SELLERS: Kyle Richards and Mauricio UmanskyLOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $2,450,000
SIZE: 4,200 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms.
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: There's an unofficial real estate rule when it comes to the houses of all the "housewives" on The Real Housewives of Wherever series: Soon after the season begins, regardless of which city is featured, at least two of the "housewives" will put their houses on the market.
Some need to sell due to financial distress (Gina from Orange County for example) and some just because because they want a change (Jill from New York City, let's say). Currently, the Atlanta, GA area house Sherée Whitfield leases in is on the market for $1,395,000, Mary Amons has her suburban D.C. digs on the market for $1,995,000 (reduced from $2,350,000), and Lisa "Pinky" Vanderpump's palatial pile in Beverly Hills, CA is unofficially listed with fat asking price of $29,000,000.
Also on the market, with an asking price of $2,450,000, is the Bel Air contemporary of raven haired Beverly Hills "housewife" Kyle Richards, one of the few of the entire lot of "housewives" who actually seems to be a housewife. Miz Richards–a former actress and Paris Hilton's mother Kathy's sister–is hitched to Los Angeles über-agent Mauricio Umansky who purveys posh properties for Hilton & Hyland, the well known brokerage owned, of course, by Kathy's hubby Rick Hilton, otherwise known as Paris's daddy. Are the children following?
Miz Richards showbiz career goes back to the mid 1970s when she was just knee-high to a lawnmower. Starting in 1975 she worked it on Little House on the Prairie and in 1978 she appeared in her seminal silver screen role in the horror film Halloween. She later starred in the tee-vee series Down to Earth and beginning in the late 1990s until 2006 she has long relationship of 20+ episodes on the hospital drama ER.
Mister Umansky, who has more than $400,000,000 in listings, shakes his money maker all over the Platinum Triangle–that's Bev Hills, Bel Air and the Holmby Hills, butter beans–and he gets a substantial percentage of the listings for the mega-mansions in the guard gated, star studded and steroidal Beverly Park community.
In addition to Lisa Vanderpump's twenty nine million dollar pile that's directly across from sister "housewife" Adrienne Maloof, Mister Umansky is working his real estate stuff for three more mansions in Beverly Park. Although it has not appeared in the MLS for quite some time, Mister Umansky has long had the mock-Moorish mansion of nutritional supplements tycoon Bill Phillips listed on his website with an asking price of $34,000,000. Interestingly, out of the blut the other day Your Mama heard through the celebrity real estate grapevine–but can not yet confirm via property records–that Mister Phillips's estate, called The Great 78, was sold for $25,000,000. Rockstar Energy Drink CEO and founder Russ Weiner hired Mister Umansky to represent his Beverly Park mansion listed at $28,000,000. Mister Weiner bought his 16,000 square foot house in February of 2007 for $15,000,000. Mister Umansky's list of listings also includes the 9 bedroom and 15 pooper spec house Beverly Park resident and Vanna White's ex-huzband George Santopietro built, listed with an ungodly $50,000,000 asking price, leased briefly to His Purpleness Prince for a reported $200,000 per month and now has back on the market at the much reduced price of $27,900,000.
In the last few years Mister Umansky has sold at least three pricey properties up in Beverly Park including a newly completed boo-teek hotel sized faux-chateau last listed for $31,500,000 and sold, according to property records, for ten million and change. Your Mama suspects there may have been other trades and considerations in the deal and that the thing went down for more than ten million bucks, but we don't know a cat box from a cookie jar so don't nobody go spoutin' off about that. In the fall of 2008 hair-chested and accented Mister Umansky brokered the transaction for a not yet completed Tuscan-style behemoth bought by wildly wealthy property developer Ron Tutor for $36,700,000. A couple years prior to that he persuaded a buyer to pay $22,000,000 for a somewhat squat-looking mansion owned and occupied for a couple of years by none other than Kelsey Grammer and his insufferable soon to be ex-wife and Beverly Hills Housewife Camille Grammer. Despite the high-sterical drama between Miz Richards and the plainly narcissistic soon to be ex-Missus Kelsey Grammer, Mister Grammer still and currently has the erstwhile couple's 7 bedroom and 9 pooper house in Holmby Hills listed with Mister Umansky with a price tag of $18,900,000.
While he may be a crack real estate agent in Los Angeles, Mister Umansky doesn't seem to have the Midas Touch when it comes to selling his own home located on a small cul-de-sac so high in the hills of Bel Air that it might as well be Encino. Property records reveal that Mister Umansky and Miz Richards scooped up their family crib in June of 2004 for $1,935,000.
As best as we can tell from our research on the internets and in our archives, Mister Umansky and Miz Richards first put their house on the market way back in May of 2009 with an asking price of $3,450,000. Since then the property has been de-listed and re-listed several times and the price has plummeted to its current price tag of $2,450,000. A few flicks of the well worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that that million dollar price chop represents a significant and sort of embarrassing 29% discount from the original price.
Listing information shows the recently remodeled two-story house measures around 4,200 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms each with en suite terliting facilities plus an additional full pooper for guests. Many of the home's rooms look over or open to the resort style back yard and the view that encompasses the city lights of the San Fernando Valley and the surrounding mountains. The house sits atop a hill at the bottom of which snakes the always busy and always jammed up 405 freeway. Although Your Mama has never been in the house, of course, we're thinking (and hoping) the house sits high and far enough from that freeway that whatever road noise there might be is minimal.
The main rooms include a long living room that opens to the resort-style back yard, a formal dining room, and an open plan kitchen, family and breakfast area that also opens up to the back yard. There are also, according to listing information, an office and staff quarters although we're not aware that Miz Richards, a bizzy mother of four daughters, employs live-in domestic help unlike that perplexing and psychically destabilizing Camille Grammer ladee who can't seem to slather on her own lip gloss without a resident make-up gay or raise her two youngins without a team of round the clock nanny-gurls.
The mostly earth tone day-core in the majority of Richards-Umansky residence is a very cohesive and obviously much considered situation that listing information describes as "contemporary Balinese tropical resort" style. Your Mama interprets this to mean that they stuck a bunch of carved Buddha things up in there, added some clean lined sectional sofas, tossed up a couple of shimmery Verner Panton designed sconces, set some leafy and spikey plants in various corners and threw in a couple white leather Barcelona chairs in the sitting area of the master bedroom. The "blended" nature of the day-core was unfortunately reinforced with a plethora of flooring materials including travertine, slate, hardwood and wall to wall carpeting. Your Mama's decorating rule #472 states that particular care must be taken when mixing and matching more than three flooring materials in any one dwelling and this house, hunnies, is a perfect example why.
Listen kids, this is hardly the worst sort of celebrity and "celebrity" day-core Your Mama's come across lately but there's just something so contrived and over-processed about it all that we can't quite put our gin soaked brain on right at this moment. Can you?
The flat back yard has a heated, free form black bottomed swimming pool, attached spa, barbecue areas, circular sunken fire pit and a lawn plenty big enough to set up one of those horrid jumpy houses and fence off a small area for a sad little petting zoo like Miz Richards did for the down to earth yet still hideously expensive birthday party she threw for her toddler.
Even though the real estate bizness is tough, Mister Umansky probably still makes a living far greater than Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter combined and we suspect the Richards-Umansky clan is not downsizing but rather up-sizing into a larger and more expensive house in a slightly more swank part of town.
