Serge Azria Lists Cape Cod Cottage in Malibu

SELLER: Serge Azria
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $10,750,000
SIZE: 2,571 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Now that ladies apparel mogul Serge Azria (allegedly) coughed up around $41 million for super producer Jerry Weintraub's nearly seven acre ocean front compound that sprawls across the bluffs above Paradise Cove in Malibu (CA)* he's pushed his much more modest if still horrendously pricey Point Dume digs on the open market with an asking price of $10,750,000.

Through a parent company (Dutch LLC), Tunisian-born Mister Azria—not to be confused with his better known fashion designer brother Max Azria—owns, operates and creative directs a trio of upscale (mostly) women's clothing brands. The brands (JOIE, Equipment and Current/Elliot) are sold in a couple thousand high end retailers around the world and has experienced astonishing 30-plus percent revenue and profit growth over each of the last five years. In January it was announced that Mister S. Azria sold a 60% stake in his to a global private equity group for an as yet unascertained amount of money but one significant enough, we imagine, to make a few tongue's wag with envy.

Far be it from Your Mama to understand or pass judgement on the perpetually itchy footed real estate ways of rich and famous folks like Mister Azria and his missus Florence who, property records reveal, only purchased their .57 acre bluff top mini-estate on Point Dume just over three years ago for $7,540,000.

Current listing information shows the two-story shingled Cape Cod-ish ranch house was originally built in 1964, overlooks Point Dume's long, wide and scenic Westward Beach and measures in at 2,571 square feet with just two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms.

We don't particularly like the mixy match of materials on the exterior—you got shingles, some stacked stone, some flag stone, and whatever that kooky driveway material is—and we don't much care for the comfy looking but decided snoozy mostly earth toned day-core** but we love the monochromatic salt-licked taupe palette on the exterior and we're super appreciative of the relative humbleness of the actual structure if a bit bowled away by the ten and some million clam price tag.

The catnippish pièce de résistance for Your Mama is the lone guest bedroom for it's obvious and merciful discouragement of large groups of people inviting themselves for the weekend to soak up some summertime sun and beach side glamour. "Oh, sorry, darlings," she purred. "We only have one guest bedroom here so, you see, there's simply not enough room for you, your life-partner (and his ego), your seven multi-cultural adopted children, their retinue of traveling nannies and your brother-in-law's cousin and her friend Sal."

Anyhoo, listing photos show a spacious, open concept main living area with high-gloss wood floors throughout and a shallow vaulted ceiling. A corner, kiva-style fireplace anchors the living room area and, in the dining area, two walls of glass windows slide open to a deep wraparound wood deck with unimpeded ocean and sky views.

The expensively equipped but otherwise perfectly ordinary center-island kitchen has direct access to the two-car garage and is plenty large enough to accommodate a professional chef for hire who will likely appreciate the usual complement of commercial-style stainless steel appliances, the copious cabinet with marble counter tops and the over-sized butcher block topped center island with veggie sink breakfast bar.

The guest bedroom (and private bathroom) are located on the main floor while the roomy master suite privately occupies the entire lower level. A pony wall divides the bedroom into a cozy seating area with fireplace and built-in book shelves from the bedroom area where an extra wide wall off telescopic glass sliders open to the room to an amorphous flagstone terrace and deck-shaded veranda. Generally speaking Your Mama is not fan of the so-called pony wall but we can see how how the addition of such allowed for optimal placement of the bed. The attached master bathroom is certainly big enough but it's also a banal blizzard of ecru and beige tiles broken up by a "carpet" of greenish-bluish mosaic tiles set in a repetitive wave border around a basketweave pattern.

Between the Pacific Coast Highway and the house there's a lighted tennis court—that's painted with lines that aren't for playing tennis—and a flagstone and foliage surrounded swimming pool and slighty elevated spa. It does not appear that there's a view of the ocean from the swimming pool but probably the located is better than on the bluff side of the house where—even if it's possible to install a swimming pool—it would be more exposed to the sometimes wind that often sweeps up the coast in the afternoons.

As the land slopes away from the house towards the bluff's edge meandering flagstone paths and stairways link several (flagstone) terrace lounging and dining areas and several small decks that jut out over the bluff to harness sweeping views up and down the classically southern Californian coastline. A somewhat rickety looking gated stairway zig-zags down the bluff to the street, sand and surf below.

In August 2011 Mister and Missus S. Azria sold a 1970s vintage French Regency-style house tucked up behind the Beverly Hills Hotel for $9,700,000. The high-flying couple decamped to the 90077 zip code where in April 2011 they shelled out $21,000,000 for a seven bedroom and 12 bathroom Paul Williams-designed Colonial that had long been owned by actress Jane Wyatt (the mother on Father Knows Best) and had been completely worked over and expanded by Tinseltown power player turned high end house flipper Sandy Gallin.

*Property records show the Weintraub spread was acquired with a Limited Liability Company that links back to a commercial address in Vernon (CA), seven or eight miles southeast of downtown L.A., that is easily linked to Mister Azria and his various upscale (mostly) women's clothing brands that include JOIE, Equipment and Current/Elliot.


**Call Your Mama a cynic—and we're called far worse on the regular—but all those sickly saccharine protestations of peace and love and joy and joie everywhere just make us feel squeamish. Nor do we also don't care for some of the finishes—high gloss wood floors in a beach house just scream out "scratch me with the sand between your toes and under you flip-flops. 

listing photos: Coldwel Banker / Malibu West

Musician Orpheo McCord Lists Contemporary Cottage

SELLER: Orpheo McCord
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $787,000
SIZE: 672 square feet, 2 bedroom, 1 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama knows we're probably gonna take some flack from some of the children for discussing this itty-bitty micro-compound in L.A.'s quickly gentrifying but still boho-chic Silver Lake area rather than having a go at Mary-Louise Parker's (re-)listed 10-room residence in lower Manhattan for the third time in a year—Your Mama discussed the Gramercy Park duplex in September 2012 when it was listed for the second time—or the nearly 10,000 square foot Atlanta (GA) mansion that Allen Iverson lost to the gaping maw of foreclosure or even Zsa Zsa Gabor's somewhat bedraggled estate in Bel Air that was, after a long slog on the open market, recently put into escrow by an as yet unidentified buyer.

However, this one's for us because, well, because Your Mama has a special affection for petite but well-planned residential spaces and—as it turns out— the unusually Lilliputian home is owned, as per property records, by multi-talented musician Orpheo McCord who shakes his proverbial money makers for one of our fave bands. Quite like the not quite famous reality tee-vee producer we discussed earlier today, Mister McCord's is hardly a household name, especially for—say—gangsta rap fans or Top 40 followers. He is, however, the marimba playing percussionist and occasional vocalist of the arty-farty L.A.-based musical collective known as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros,* a 10-plus member band that hasn't risen to pop music mass consciousness yet but one that Your Mama—thank you very much, as if anyone cares—likes more than a little bit.

Property records indicate Mister McCord acquired his Silver Lake micro-compound in February 2007 for $665,000. The eensy-weensy main house, perched high above street level single car garage on a downright puny .06 acre parcel, was originally a 1920s Spanish bungalow but was re-worked—so our online research reveals—by the folks at Design Built, Inc. into an airy if highly compact and very contemporary cottage with two bedrooms and one bathroom efficiently wedged into what the L.A. County Tax Man shows is a microscopic 672 square feet.

Obviously this is not a house in which to raise a big family but for a single person or an in-synch couple this is really no more—or less—than is required for a comfortable urban lifestyle. Indeed, Your Mama would live here in a heartbeat, especially since it's walking distance to the hipster swarmed Sunset Junction shopping and dining area where a person so inclined can pick up a $38 pound of extra special coffee beans at Intelligentsia, snag a cute little knick-knack for your b.f.f. at ReForm School, purchase some hardcore fetish wear at Rough Trade—that last one is a maybe NSFW link, children—and finish up a damn fine steak frites at perennially popular eatery Cafe Stella.

The main, open plan living space, indisputably tiny and arguably even a bit cramped, is finished with high gloss wood floors that also horizontally clad one entire wall in a more modern take on wood paneling. Aluminum framed floor-to-ceiling windows face south for maximum solar exposure and open to a small deck with over the roof-top sky views.

At the back of the main living area that a compact, galley-style kitchen has lustrous custom cabinetry, quartz slab counter tops, (middle-grade but perfectly adequate for this price range) stainless steel appliances and a cleverly cantilevered breakfast bar that separates the kitchen area from the living room. A glass door makes a convenient exit from the kitchen to a supermodel slender deck that runs along the back side of the house.

A sliding wood panel separates the living room from one of the bedrooms that listing photos show has a built-in walnet—or maybe it's teak—wardrobe cabinet/dresser and another full wall of aluminum framed south facing windows. Listing photos show Mister McCord—or perhaps a property stager, we don't know—has sparely furnished to room as a home office.

The master bedroom—if it can properly be called that since it's hardly if at all bigger than the office/bedroom and doesn't have an en suite facility—opens through a floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors to that supermodel slender deck that wraps around the side of the house and steps down towards the entry gate.

At the back of the house, planted terraces stair step up the steep hillside to a larger, more entertainment friendly deck where the architect/designer installed a privacy fence of horizontal wood cladding that mimics the wall in the living room. A few more steps up is a detached, flexi-use ancillary structure that currently houses a simple two-room recording studio but could easily be used as a writing room or other home-based office situation, a yoga and meditation suite, a fitness space and aerobics studio, bathroom-free guest quarters or any other thing a person might imagine.

We're not sure if his decision to sell his bantam abode in Silver Lake is related but property records show Mister McCord—who previously owned a home in the remote, cedar-scented San Jacinto Mountains town of Idyllwild, CA—recently spent almost $800,000 on a charming but woefully dated hacienda style house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and an in-ground swimming pool in a Ojai, CA.

Not that anybody gives a toxic dump's worth but besides Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros also others on regular rotation on Your Mama's music box right now include Linda Ronstadt, The Black Keys, Broken Bells, Miike Snow, Julian Doré, Robert Plant and Allison Kraus' 2007 album Raising Sand, the Alabama Shakes, Jack White's Blunderbuss and—always—a little Nina Simone for good measure.

*Just for your musical edification, puppies, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have been touring for a couple of years, they're hardly a stranger to the public eye—they were on Letterman for chrissakes—and there is no such person named Edward Sharpe associated with this band.

listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty

Kitchen Love

“Do you need more cabinets here?” Mr. Wonderful said loitering in the kitchen.

“No,” I said unloading the dishwasher.

“Do you need more light?”

“No.”

“More space?”

“No.”

“Well I do.”

Mr. Wonderful was interested in my room? How odd.

During escrow for the House both of us had signed the bank’s papers in blood, sweat and multiple fears. Both of us had pledged that both of us would pay the mortgage every month for the next 380 years or both of us would be booted to the curb by David Beckham. But a funny thing happened on moving day—the House didn’t belong to both of us—it got divvied up between us. Mr. Wonderful claimed the office, work room, living room, spare bedroom and entire guesthouse while I got the run-down kitchen. Life was not fair.

In the first weeks of living in the House every night after dinner I would linger in the dingy kitchen while he retreated to the airy spare bedroom, the bright living room or went roller blading in the spacious guesthouse.

With disinfectant, buckets of paint and countless trips to The Home Depot I banished the kitchen’s offensive faded colors, grimy walls and dead lizard, thereby making my only room in the House my favorite room in the House.

I was smitten with kitchen love.

I was not alone. Mr. Wonderful knew a good thing when he saw it. It started small. Most indiscretions usually did. After several years of marriage the shine could rub off even the happiest of relationships and when that happened women and men acted out. Like every member of my fairer sex I coped by shopping. Meanwhile Mr. Wonderful took the path of all masculine brutes: he started spending time with… something else.  Which was oh, so far from wonderful.

While I was purchasing skirts, jeans and pants, he was playing with piecrust dough. While I was buying cowboy boots, he was canoodling with the Cuisinart. While I was buying knick knacks, he was buying gifts for her—for my creation, my best friend,  my kitchen! He started with extra drawers then graduated to massage oils for her wood counters. He took better care of her than his car.

He was smitten with kitchen love.

In the evenings I lingered in the kitchen and so did he. Seated on the opposite side of the table he scanned the internet for ideas to improve her, to make her more appealing, to make her more beautiful. He was so focused on this goal he no longer wanted to eat in, eat out or roller blade anywhere. Everything he did was now about her and for her. The happy conjugal life we’d shared was as present as last summer’s ice cream cone. I’d been warned fixing up a house while living in it put severe stressors on a marriage but I didn’t realize a single room could be total home wrecker. OMG Maybe my husband would leave me for… my kitchen. Was there a support group for that?  

Mad with kitchen love he drew up so many plans for her he released them in a multi-volume kitchen repair book series with corresponding iPhone app and Tumblr video site. 

“I’ll put in recessed lighting here,” he said showing me book seven of his 16-volume set.

“The kitchen doesn’t need it.”

“I’ll install more cabinets here.”

“I don’t need—”

“And more counter tops here and here.”

“No one needs this!” Couldn’t he see his indiscretions? His misplaced affection? “It’s all about her all day, every day, 24-7!” I said stamping my new cowboy-booted foot in frustration.

He kinked an eyebrow, “Who are you talking about?”

“The kitchen, you’re leaving me for my kitchen!” He asked me to elaborate about my fears and after I did, he pulled me close reassuring me that he was not in love with a space but his married, human partner, although she possessed an overactive imagination and gave human characteristics to inhuman places. We made up. Life was fair.

“All these kitchen improvements,” he said kindly, “I’m doing them for us.” My heart melted, my reason returned. 

“Can we improve the kitchen--together?”

A grin spread across his face. “I’d like that.”

In the end our kitchen love reminded us we were smitten with each other.

I sat beside him at the table where we both discussed the plans for our kitchen’s second remodel. We were on the same page again. Ahhh, life was wonderful.

Reality TV Producer Jonathan Karsh Lists at a Los in Los Feliz

SELLER: Jonathan Karsh
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,200,000
SIZE: 2,275 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 1.75 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last week Your Mama tied things up with a brief discussion about a modestly sized Spanish-style villa in L.A.'s swanky Sunset Strip area owned by well heeled TMZ head honcho Harvey Levin and listed for $5.3 million. We're going to stay in that vein—or at least that architectural vernacular—and start off this week with an also brief discussion of an also modestly scaled but much less expensive—if not exactly cheap—Spanish style residence in L.A.'s less glitzy Franklin Hills area (between Los Feliz and Silver Lake) owned by director/producer Jonathan Karsh and listed at $1,200,000.*

Mister Karsh may not be a household name but ia none-the-less an Emmy award winning documentary film maker (My Flesh and Blood, Ted Haggard: Scandalous), the former host of the short-lived reality program Kid Nation and an increasingly active producer of mildly tawdry reality tee-vee programs (Catfish: The TV Show, My Teen Is Pregnant and So Am I, Broke and Famous, the Police Women of... franchise).

Online listings indicate Mister Karsh's casa in the Franklin Hills was first listed last July (2012) and, as of today, is currently in escrow. That's certainly some good news for Mister Karsh and his market research consultant missus Jennifer. However, hunties, unless their real estate lady managed to secure a sale price in excess of the $1.2 million asking price—don't laugh, it could happen—it looks to Your Mama like Mister and Missus Karsh are headed for a $77,000+ hit to their conjugal pocketbook since property records reveal they paid $1,277,000 for the house in August 2005.

The two-story residence, fronted by ground hugging foliage that looks like it might mostly be fairly drought tolerant, sits well above the street, was originally built in 1931 and measures in at just 2,275 square feet with 3-4 bedrooms and 1.75 bathrooms. A narrow driveway—one slender enough that Your Mama could never dream of backing out of it without ripping both sides of our BMW wagon to shreds—runs along one side of the house to a detached two-car garage behind the house at the rear of the property.

A teeny-tiny foyer is generally preferable to no foyer at all but the front door of the Karsh residence opens into a Saltillo-tiled foyer so brutally compact that it looks to Your Mama like it's simply too  minuscule for more than one person to be in at the same time. It seems to us that the door answerer must back uncomfortably and awkwardly in to the living room in order to allow the door knocker to enter the abode. Anyhoo, the closet-sized "foyer" leads into a much more pleasantly proportioned "formal" living room with well maintained narrow strip wood floors, heavy wood beams across the ceiling and three over-sized windows, two rectangular ones that flank the fireplace and a super-sized arched one with easterly views over the roof tops of the houses across the street.

A couple steps up from the living room, in the dining room, the floors switch from wood to polished Mexican paver tiles that continue into the small but well-equipped eat-in kitchen that listing information indicates was recently updated with outfitted with commercial grade appliances, simple white cabinetry and mint-ish green counter tops of unknown material that rather disturbingly almost exactly match the color of the exterior trim work. Not that it matters an iota but besides the ill-advised minty green counter tops Your Mama also does not care a lick for the paned greenhouse window over the sink.** French doors in the breakfast area end of the kitchen would probably make for a more elegant and convenient egress but, as it stands, one must traipse through the adjacent laundry room in order to get to the backyard.

Back in the living room, just to the left of the fireplace in the living room another short set of steps ascends to a narrow but ever-so-charming den/library with wood floors, kiva-type corner fireplace and floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves where Mister Karsh keeps both a colorful array of books and an his trio of Emmys.

The wood floors in the den/library continue into a sunny, window lined room next door that has a high pitched ceiling and side-lighted French doors that open to a small dining deck with built-in bench seating tucked into the rear of the residence, the same deck to which the aforementioned laundry room opens and which is described in marketing materials as "reminicent [sp] of a Tuscan hill town." We don't know about this hyperbolic Tuscan hill town bizness nor are 100% certain but it is this room, the one with the vaulted ceiling and deck accessing French doors, that is shows as a potential fourth bedroom in listing details. In listing photos, the room is clearly and smartly better utilized as a family room since the most easily accessible bathroom is a three-quarter number that's shared with the rest of the main floor living spaces.

Upstairs three bedrooms all have lovely wood floors, coved ceilings and newer double-paned windows on at least two walls that allow for summer time cross-ventilation. What none of the bedrooms have, however, is a private bathroom. Instead they all share a spacious but single, sky-lit bathroom with separate spa tub, stall shower and a lot of wacky white, tangerine and navy blue tile work that fights aggressively with the well-worn peach-y colored paver tiled floors.

In addition to the trellised dining deck with the built-in bench seating, the backyard offers a small and patchy but mostly flat patch of partially tree-shaded grass and a slightly raised circular spa lined with mosaic tiles.

Now listen, children, neither Your Mama or the Dr. Cooter is a size queen when it comes to real estate so we have zero issue with the amount of space the house offers but, seriously, for a million two—even in L.A.—we most certainly want a master bedroom with a private bathroom

Of course we can't say it with any real certainty but as best as Your Mama can tell from a quick spin through various property record data bases Mister (and Missus) Karsh do not own any other real estate in Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter.

*Yes, children, we know this is some slim celebrity real estate pickings but sit tight. These things go in cycles and Your Mama will have some big(ger) name transactions to tantalize y'all with soon enough.

**For the record, Your Mama dislikes green house windows in general and not just this one in particular.
listing photos: Michael McNamara / Shooting LA for Sotheby's International Realty

TMZ Boss Harvey Levin Lists Sunset Strip Digs

SELLER: Harvey Levin
LOCATION: Lost Angeles, CA
PRICE: $5,300,000
SIZE: 2,996 square feet, 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It has come to Your Mama's attention that attorney, legal analyst and celebrity gossip bigwig Harvey Levin—he's the co-founder, owner and managing editor at TMZ—has hoisted his long-time home in West Hollywood, CA on the market with a celebrity-style $5,300,000 asking price.

Property records indicate Mister Levin picked up the house way back in 1998 for $950,000 and almost immediately added his longtime man-friend, chiropractor Andy Maurer—or Mauer, depending on what documentation you look at online—to the deed and documentation.

Current listing details shows the three bedroom and three bathroom Spanish style mini-villa was originally built in 1937, measures in at a modest-by-rich-folks standard 2,996 square feet and sits well above the street on a .31 acre up sloping lot behind high hedges and electronic driveway gates. The house happens to be just a few doors down, ironically enough, from the gated and fortified mini-estate Halle Berry owns and—so the stories go—has available off market with a $15 million price tag.

Intricately patterned and vibrantly colored tile floors in the entrance hall stretch into a sun-splashed loggia with a perfect row of three arched French doors that open a flagstone terrace that surrounds the heated swimming pool and spa.

The sunken living room has wood floors and a hulking stone fireplace not to mention lots of masculine looking brown furniture and several of the many framed Italian movie posters or Euro-advertisements—or whatever they are—that are hung throughout the house.

We don't care so much for the red tile floors in the formal dining room but we do appreciate the generous scale of the room that has over-sized windows on three sides and opens onto a lushly planted terrace with a direct view up towards a rolling swathe of tree-ringed lawn. The red tile flooring continues into the fairly compact informal family quarters that include a smallish but well-equipped kitchen with granite counter tops and top-grade appliance. A short, two-seat breakfast counter peninsula separates the kitchen from a petite den/tee-vee viewing lounge that opens to the rear terraces and gardens and is currently furnished by Mister Levin and Maurer—or Mauer or whatever—with a sectional sofa upholstered in eggplant colored velvet.

There are two guest/family bedrooms and two guest/family bathrooms slathered in period-perfect vintage tiles. The second floor master suite has a small sitting area, two sets of French doors that open to Juliet balconies with verdant garden views, a custom-fitted walk-in closet and a spacious bathroom with exposed wood vaulted ceiling, his and his sinks, a soaking tub set into a bay window and a separate shower separated from the rest of the bathroom by a tiled pony way. Frankly, we prefer a bit more privacy in our showering space, but we're not living here so...

Other features include a built-in home office nook with custom-built desk and cabinetry, a separate laundry room so large and luxurious that it could make most hauefraus pee their mom jeans with envy, a basement level bonus room with extra storage and an attached two-car garage with direct entry. The house is pre-wired for sound with individual controls in each room and secured with a celeb-style state of the art system and intercom.

Your Mama's research shows Mister Levin and Mister Mauer (or Maurer or whatever) also own a nearly 1,800 square foot condo in a beachside building in Marina del Rey (CA) that they snatched up for $1,200,000 in 2003.

We have absolutely no inside intel into the matter but Your Mama would bet both our long bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, that Mister Levin and his long term male companion will trade up to an even more impressive estate with a larger house and more extensive grounds. We shall see...

listing photos: Keller Williams / Beverly Hills

More Week End Catch Up: 03.01.13

Michael Jordan may have hung up his eponymous size thirteens almost a decade ago but the six-foot-six basketball superstar is still hauling in enough bank to maintain and grow a fat property portfolio. Indeed, recent reports by the dozen reveal Mister Jordan—who was just hit with a paternity suit from a woman who is not his fiancée and who claims her 16 year old son is his sire—dropped $2.8 million to acquire a 10,000-or-so square foot mansion out of foreclosure on Lake Norman in Cornelius, NC

The gated, two parcel spread occupies a private peninsula within the posh Peninsula Club golf community and totals just over an acre of boardwalk ringed lake frontage on three sides. The property had previously been owned by drag racer Doug Herbert who, apparently, could not or chose not to make his mortgage payments.

The three story mansion has six bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, an impress the guests-style foyer, a double height great room and, on the lower  lake level, a recreation room with dance floor, a home gym and a spa room with sauna. Terraces cascade down the past the swimming pool to the lake's edge where there's a private dock for parking water craft.

Mister Jordan also owns a large house in Park City, UT and an even larger if not quite finished custom constructed mansion in a fancy gated golf enclave in Jupiter, FL as well as a pair of penthouse condos in Charlotte, NC, where's he's an majority owner of the local professional basketball team. He recently slashed the asking price of his custom built 56,000 square foot mega-compound in Highland Park, IL from $29 million to $21 million.

listing photos: Lake Norman Realty

Back in Beverly Hills, attorney and financier Leonard Ross has made his monstrous Mediterranean Revival-style residence available for lease at a rate of—Your Mama suggests you get a nerve pill down in you for this—$600,000. Per month. That's right, puppies, that's $7.2 million just to rent this house for one year.

Just to put that in a wee bit of financial perspective: A few quick tabulations with the beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that a person who earns $10 an hour would need to work 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year for almost 29 years to earn single month's rent. That same worker would have to work at the same rate for 346 years to come up the the $7.2 for a full year's rent. You just watch, some free-spending gajillionaire from Kazahkstan, Abuja or Shanghai will probably not even bat an eye to drop that kind of dough to rent it for six months while his mistress shops, sunbathes and undergoes a battery of cosmetic treatments and enhancement by a scalpel and syringe wielding squadron made up of some of Beverly Hills' most successful and expensive doctors.

Anyhoo, the humongous house was designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann—he's the guy who designed Greystone, dontcha know—for banker Milton Getz in the mid 1920s. In 1946 silent movie superstar Marion Davies bought the house for $120,000 for her portly and very married man-friend, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. He died in the house five years later. John and Jackie Kennedy spent part of their honeymoon at Beverly House and scenes from numerous movies including Fletch, The Bodyguard and The Godfather were filmed on the property.

We're not sure exactly how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the massive and decadently decorated main mansion—the L.A. County Tax Man says it's 9 and 15—but we do know from online marketing materials that there is a 50 foot entrance hall, a living room with a 22-foot ceiling, a billiard room and a family room that spills out to a prairie-sized terrace capable of accommodating 400 for a sit-down dinner prepared in a commercial grade kitchen. There are also two projection rooms, an Art Deco night club, a gym and spa facilities.

In addition to the massive main mansion the historic 3.7 acre compound offers generous staff accommodations, a guest house above an 8-car garage, a separate security cottage, a separate two bedroom apartment and a two story gate house with four bedrooms and a kitchenette.

Mister Ross unsuccessfully tried to sell the estate in 2007 when he hoisted on the market with a vivaciously optimistic $165,000,000 asking price. Although it does not appear in the MLS as an active sale listing at least one listing accessible on the computer shows it's currently freighted with a much lower but still elephantine $115,000,000 price tag.

Hello? Did anyone call Tamara Ecclestone?

listing photos: Hilton & Hyland

Your Mama could not name even one movie in which she's appeared, hum the tune to a single song she's sung or otherwise name a any of her (no doubt copious) professional achievements. None the less, Haylie Duff—the older sister of Hilary—ranks high enough on the celebrity real estate meter that at least one property gossip reported this week that she sold her upscale but ho-hum house in L.A.'s star-studded Toluca Lake area in mid-February (2013) for $30,000 less than the $1,750,000 she paid for the five bedroom and six bathroom house in June 2008.

listing photos: John Aaroe Group

Although Your Mama first heard it from a real estate tattle tale we sometimes refer to as Ima B. Anupstatemary it was already reported in New York Magazine that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes—currently the publisher, editor in chief and majority owner of lefty-lib rag The New Republic—and his politically ambitious activist/investor husband Sean Eldridge scooped a very contemporary getaway in the tiny Upstate New York town of Shokan in the insanely scenic Catskills Mountains.

Your Mama has a couple of (very) tenuous tie ins to this property. Not only do we have a tattoo of an anchor—as does one of the sellers, the sometimes mustachioed advertising industry creative director Fritz Westenberger who custom built and co-owned the house with his former man-friend Patrick O'Neill—as it turns, out the house is just a short hop as the crow flies from the rustic farmhouse on 400 glorious acres above the Shokan Reservoir that Your Mama and a group of friends leased for a few years back in the mid 1990s. But, really, that's entirely irrelevant, isn't it?

Anyhoo, information provided by Mister Anupstatemary shows Mister Hughes and Eldridge paid $1,922,500—in cash—for the glassy two bedroom and two bathroom residence that Mister Westenberger told the New York Times in 2011 was inspired by the designs of modernist master Richard Neutra. The sleek and airy interior spaces are complemented on the outside with a negative edge swimming pool and panoramic views over the Shokan Reservoir to the distant Shawangunk Mountains.

The couple also own a loft in SoHo bought in 2010 for $5 million and an 80-acre estate in Garrison (NY), the same semi-rural, arty-farty and upscale community where Patty Hearst, Julie Taymor, Roger Ailes and (former New York) governor George Pataki all maintain residences.

listing photos: Eric Bean Real Estate / Coldwell Banker

And, finally, because we can not resist the melodramatic real estate plight of a rich lady, there's all the hullabaloo and legal brouhaha brewing between Showbiz widow Candy Spelling and the fit to be tied  landlord of her $28,000 per month rental at the swanky Carlyle building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Miz Spelling has been holed up in her rental at the Carlyle—the apartment house not the perfectly elegant New York City hotel—since she vacated The Manor, the 56,000 square foot neoclassical-ish pile she sold to Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone last year for $85 million. She awaits the completion and decoration of the 16,000 square foot duplex penthouse at the newly erected Century building in the heart of Century City for which she paid an astonishing $47,000,000 back in 2008.

The landlord is spitting mad and claims in court documents that Miz Spelling remains illegally in residence beyond the terms of her lease that officially ended January 31 (2013). Miz Spelling asserts she arranged to extend her lease by six months and had, in fact, already made her February rent payment.

Will Candy vacate on her own volition? Will the landlord pursue legal remedy? Would a judge turn a multi-milionairess out on her keister and force her to take a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Where would she go? Could she move in with Tori and Dean and their 87 children? What real estate fate, children, does Miz Spelling face before she can, at long last, move into her $47 million dollar penthouse? Stay tuned...

exterior image: Carlyle on Wilshire

Week End Catch Up: 03.01.13

In case any of y'all somehow managed to miss it in the deluge of publicity this week, Bob and Dolores Hope's 23,000 square foot spaceship-like John Lautner-designed residence in Palm Springs has—as has been much anticipated by property gossips and architecture aficionados alike—finally and officially hit the market. Buckle your real estate safety belts, butter beans, because that big ol' beotch ain't listed at $45 million like Your Mama originally thought and reported it was gonna be back in mid-December 2012. No, babies, that titanic torus-shaped edifice got saddled with an even more tumescent and rosier tinted price tag of $50 million.

Mister and Missus Hope owned at least two other residential properties in Palm Springs, a 1935 ranch near Ruth Hardy Park that sold last month for $725,000—$66,000 over asking, thank you very much—and a 1936 Spanish casa across the street from Ruth Hardy Park that had been listed at $469,000 but was taken off the open market in mid-February. Our research turns up some evidence that the dated 2,100 square foot charmer remains available off-market at the same price.

listing photos: Partners Trust and Windermere Real Estate

Speaking of celebrities selling real estate in Palm Springs, Your Mama hears through the Coachella Valley real estate gossip grapevine that Le Baux de Palm Springs, Suzanne Somers and Alan Hamel's quirky, multi-structure compound tucked into the rocks at the south end of town is about to pop up on the market—again—with a $14,500,000 asking price.

Long time celebrity real estate watchers will recall the (rumored) new asking price is far less than half the $35 million they wanted when they first listed the 10 bedroom and 11 bathroom hillside compound back in early 2008 when Your Mama went over it and it's decorative decadence with a fine toothed comb. That figure is also, curiously enough, 1.6 million smacker more than the $12,900,000 the price plummeted to over the summer of 2009 before it was taken off the market.

photo: sorry folks but we can't figure out where we got this photo.

Fashion designer Derek Lam and his man-partner Jan-Erik Scholttman—he's also the CEO of Derek Lam International—put a $6,000,000 price on their triplex loft in New York City's swanky (if tourist mobbed) Soho 'hood that they bought less than two years ago for $4,650,000. The floor through space has three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a library loft, a small but expensively equipped kitchen and a fireplace in the living room surrounded by custom mill work. Not surprisingly, the finishes and day-core are every bit as tailored sophisticated and thoughtfully considered as his clothes. Have y'all seen his fall 2013 line with all its caplets, coats and geometric piece work that looks like some sort of Kelly Wearstler marble confection? It's all rather divine if you're into fairly expensive ladies' garments. Anyhoo...

listing photos and floor plan: Corcoran 

Now that Kim Kardashian and Kanye west are making babies and (allegedly) setting up house in a massive nine million dollar mock-Med MacMansion in a guard gated enclave in Bel Air the perpetually preening and fastidiously groomed Mister West has re-listed his 4,200 square foot art- and fashion-filled bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills. For what it's worth, the current $3,300,000 asking price is $700,000 less than the $3,995,000 the three story house was briefly listed at in May 2010 but still almost twice the $1,750,000 he paid for the place in late 2003.

NOTE: Although Your Mama has repeatedly heard a different story come down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine, "sources directly connected to Kim and Kanye" told TMZ this week that despite three higher offers coming in—the highest being $10.5 million—they are not flipping the house. Plans proceed full speed ahead to gut renovate and expand the already large house to 14,000 square feet and they plan to move in in a few months.

photos (from 2010 listing): Hilton & Hyland

On the heels of his recent Oscar nominated for his role as Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, polo-playing veteran actor Tommy Lee Jones has slapped at hair straightening $26,750,000 asking price on his 50-acre San Saba Polo Ranch in Wellington, FL, arguably America's capital of all thing equestrian. Mister Jones purchased the property in two separate transactions in 2002 for a total of $4,620,000 and—it would appear

Listing details show the property has 48 stalls in a pair of parallel barns, 7 take room, 2 feed rooms, 4 paddocks, and exercise track and a full sized polo field. In addition to four bedroom and 2 bathroom grooms quarters a separate pavilion provides luxuriously appointed lounging, dining and cooking space.

As far as Your Mama knows, Mister Jones still owns at least two other properties in and around Wellington as well as a gated compound in San Antonio, TX with a 6,500+ square foot main residence.

listing photos: Southfields Real Estate