depending where you look, and includes 6 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms. Additional living space above the three car garage is attached to the main house by a loggia-style breezeway.

A charity event-sized stone terrace with outdoor fireplace extends off the back of the two-story house that looks out over a broad tree-dotted lawn ringed by a privacy ensuring forest. Between the main house and the garage a low wall encircles a swimming pool, spa and substantial sunbathing area. A second, smaller walled garden connects the pool deck to a sport court well and thankfully hidden behind the garage.

This is not the first time for Miz Crow at the Tennessee State Real Estate Rodeo. In 2006 the low-key but luxe-living superstar began to buy up property down in bew-colic College Grove. She ended up with a sprawling and beautifully tended 150-acre equestrian estate called Cross Creek Farm. It wasn’t long after settling down in College Grove that Miz Crow had caught a classic case of the Celebrity Real Estate Fickle; Your Mama dissed and discussed Cross Creek Farm, in May 2010 when Miz Crow had the posh property on the market with an asking price of $7,500,000.

With no immediate takers for Cross Creek Farm Miz Crow made real estate headlines across the globe in the fall of 2010 when she put the solar powered pastoral property with its 10,254 square foot mansion, recording studio, and extensive equestrian facilities up for auction with a minimum bid of $1,000,000. The auction remained open for bids until 6pm the 23rd of November (2010). Your Mama has no idea who may have bid what amount for the celebrity singer’s farm but it did not sell–or at least no transfer of property has been recorded–and the property remains listed with a $4,500,000 price tag. A few quick flicks of the well worn beads of Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus shows that Miz Crow has cut the price by about 40 percent, a stunning statistic all the Chicken Littles can cluck endlessly about.

In addition to Cross Creek Farm and her new mansion in Forest Hills, Miz Crow owns a number of other properties across the U.S. of A. including a gated multi-parcel compound tucked into the rugged foothills just above Hollywood, CA that records show she acquired in several 1998 transactions that combined cost her $5,100,000.

A deeper dive down into the property records reveals that Miz Crow also owns a beachfront crib in Santa Rosa Beach, FL, an unincorporated gulf-front collection of communities on the Florida Panhandle between Pensacola and Panama City, an area often referred to as the Redneck Riviera due to the high number of pee-cup truck driving and gun-toting good ol’ boys and gals that live and vacation in the area. Records reveal that in January of 2003 Miz Crow splashed out $1,000,000 for a beach front lot that now includes a 3,529 square foot house with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms. A little leg up from The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial informs Your Mama his is not the first house Miz Crow owned in Santa Rosa Beach. In 1997 she bought a smaller landlocked residence for $289,000 that records show she sold off at a tidy profit in 2004 for $650,000.

photo: Davidson County Assessor

Posted by Your Mama at 8:21 AM 19 comments

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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Afternoon Tidbit (Three of Three): Roxanne Pulitzer Lists Mansion That’s Perfect for a Billionaire Xenophobe

Former aerobics instructor and life insurance sales person Roxanne Pulitzer (née Renckens) struck it rich when she married wealthy newspaper heir Herbert Pulitzer in 1976. Her soigné life in the sometimes harrowing Palm Beach social scene came to an abrupt end in the mid-1980s when she was catapulted to tabloid infamy amid salacious divorce allegations of dabbling in the occult, drug use, and bisexuality.The much-maligned Foxy Roxy went on to pose for Playboy–she says she did it so she could pay her divorce attorneys–write some books set in the Palm Beach milieu she once inhabited, and marry a few more times. She and her fifth husband, retired management consultant Tim Boberg, settled into late-life marital bliss on an approximately 3.5 acre estate near Telluride, CO they acquired in 2001 for $5,500,000.

If we’ve said it once we’ve said it 42,000 times before, the rich and/or famous can be fickle when it comes to their real estate. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, after spending around $8,500,000 on improvements Miz Pulitzer and her fifth mister ran out of home improvement and expansion projects–she told the WSJ that she “can’t stand him [Fifth Mister] at home without a project”–and earlier in the year their home on the market with an asking price of $19,900,000.

The rambling 23,124 square foot log cabin meets Palm Beach style mansion has 7 bedrooms, 8 full and 5 half crappers including a 4,000 square foot master suite, a computerized state of the art bowling lane, 100-foot long indoor pool with waterfall and spa, 8-seat home theater, sun room outfitted with plant misters and grow lights, a fitness room full of body torture devices, 4-car temperature controlled garage, heated pathways, patios and motor court, a full-scale outdoor replica of the Labyrinth at Chartres in France, a private golf fairway, putting green and bunker, an art gallery, and a 2-lane 150-foot long computer controlled indoor shooting range with separate ventilation system.

Lowerd have mercy, children, it boggles and betwixts Your Mama’s pea brain to try and calculate the finances and quantify the sharp organizational skills needed to manage the staff required to maintain this property properly. You need a pool man, a greens keeper for the golf course and gardeners galore for everything else. Then there’s a strapping and barely clothed work-out buddy, movie equipment technician, bowling alley waxer, and a marksman who knows how to operate a variety of hand guns and other semi-automatic weaponry. You need a minimum wage terlit gurl whose superstitions will not be tweaked by the 13 terlits, a window washer, wash woman, and meal preparer. About the only person not needed here is a well-formed young man to shovel the snow from the pathways, patios and motor court since they are all, as aforementioned, heated at great cost for winter time convenience.

As noted in the Wall Street Journal, Miz Pulitzer and Mister Boberg’s mansion is just a short hop to the Telluride ski-chalet that Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld recently listed with an asking price of $18,300,000.

listing photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

Posted by Your Mama at 1:33 PM 7 comments

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Afternoon Tidbit (Two of Three): Update Rachel Uchitel

Just in case her 15 minutes are not quite up…She may have had to hand back the $8-10,000,000 hush money she was paid by her philandering former lover Tiger Woods because she broke the silence the millions were supposed to buy but, according the the peeps at gossip juggernaut TMZ, VIP hostess turned short-term reality tee-vee denizen Rachel Uchitel just hauled in $330,000 on the sale of a New York City apartment she bought last year.

P.S. We’re not even going to mention that dreadful carved wood giraffe standing up over there against the wall because it’s giving Your Mama a burning moment of heebie-jeebies that someone would actually think to stick that thing there like it’s day-core.

listing photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Afternoon Tidbit (One of Three): Update on the Woolworth Mansion

A New York City townhouse–owned by the estate of late lady-gym mogul Lucille Roberts (and shown above)–landed on the open market in mid-March 2011 to much real estate shock and awe with a titanic $90,000,000 asking price. The sick-palatial and approximately 18,000 square foot Neo-French Renaissance style pile–designed in 1911 (or so) by high-society architect C.P.H. Gilbert for dime store tycoon Frank Woolworth for one of his three daughters–was concurrently listed for lease at an astronomical $210,000 per month.The fine folks at Curbed as well as many of the New York City real estate gossips reported today that the rental asking price for the 7-floor townhouse was recently slashed to a still spine tingling $165,000 per month.

A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus shows that at it’s current price a rental tenant must bring in $1,980,000 per year just to pay the damn landlord their agreed upon due. We have no experience managing of residence of this magnitude but we imagine the deep pocketed tenant will have to cough up an additional couple or few hundred grand each year to heat, cool, clean and otherwise staff and maintain the high-maintenance mansion.

Nothing like a little real estate reminder that you’re poor as a church mouse, right?

listing photo: Brown Harris Stevens

Posted by Your Mama at 12:48 PM 9 comments

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Susan Sarandon Snags Penthouse Bachelorette Pad

BUYER: Susan Sarandon
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,750,000
SIZE: 1 bedroom, 1 bathroomYOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen chickens, there are a number of juicy(ish) celebrity real estate tidbits in the works but, right now, at this very moment, the pickins are slim. Rather than leave y’all high and dry–or drowning in discussions of properties owned by “celebrities” most people have never heard of before–we’re going to dig down into the archives and pull up a few old things that we never got around to dissin’ or discussin’ when all the other real estate gossips were yammering about them.

Let’s start with soo-blime actor Susan Sarandon, a gutsy gal with one Oscar in her pocket (Dead Man Walking) and another four nominations under her belt (The Client, Lorenzo’s Oil, Thelma & Louise, Atlantic City). Miz Sarandon has dated (Louis Malle) and procreated (Franco Amurri) with a few high-profile gentleman but her longest romantic entanglement has been with fellow Oscar winning actor Tim Robbins (Mystic River, Dead Man Walking, The Player, The Shawshank Redemption). The lefty-left-left activist couple never hitched their wagons in the eyes of God and government but they did bring two children into their unmarried union, something that no doubt reinforced the seething hatred right wingers to have for these two famous limousine liberals from Tinseltown.

Anyhoo, sometime during the summer of 2009, after about 23 years of bleeding heart coupledom, Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins called the whole thing off. Until that point the Sarandon-Amurri-Robbins clan split their time between New York City and the bucolic and upscale community of Pound Ridge, about 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

In 1991 Mister Robbins and Miz Sarandon acquired a lofty-style cooperative apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood. They eventually bought up one entire floor and half of the one above to give them about 7,000 square feet of interior space on the 7th and 8th floors. The massive apartment is just a few blocks from SPiN, a ping-pong bar/eatery in which Miz Sarandon is an investor.

In June of 1995 the then happy now kaput couple coughed up $1,675,000 for a secluded 7.74 acre spread that backs up to the Cross River Reservoir. The New York State Tax Man shows the estate includes a 5,068 square foot main house with 4 bedorooms and 3 bathrooms. Several out buildings dot the property and a large terrace off the back of the house has a swimming pool.

Your Mama has no idea what plans Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins might have in regards to keeping or selling their Pound Ridge property but we do know it sits within a couple miles of the posh mansions, sprawling estates and colossal compounds of loads of other rich and famous folks with a yen and the bucks for a pastoral getaway just an hour from the hustle and bustle of New York City. Ralph Lauren maintains a vast estate in the area where other property owners include Richard Gere, George Soros, Martha Stewart, Abigail Disney, Matthew Bronfman, and Clive Davis.

In June 2011, not long after it became publicly known that Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins’ relationship had reached its sunset, property records (and previous reports) reveal Miz Sarandon paid Mister Robbins $3,200,000 to take full ownership over their leviathan loft in New York City. At the same time she was buying Mister Robbins out she also snatched up a wee but pricey bachelorette pad in an elegant pre-war apartment building in a particularly charming (and swank) section of Greenwich Village known as the Gold Coast.

Property records (and previous reports) show the newly single sixty-something year old Miz Sarandon paid high-end wallpaper designer Anya Larkin $1,750,000 for a well-scaled but far from humongous 1 bedrooom and 1 bathroom penthouse pad with million dollar city views and a wrap around terrace almost as large as the apartment itself.

Now, children, have some common sense here. The only way to look at a one bedroom apartment that costs one and three-quarter million clams is to see it through the very specific real estate goggles of New York City. Like it or not, Big Apple Haters, the petite penthouse’s pit falls–the stingy closet space, the crapper accessible to guests only by walking through the bedroom, for example–are far outweighed by the prime location in the hoity-toity heart Greenwich Village, the white glove services of the pre-war building, and the giant but manageable wrap around terrace with sparkly city views to the east, north and west. The wood-burning fireplace and unusually spacious contemporary Craftsman-style kitchen are icing on the nearly two million dollar one bedroom cake.

Much to our chagrin the front door opens directly into the main living space, which means that all the Chinese food delivery men in in neighborhood are going to know exactly what Miz Sarandon’s living room looks like.

In the nearly 400 square foot main living space, divided into living and dining areas, built-in cabinets anchor one side of a Batchelder (or Batchelder-style) fireplace. French doors in the tile-floored dining area connect to the terrace that snakes around three sides of the apartment. Your Mama knows that some of you real estate beotchas are going to hiss, “Pshaw!” and deride a New York City terrace as dirty and loud spaces that, more often than not, lack any real privacy. And y’all would be right. Terraces in New York City are typically loud, dirty and in full view of at least a few neighbors. Howevuh, honey bees, this former New Yorker would have happily endured the indignity of a dirty and loud wrap around terrace where our neighbors could spend all day watching Your Mama lounge around in a ikat sarong on a nappy chaise lounge eating candy, drinking gin & tonics and picking at our toenails.

The dining area is open to the cook-accommodating kitchen outfitted with commercial-style stainless steel appliances and blessed with a window over the sink that provides a pretty city view while doing battle with the dried up sticky shit off the bottom of a frying pan.

A small vestibule off the living area leads back to the generous but far from ginormous bedroom that includes French doors that open to the east-side terrace area and a double-windowed pooper re-done in classic 1930s style with white subway tiles on the walls and black and white honeycomb tile on the floor. Floor plan information indicates that the bedroom’s lone closet–a small walk-in–is inconveniently situated in the vestibule between the bedroom and the living/dining room. But again, these wonky real estate moments might seem like deal killers in suburbia but in New York City, as in many other densely urban areas, these annoyances become mere quirks.

Property records also show that in addition to the two apartments in New York City and the Pound Ridge spread she once shared (and as per public records still co-owns) with Mister Robbins, Miz Sarandon also owns a 1.5 acre waterfront property with a 3,270 square foot residence on Mount Desert Island in Maine, the same swanky neck of the dramatic Maine coast where media mogul/domestic goddess Martha Stewart maintains a 63-acre waterfront spread with a 35,000 square foot mansion she calls Skylands.

Politically progressive Miz Sarandon has not always had an easy-peasy relationship with her staunchly Republican mother Lenora Tomalin but property records do indicate that mother and daughter buried the hatchet when it came to real estate and co-own two condos at a Leisure World retirement complex in Leesburg, VA.

exterior photo: Property Shark
interior (listing) photos and floor plan: Sotheby’s International Realty via StreetEasy

Posted by Your Mama at 7:55 AM 12 comments

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Monday, August 8, 2011

Girlfriends’ Persia White Lists in Studio City

SELLER: Persia White
LOCATION: Studio City, CA
PRICE: $1,529,000
SIZE: 4,200 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathroomsYOUR MAMAS NOTES: Over the weekend between racing around to family parties and building a chicken wire contraption to keep the damn raccoons from snatching the fruit off my tomato plants in the middle of the night Your Mama took some time to peruse the Los Angeles area real estate listings. In truth, we didn’t come up with much but we did turn up a property in the hills above Studio City listed for $1,549,000 and owned by actress/musician/artist Persia White.

From 2000 to 2008 Miz White starred on the boob-toob series Girlfriends with Golden Brooks and Tracee Ellis Ross, the daughter of Miss Diana Ross, thank you very much. Although she hasn’t worked much since her gal pal program was canceled, she does, as per her resume on the Internet Movie Data Base, have a few movie projects underway and in the hopper. In addition to her ack-ting Miz White, a staunch and vocal advocate for environmental, human and animal rights, also makes music–she released a solo album in 2010 called Mecca–and paints emotionally charged images that often depict women curled up in the fetal position, bent over backward, or in otherwise taut state of heartbreak and/or longing.

Property records show girlfriend for Girlfriends–married a time or two and the mommy of one–acquired her two-story hillside house in June 2004 for $1,135,000. Built in 1990, the contemporary cottage encompasses 4,200 square feet with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms and nearly unobstructed views of the surrounding mountains during the day and glittery lights of San Fernando Valley at night.

At first glance the tile-roofed residence looks a little (too much) like Grandma’s house for Your Mama’s particular and persnickety taste in real estate. It ain’t easy for us to get past the unnecessarily horrific white wrought iron fence of uneven heights that runs along the front of the property. When we do mange to squeeze our eyes past the ugly fencing, a closer inspection reveals an attempt to present a more modern edge on the front facade that’s dominated by the odd coupling of a red Spanish tile roof and a smoked glass and aluminum garage doors.

An entry deck connects the driveway to the commercial-style smoked glass and aluminum front door, shaded by the overhang of a deep eave and roof projection with very post-modern circular detail that may or may not be a window (we’re not sure). In order to get that sentence right, puppies, y’all must roll your eyes with self-righteous architectural disdain when you read the words “post-modern circular detail.”

Anyhoo, the interior spaces of Miz White’s domicile have been stripped down to an Armani Casa-like simplicity with prominently grained ebonized wood floors, large planes of gallery white walls and divisions between some rooms obliterated by opening up doorways to the full height of the ceiling. A chunky double-sided fireplace with veined black marble surrounds and hearths divides the living and dining rooms. Both room have extra-side wood-framed glass doors that slide open to a narrow wrap around deck with oblique view to the distant mountains at the northern end of the San Fernando Valley. A built-in wet-bar in the dining room should elate all the booze hounds like Your Mama who, rather than join the congregation of party guests in the kitchen looking for a snippet of sausage or hummus, gravitate towards to liquor cabinet for three fingers of gin.

The galley style kitchen has taupe-gray tile floors, traditional black raised panel cabinets somewhat successfully zhushed up with black paint, black and brown flecked granite counter tops and medium-grade stainless steel appliances. This is not what Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter with fifty grand to spend on a kitchen re-d0 but it ain’t awful. It’s certainly better than a faux-Tuscan extravaganza with a gigantic pot rack that drips with fake grapes, Chianti bottles and coppeer pots. For what it’s worth–and it’s not worth a goddam thing–we the kitchen day-core might be vastly improved by simply swapping the snooze of a rug shown in listing photo with some sort of antique Turkish kilim rug.

The master suite includes a good-sized bedroom with fireplace with granite surround, wood floors, two sets of French doors that lead to a private view deck, and two custom-fitted walk in closets, one with glass fronted shoe cabinets for displaying the Brian Atwoods and Jimmy Choos. The large but lackluster attached crapper has a lot of beige tile work, two sinks, separate shower and jetted tub and a wide-window with tree-top view.

A short stair connects a small lower level deck along the back of the house to an entertainment and lounging deck built around a narrow tree trunk. Additional features that a potential buyer might find enticing include a non-toxic paint on the walls, a finished 3-car attached garage with additional storage space, video surveillance security system, two-zone heating and cooling systems, water purification system, and an unfinished storage area that listing information suggests would make an ideal studio, gym or media room.

listing photos: Re/Max Execs

Posted by Your Mama at 8:32 AM 11 comments

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Friday, August 5, 2011

Hank Azaria Downsizes in Los Angeles

BUYER: Hank Azaria
SELLER: Dan Castellaneta and Deb Lacusta
LOCATION: Pacific Palisades, CA
PRICE: $5,500,000
SIZE: 4,415 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathroomsYOUR MAMAS NOTES: Multi-talented actor/producer Hank Azaria has been on the Hollywood hamster wheel for a very long time. His scads of starring and recurring roles on both the boob-toob (Huff, Friends, Mad About You) and silver screen (Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, The Birdcage) have earned him oodles of respect and accolades among fans and other industry denizens. He is, however, probably best known (and paid most) for the voice over work he’s done since the late 1980s on the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons. His comedic talents and long-term showbiz success have allowed him to build up an impressive portfolio of posh properties in Los Angeles and New York City.

In March 2009, with a bun in his lady-friend Katie Wright’s oven, Mister Azaria splashed out a very a-list $10,000,000 for an 8,434 square foot mansion at the tail end of an exclusive cul-de-sac. Although the property hovers over the parking lot at the extremely hoity-toity Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles, the children can be assured it sits well elevated enough to have a distant but de-lovely vista of the Pacific Ocean during the day and a sparkling view of the glittering carpet of lights of Los Angeles at night.

The actor and his baby momma hired talented and much-published decorator du jour Trip Haenisch to work over the traditional interior spaces. Mister Haenisch, for those who like their celebrity decorators cross referenced, recently re-worked the chic mid-century Malibu compound owned by Courtney Cox that recently appeared in the pages of Elle Decor.

Mister Azaria’s Bel Air mansion includes 7 bedrooms 10 bathrooms, formal living and dining rooms, a barn-sized family room with a pair of sofas upholstered in teddy bear fur, a substantial home gym, screening room and an office where Mister Azaria keeps his quartet of Emmys and a poker table surrounded by Eames-designed office chairs. Magazine readers will recall that Mister Azaria’s meticulously done Monterey Colonial-style mansion was just featured in the August (2011) issue of Architectural Digest and y’all know what the say about celebrity homes that appear in the gleaming pages of Arch Digest, right?

Well, dontcha know pets, a few weeks ago, just days after the August issue of A.D. landed in our mail box, Your Mama’s bedazzled and bedraggled princess phone started to clang-a-langa-lang. On the other end was a chatty real estate insider pal we’ll call Peter Peckerwood (of the north of Sunset Peckerwoods) who snitched that Mister Azaria was very quietly in the process of selling his big ol’ Bel Air mansion and purchasing the much smaller Pacific Palisades residence of The Simpsons cast mate Dan Castellaneta (voice of Homer Simpson) and his wife Deb Lacusta who has herself penned a number of episodes of The Simpsons.

Property records for the sale of Mister Azaria’s Bel Air mansion have yet to clear but, according to the usually impeccably informed Mister Peckerwood, Mister Azaria has done sold the posh property to a friend who couldn’t resist making an offer that Mister Azaria could not refuse.

Mister Castellaneta and Miz Lacusta’s part of this real estate tale starts in 2006 when, according to Mister Peckerwood, they went a-huntin’ for the perfect contemporary house. Not having found something more modern to their liking, in December 2006 they settled on a charming 4,415 square foot mock-Tudor mini-mansion in the quietly ritzy Riviera area of Pacific Palisades. They paid, as per property records, $5,750,000 for the well-preserved pad that was, according to listing information, designed by architect Gerard Colcord and built in 1928.

A little over four years later Mister Castellaneta and Miz Lacusta stumbled across their contemporary dream house–oddly enough located just a couple short blocks from their Colcord-designed crib–and in April 2011 they coughed up $5,700,000 to purchase the 5 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom property. The following month they heaved their 4 bedroom and 3.5 crapper Colcord-designed digs on the market with a $5,750,000 price tag.

Along comes Mister Azaria and Baby Momma Katie who must have desired a real estate downsize and, according to Redfin, paid his fellow Simpsons cast mate $5,500,000 for the smaller and less glitzy but still atrociously expensive residence in the Riviera ‘hood. Why did Mister Azaria opt for a new house almost half the size of this celebrity-style pad in Bel Air? We don’t know, so don’t anybody take the bother or breath to ask.
In addition to his new house in Pacific Palisades, Mister Azaria owns two additional homes in Los Angeles. In 1992 he paid $390,000 for a house in the Hollywood Dell neighborhood that he still owns and rents out. November 1996 he paid $285,000 for a property deep in one of the canyons that cut into the mountains behind Beverly Hills. The secluded Bev Hills hideaway (above) briefly appeared on the market last year with an asking price of $3,600,000. It was also listed for lease at $11,000 per month and online listing information Your Mama persuaded out of the interweb shows it went for $9,000 per month.

The stage-trained actor–who went to drama school and remains poker-playing BFFs with Oliver Platt who currently c0-stars with the dee-voon Laura Linney on The Big C–bought a large loft in a quintessential cast-iron building from the late 1800s in New York City’s SoHo ‘hood in July 2005 from famous artist/photographer Cindy Sherman. The peeps at Property Shark (and reports from the time) reveal that Mister Azaria bought the 4,000-ish square foot loft condo in the heart of the maddening tourist-filled SoHo shopping mecca for $4,625,000.

In late July it was reported on Curbed that Mister Azaria had (somewhat reluctantly) put his New York City loft on the rental market with an monthly price tag of $16,000. Listing information for the oddly-configured loft shows it contains 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, a 70-foot long entrance gallery, an almost 700 square foot living room and a windowless media room with exposed brick wall. One entire corner of the loft is given over to a professional quality gym because, apparently, Mister Azaria is mad-serious about the condition of his body.

The eat-in kitchen has an old-timey tin ceiling, black tile floors, urban-country type white Shaker-style cabinetry, butcher block counter tops and high grade stainless steel appliances. A perusal of the floor plan included with marketing materials reveals the loft has a terribly long list of awkward architectural moments–an essentially windowless bedroom, way too much space devoted to a gym–but none perhaps more pearl-clutching worthy that the kitchen windows that look into an otherwise private windowed corridor that connects the master bedroom to the master bathroom. Admittedly we like the un-decorated put your feet on the sofa vibe of the media room and main living space but the floor plan, puppies, has Your Mama needed a nerve pill and a handful of jelly beans.

listing photos: (Pacific Palisades): Sotheby’s International Realty
listing photos (Beverly Hills): Prudential
listing photos and floor plan (New York City): Stribling

Posted by Your Mama