SELLER: Ryan PhillippeLOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $7,450,000
SIZE: 7,447 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Brace yourselves butter beans because we're going to slap you in the face with a bit of old old old real estate news this morning in the form of a Los Angeles, CA residence that hairless Hollywood hottie Ryan Phillippe foisted on the market a week or two ago with an asking price of $7,450,000.
Mister Phillippe started up his ladder of fame with a ground-breaking early 1990s role on the soap story One Live To Live on which he played a homosexual teenager. Many more movies and tee-vee projects followed including Studio 54 and Cruel Intentions, which also starred Reese Witherspoon who became Mister Phillippe's Missus in 1999. In 2002 he showed up as a baby-faced valet in in the late, great Robert Altman's Academy Award winning Gosford Park. Next came Igby Goes Down, Academy Award winning Crash and Oscar winning war movie Flags of Our Father. Then, alas, Mister Phillippe's career hit the skids with a whole mess of earth scorching flops that included Stop-Loss, Franklyn and–Lowerd help us all that they even make movies like this–MacGruber. Jeezis, Mary and Jennifer Lopez, we need a damn nerve pill just to think of what kind of a person actually spends 1o or 15 bucks to pay for a ticket to see MacGruber. We. Don't. Even. Want. To. Know. Anyhoodles poodles, our Mister Phillippe, a virtually hairless Hollywood hottie, has a number of projects in the hopper that–Your Mama imagines–he hopes will revive this powerful ebb in the flow of his career. We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.
Amid deafening rumors that he was knocking boots with his Stop-Loss cast-mate Abbie Cornish, the marriage of Mister Phillippe and his much more successful and far richer wife Reese Witherspoon swirled down the terlit of Tinseltown love sometime in 2007. Jump to June of 2008 when the newly un-hitched Mister Phillippe–who was by then openly dating Miss Cornish–shelled out $7,150,000 to purchase a sprawling residence high in the hills above Los Angeles' Sunset Strip. Mister Phillippe purchased the property from movie producer Sylvio Tabet (The Beastmaster, The Cotton Club) who previously transformed what was originally a mid-century modern Buff and Hensman designed domicile into an buffoonish Asian-themed hot mess replete and rife with Oriental rugs, Tansu chests and shoji screens.
Mister Phillippe seemed to like the Asian themed day-core–the house still oozes with an odd rendition of a Geisha house–but he none-the-less recently caught a classic case of The Real Estate Fickle. Just 2.5 years after settling into his Chino-Japo-East Asian-ish style bachelor pad he flipped the beehawtcha back on the market for a few hundred thousand more than he paid for the place. Current listing information shows the 5 bedroom and 6.5 pooper pad measures in at 7,447 square feet spread out over two hillside levels.
Rustic, Asian-y antique style wooden doors open from the gated motor court into a canopied courtyard entry that leads to the front door. A vast, low-ceilinged living room with blond hardwood floors, floor to ceiling panels of glass and a wide fireplace can be opened up to or closed off from the sky lit dining room by sliding shoji screens. A swinging door appliqued with a Chinoiserie design leads back into the nearly windowless kitchen complex. A sky-lit galley style kitchen with smooth, glass fronted cabinets and stainless steel appliances opens into sky lit breakfast room with built-in banquette, built-in desk, a flat-screen tee-vee and a couple of under-counter wine fridges.
The house has two major master suites, one of which is located underneath a large sundeck in the backyard, stretches about 60-feet and is so large that Mister Phillippe can–and did–place a clean-lined four-poster canopy bed smack in the center of the damm room. At one end he has a private office area with large computer screen and at the other a sitting area with built in wet bar and flat screen tee-vee mounted above a fireplace. On a clear day the views from the master bedroom stretches all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The attached bath has been did up and done over in a contempo-Asian style with shiny neutral colored marble floors with wood inlay, a free standing soaking tub for two, long vanity and party sized steam shower, private cubby for the pooper, a full lenth mirror or two and, natch, a television because apparently Mister Ryan is one of those people for whom luxury means having a flat screen mounted on the wall in just about every damn room of the house.
Additional living spaces include a room with built-in bar, family room, library/office, guest quarters with private entrance and a media/music room where the big screen tee-vee is outdone by a projection screen the scrolls down from the ceiling at the touch of a button. A concrete floored double height home gym is filled with body torture equipment meant to keep Mister Phillippe's abs rock hard and biceps a-bulging and there's also a sauna for sweating out the booze..
The house wraps around expansive outdoor areas that include a heated swimmer's pool ringed by a wide terrace, spa, stacked stone walls over which water tumbles, a canopied fire pit/lounge with city lights view, an outdoor kitchen and that huge deck that extends the outdoor space over the master suite below.
A number of nameless sources have privately speculated and insinuated to Your Mama that Mister Phillippe needs to move because he ain't got the ducats to afford a house like this anymore. But, kids, we're not so sure. Of course, Your Mama does not know a damn donkey from an avocado tree so we don't really have any idea what may or may not have motivated Mister Phillippe to up and sell a terrifically expensive house so soon after settling. However, we suspect that his motivations may be far less salacious and much more mundane, something along the lines of wanting to save himself the mind numbing aggravation of traffic jams every time he has to get back and forth over to where his two children with Reese Witherspoon live in the Brentwood/Mandeville Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Whatever the case, a few quick flicks of the well worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that even if Mister Phillippe's Real Estates manage to bring in a buyer with a full price offer, once he pays the fat real estate fees he's looking at barely breaking even on his ill-timed and ill-conceived Asian-themed real estate flight of fancy.
A wee look-see at a map on the interweb shows Mister Phillippe's residence sits just a few doors down from the house that pop star Britney Spears sold to ack-tress Brittany Murphy who died in the house–according to the coroner–due to acute pneumonia and severe anemia. Bizarrely, Miss Murphy's older man-friend Simon Monjack perished in the house five months later–according to the coroner– due to pneumonia and severe anemia. Does that chill y'all bones right to the dang marrow and make you wonder if that whackadoodle Randy Quaid and his even more unhinged seeming wife Evi just might be on to something with their freaky stories of the "Hollwood Star Whackers?" Just a thought. Other nearby neighbors include actor Michael Vartan (Alias, Hawthorne) and British tele-hypnotist Paul McKenna who was recenty reported to be interested in the Holmby Hills mansion where Michael Jackson met his maker.
listing photos: Total Agent Photos for Coldwell Banker Preview International
