Rumor has it that Beverly Hills restaurateurs Kenneth Todd and Lisa Vanderpump have sold their massive mansion in the high-priced, guard-gated Los Angeles, CA enclave known as Beverly Park. The titanic and lavishly decorated residence has been featured in all its glitzy ogle worthiness on the first two seasons The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the reality program on which Miz Vanderpump works her stuff.Property records we peeped confirm the Vanderpump Todds did indeed sell their humongous Richard Landry-designed French chateau-style pile in early September (2011) but do not reveal the sale price reported by Radar Online to be $19,000,000. The buyer has yet to be identified and Your Mama has yet to get it figured out.
If the reported sale price is correct–and given that the reporters at Radar spoke directly too Miz Vanderpump, it's probably safe to assume it's very close to if not entirely accurate–then the luxe-living reality tee-vee stars accepted far less than the $29,000,000 asking price. Either the Vanderpump Todds had ants in their real estate pants and wanted out of Beverly Park a.s.a.p. or their opulent abode was priced almost ludicrously higher than the market will currently bear for a fancy mansion in Beverly Park.
Property records reveal Mister Tood and Miz Vanderpump Todd paid $14,000,000 for the hoity-toity house in September 2004. They bought the 2-plus acre estate from art world empress Rosette Delug who happens to be the same well-to-do woman who sold a Hal-Leavitt-designed mansion in Beverly Hills to Jennifer Aniston in 2007 for $13,500,000 that the sitcom/romcom queen in turn renovated and recently unloaded for a teeth chattering $35,000,000.
Anyhoo, Miz Vanderpump told Radar that with her adult children moved out of the house "'it's just too big for Ken and me."' Listing information shows the Beverly Park mansion was built in 1996, measures 15,560 square feet and includes a total of 7 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. The Los Angeles Tax Man shows the house is a hair smaller at 15,480 square feet with 8 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms. We don't know why the discrepancies. Either way the house is huge if not exactly epic in scale.
The voluminous entry with curved staircase leads to lavish formal entertaining rooms all done up in a very romantic palette of white, pink, silver and mirror. Less formal spaces include his and her offices, an all-black and very moody mens clubby den/game room, a chef-friendly kitchen, and a wine cellar with dining area.
The grounds, ringed by a very tall precision-clipped hedge, include front and rear motor courts, shaded verandas, planted balconies, parterre gardens dotted with topiary, bright green swathes of lawn criss-crossed by walkways, meandering pathways, a gazebo, numerous fountains and statues, a tennis court and over-sized swimming pool and spa.
The Vanderpump Todd mansion was listed by Beverly Park pooh-bah Mauricio Umansky who just split from Hilton & Hyland to form The Agency with a couple other high-profile real estate agents in Los Angeles who do mad business with famous folks, entertainment industry bigwigs, foreign potentates and international big business barons.
In addition to their new house in Beverly Hills–about which we have no specific intel–the couple also lease a house about 90 miles north in the tony seaside community of Montecito, CA where some of the other high profile property owners include dingbat actress/Hollywood heavyweight Drew Barrymore, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, climate change crusader Al Gore, and former CEO and current executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt who bought his spectacular George Washington Smith designed estate from Sapphic showbizzers Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi.
Miz Vanderpump–who Camille Grammer so perfectly called Lisa Vanderfancy on the last episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–went on to say that she and her mister have already selected a new home in Beverly Hills. At 10,000 square feet the new crib is considerably smaller that the old one but is–let's get real people–still enormous by the sizing standards of an average American home. There is down sizing and then there is down sizing, right? Anyways, the Vanderpump Todds paid, according to one of Radar's snitchy sources, around $12,000,000 for the new house.
Your Mama has no specific intel on the new house at this point, so don't bother asking. We'd tell you if we knew. Maybe Miz Vanderpump with pick up her bejeweled mobile phone and give us a ringy dingy on our bespangled and bedraggled princess phone to give us the scoop on the what's what with her now house? Stranger things have happened, perhaps, but we're not going to hold our breath.
Listing photos: Hilton and Hyland / The Agency
