BUYER: Chris ColferLOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $860,000
SIZE: 2,462 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Even though Glee-mania continues to sweep the globe, it is Your Mama's humble and meaningless opinion the super-gay show has done jumped the proverbial showbiz shark, a victim, perhaps, of its instant mega-success. Since we think the boo-toob super-hit already passed its prime we find it a complete waste of time to shed any tears for actor Chris Colfer who portrayed the fey and steely-spined teen homosexual Kurt Hummel for the first three seasons but will not, reportedly, be back for a fourth.
Sassy Mister Colfer will inevitably move on to bigger and better things. As per both The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial and our impossibly well-informed confrère Lucy Spillerguts–he will also soon move into a new house that hovers over the rugged Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, CA.
Property records show that Mister Colfer, through a trust, paid $860,000 for an ass-uglee residence perched on the last hairpin curve of a secluded cul-de-sac high above Laurel Canyon. A deeper dive into the property records reveals that Mister Colfer bought the blue beast out of foreclosure. Some of the resident Real Estate Chicken Littles around here will surly go giddy when they learn the non-celeb sellers of Mister Colfer's new crib purchased the property in early 2007 ago for a substantially higher $1,232,000 and lost the house, according to the docs we peeped, into the snapping claws of foreclosure in September 2010.
Listing information for the 1963 mansard-roofed hot mess shows it measures 2,462 square feet. Listing information for the property gets a mite confusing when it comes to the bedroom and pooper count: In one area of the listing 2 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms are indicated, in another it reads "3 Bedrooms, 3.5 Bathrooms," and in a third section the bathroom count gets broken down into 1 full, 1 three-quarter and 2 half bathrooms. The Los Angeles County Tax Man, for what it's worth, shows there are 2 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. Make of all that nonsense what you will.
The three-story hillside house, called a "contemporary" in the listing, sits hard up on street with a front facing two-car attached garage with convenient direct entry and indoor laundry facility. We anticipate a couple or few of the children will whine and stamp their real estate feet with righteous indignation about how they would never, in a million damn years, pay nearly a million clams for an architecturally rude-looking residence that sits so close to the street that someone could walk by and easily reach right in an open window and snatch a bottle of booze or pack of menthols off the table. Spare us the jibber-jabber. The geographic reality of building in the steep ravines and perilous canyons in Los Angeles often means that a house must sit very close to the access road. Don't like it? Buy a ranch house in Sherman Oaks with a wide front lawn, broad back yard and no canyon view. Real estate is a trade off, kids, and just because you wouldn't swap a deep front lawn for a canyon view doesn't mean that it's foolish for someone to do so, okaaaay? Our bigger concern here is not the lack of front yard–Your Mama lives in the Hollywood Hills and has but a sliver of a front yard–it's the dearth of architectural or aesthetic fabulosity. More on that later.
A tightly curved stair case with brushed stainless steel (or perhaps its aluminum or some other material) banister doubles back around itself and connects the three levels of the house. The open-plan lower level main living space encompasses a living/dining/kitchen area with blond wood floors, fireplace with slate surround, built-in banquette sofa, and sliding glass doors that lead out to one of the two decks that run along the back of the lower two levels and cantilever over the canyon.
The kitchen, which looks like it was fairly recently punished with an upsetting remodel, has average-grade stainless steel appliances, some sort of solid-surface or granite counter tops, a separate wet bar with sink and wine fridge, and an L-shaped center island with a breakfast bar fashioned from an perplexing panel of curving green glass that looks like it was ripped right out of the 1980s.
However many bedrooms there may be, two or three, Mister Colfer's new grand master suite features a private pooper, walk-in closet and an unobstructed view over the jagged canyon.
Aerial images of the house show the rooftop covered in solar panels but listing information doesn't mention anything about solar panels, not that we noticed anyway.
At the time Mister Colfer scooped the place up, the exterior was painted a gawdawful blue color that resembles tur-qwahze. Now children, Your Mama loves us some turquoise–and tur-qwahze–but it is not, generally speaking, an appropriate color for a 21st-century house. It just isn't.
Your Mama can only hope Mister Colfer has already had the good gay decorative sense to consult a color queen, a nice, gay decorator and/or a smart architect to come up with a more acceptable solution to the jaw-droppingly horrific exterior of the house. We also hope with all our might that Mister Colfer hires a brawny contractor to remove that silly half-assed mansard roof hoozy-goozy that makes our flesh pimple with architectural discordance.
Before y'all get your architectural panties in snit and start to yammer about how this house is beyond saving and should be torn down, we ask that you keep in mind it is not a realistic or practical solution to tear down all the ugly houses. It just isn't. To make that case is just wasted words and aesthetic pie in the sky. Sometimes and for a myriad of reason, like it or not, you just have to work with what's there and–to put it another way–put some goddam lipstick and lashes on the pig.
With that in mind Your Mama took the liberty to whip together a rough mock up of a possible solution to the troubling existing exterior of Mister Colfer's Laurel Canyon cauchemar. Rather than tart the house up with traditional details–a device that almost always ends up looking cheap and depressingly faux–we opted to strip the structure down to its core and just let it be what it is: a boxy contemporary slammed right up on to the roadside.In our "after" version (shown above on the right) we painted the exterior white so it glistens in the scorching southern California sunshine, added new front and garage doors, ran a privacy fence along the property line at the front of the house that provides an illusion of privacy at the street level, and we consolidated that unholy trio of mis-matched windows on the second floor into one large opening partially shielded by vertical privacy slats.
Now, of course, kittens, this is just one quick and dirty solution to the front façade by a boorish blogger. Certainly a smart architect or crafty landscape designer could come up with something far superior than our paltry five-minute effort.
Any of y'all want to give it a go?
listing photos (top): Coldwell Banker
photo for re-do (bottom): Google Maps
