OWNER: Kyle MacLachlan and Desiree GruberLOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE $20,000 per month
SIZE: 2,669 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Professional commitments often require that actors and others in the Big Bizness of Show be away from home for long stretches of time while making movies and/or taping tee-vee programs. Surprisingly and despite presumed wealth, there are a surprisingly number of famous folks who actually put their homes on the rental market when they're not using them.
Actor Kyle MacLachlan, who lives primarily in New York City with his wife and child, has long owned a vine-entwined home in the Hollywood Hills that recently came up for lease with a not exactly inexpensive monthly rent of $20,000.
Mister MacLachlan, clean cut, quirky and unconventionally handsome with a really good head of hair, started up his ladder of fame in the mid-1980s with roles in the cult-fave films Dune and Blue Velvet. It wasn't until the early 1990s that he solidified his place in pop culture lexicon with his role as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper on the short-lived but highly-acclaimed Twin Peaks program. Since then he's appeared in some film flops (Showgirls), made-for-tee-vee movies (Route 9, Roswell) and made the rounds through a number of enormously successful television projects including the long-ago jumped the shark Desperate Housewives Sex and before that Sex in the City where his character had a thing for doing it outside–and Desperate Housewives. He currently stars in the cable comedy Portlandia.
For much of the 1990s Mister MacLachlan dated 1980 and '90s catwalk queen Linda Evangelista but ended up marrying N.Y. fashion publicist Desiree Gruber who double-times as a reality tee-vee producer (Project Runway, Stylista). Together they have a young child and a couple of dogs who, remarkably and somewhat strangely, have their own website.
Property records show that Mister MacLachlan has owned his house in the Outpost Estates neighborhood since at least 1992 or '93 and occupied the property, as per Movieland Directory, with his aforementioned former lady-friend Miss Evangelista who, it's recently come to light, made a baby about four years ago with French fashion tycoon Francois-Henri Pinault who also made a baby with movie star Salma Hayek at almost exactly the same time. Escándalo, niños, escandalo!
Anyhoo, listing information for Mister MacLachan and Miz Gruber's west coast abode shows the English Country-style compound, shielded from the street by a fence and high hedge, was built in 1939 and includes a main house plus a detached guest house for a total of 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms. The house is being offered fully furnished which is perfect for thoses with 20k a month to spend on rent who have a decorative penchant for roll-armed slip-covered sofas, quilts, needlepoint upholstered antique chairs, distressed wood pieces that look like they came from the Rose Bowl flea market, stacks of books and fireplace mantels crowded with pictures and other knick-knacks and paddy-whacks.
Behind the privacy hedge a thickly planted courtyard has a fountain, a corridor of vine-draped arbors and unholy cacophony of hardscaping materials that include flag stone, slate and brick. Inside there are formal living and dining rooms, the former with a stone fireplace. Less "formal" family quarters includes a family room with vaulted ceiling, exposed rough-hewn beams and trusses, slatted sky-lights, wood floors, wall-mounted flat-screen boob-toob and over-sized fireplace. The cozy breakfast room has a trio of giant 20-pane sash windows and connects the family room to warmly sleek remodeled center-island kitchen that features vaulted ceiling, honey-colored Shaker-style cabinetry with glass-fronted uppers, a mix of butcher block and fine but thickly-veined marble counter tops, over-size farmhouse sink and a commercial-style range with pounded copper hood that looks like it was ripped out of some 18th-century chateau in the Loire Valley.
The main floor master suite sports vaulted ceilings, rustic/romantic white-brick fireplace, parquet floors, French doors that open to a slim balcony and and attached bathroom with key-lime pie green walls and sunken soaking tub for two in the exact same shade.
The hillside house sits above the private tree-encircled backyard that includes an amoebic-shaped swimming pool and spa encircled by one of those horrid but blessedly removable child-protection fences. We know it's important to keep the children from drowning but those awful fences just take the wind right out of an otherwise good-looking backyard. The swimming pool is surrounded by a terrace of dark gray slate (or maybe it's some other sort of stone), a free-form grass patch or two and lush, pleasantly overgrown gardens. The stone built guest cottage adjacent to the swimming pool looks to Your Mama like it's being choked with wisteria and fern plants.
As far as Your Mama knows–and we really don't know a damn thing about nuthin'–Mister MacLachlan and Miz Gruber do not own any other property in Los Angeles.
What we do know is that scads of celeb own homes in the Outpost Estates neighborhood including Charlize Theron, Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy and Ben Stiller–whose two-crib compound has long been for sale. We also know that at least one other Showbiz Somebody owns a house in the casual but upscale 'hood that's up for lease. In March 2007 Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean) paid $2,750,000 for a gated mini-estate once owned by Helen Reddy and later by Thomas Gibson (Greg from Dharma & Greg). This is the very residence burgled in 2009 by the so-called 'Bling Ring,' and über-audacious and naughty-awful group of suburban teenagers that went around and busted up into the homes of numerous young Hollywood types including socialite/reality television star Paris Hilton and once-promising former actress Lindsay Lohan.
In early 2011–or maybe it was late 2010–Mister Bloom and his wife/baby momma Miranda Kerr decamped the Outpost Estates and put the now heavily secured 4 bedroom and 4 pooper property on the rental market with an asking price of $18,000 per month where it remains, as per current listing information, for lease at $18,000 per month.
Mister MacLachlan and Miz Gruber live primarily in New York City where, according to the docs we peeped, they shelled out $1,350,000 in October 2002 for a 1,934 square foot loft-style condo at the Chelsea Mercantile, a desirable full-service pre-war building located in–you got it–the Chelsea neighborhood. In April 2010 it was reported by the New York City-based real estate gossips that the couple put their fully renovated and nicely upgraded unit on the market with an asking price of $2,8750,000. Two months later they reduced the 3 bedroom and 2.5 bathroom apartment to $2,599,000 and almost two months after that they the took it off the market.
The floor plan included with listing information from the time shows the smallest of the Maclachlan-Gruber condo's three bedrooms has been converted to 250 square foot custom-fitted dressing room/closet "befitting a Beverly Hills mansion." A make-shift sleeping space with built-in Murphy bed was carved out of the tail end of the 35-foot long living room and separated from the main living space by little more than a flimsy curtain.listing photos (Los Angeles) Westside Estate Agency
floor plan (New York City): Corcoran via Street Easy
