SELLER: Leeza GibbonsLOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $6,895,000
SIZE: 6,333 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It was only just over a year ago that cougarlicious celebrity gossip, make-up purveyor and philanthropist Leeza Gibbons spent $6,600,000 to buy a Beverly Hills, CA mansion where she reportedly lived in unmarried bliss with her younger man-friend Steven Fenten, the former president of the Bev Hills Unified School Disctrict Board of Education who is sometimes described as a talent manager and sometimes as the "head of a private career management company."
A few months ago, during an intimate roof top ceremony officiated by two of her three children from two previous marriages and covered by the gossip programs and scuttlebutting blogs everywhere, Mister Fenten become Miz Gibbons' fourth husband. As is often the case with rich and famous types–even those who opt to live in sin before getting hitched–a new marriage means a new house.
Your Mama is entirely ignerrent about what Mister Fenten and Miz Gibbons' real estate plan is once they pack up and move on but thanks to real estate buddy-pal Brenda Blabsitall, it's come to Your Mama's attention that the newlyweds recently flipped their 2007-built mock Med mansion on the market with an asking price of $6,895,000.
Listing information for the mansion, located just around the corner from the La-la Land estate of The Soccer Player and The Spice Girl, does not indicate square footage but does show a count of 6 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms. The L.A. County Tax Man shows the two-story residence measures 6,333 square feet and includes 8 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms, which makes Your Mama's pea brain think The Tax Man's number may (or may not) reflect the stats of whatever house stood on the property before it was knocked down to make way for this–ahem–bulky bee-yew-tee.
Listing information also shows the walled and gated two-story tile-roofed pile, separated from the street bya narrow strip of terraced and landscaped front yard, has a 3-car side-facing garage plus off-street parking for "at least 4 additional cars," 4 fireplaces, 2 main floor "bonus rooms," and 1 screening room with built-in wide screen. Lowerd Jeezis in heaven we just hate that term "bonus room" almost as much as we loathe "great room," an over-worked, generic and just plain awful real estate descriptive that always makes Your Mama want to vomit with ennui.
Anyhoo, interior spaces include a slim but airy double-height center entrance hall with walnut floors and a curving staircase with authentic-looking Spanish tile risers. A formal living room has a gently arched French doors on two opposite ends of the room, stone fireplace, walnut floors and dark wood beams that we'd bet our long-bodied bitches Linda and Beverly are faux. We don't mean fake wood but rather we think that the beams have zero to do with the structural framework of the house. There's also a formal dining room, a library, an exercise room, office, and a sizable center-island kitchen outfitted with top-grade everything and done up to look like that quasi-Tuscan "style" seen almost exclusively in recently erected American mcmansions and almost never in Tuscany or any other region of the Mediterranean.
The well-equipped kitchen opens into breakfast area and large family room with more walnut floors and yucky, half-assed (and possibly faux) wood beams. Dark wood French doors with gracefully arched tops open the room to a covered outdoor lounge with fireplace that overlooks the skinny swimming pool and raised spa. The terraced backyard, really more of a cozy courtyard than a typically vast Beverly Hills back yard of rolling lawns and formal gardens, also includes a couple of Yorkie-sized pee-patches of grees and an open-air bar cabana with bar and grilling station.
Although Miz Gibbons' crib in Beverly Hills is nearly new and lacks the sort of authentic patina one pines for in a "Mediterranean" style residence, it is surrounded by scads of Hollywood historic mansions and estates previously owned by some of early Tinseltown's greatest movers and shakers including Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, Loretta Young, Harold Lloyd and Jack Warner. Nestled right in amongst the stars, the former house of often outrageously chapeau-ed ur-gossip Hedda Hopper.
Previous to buying in Bev Hills in 2010, Miz Gibbons and her third hubby, architect/actor/artist/Parabounce inventor Stephen Meadows, owned a West Hollywood, CA compound once owned by Mommie Dearest's Joan Crawford. The erstwhile couple parted ways in 2005 but still co-owned their once happy home in West Hollywood in December 2006 when it was on the market with an asking price of $7,995,000. They had a devil of a time selling the historic spread but finally unloaded their white elephant in June 2010 for $4,795,000 to–according to a Little Birdie we know–Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and his accomplished and much-published architect wife Linda Brettler.
listing photos: Keller Williams Realty / Beverly Hills
