...from a snitchy informant on the Tinseltown celebrity real estate scene–let's call her Ivana Blowarealestatewhistle–who rang Your Mama's bell this weekend to gossip about soon-to-be divorced sit-com queen Courtney Cox (Cougar Town, Friends) and her estranged actor husband David Arquette (Scream, Pushing Daisies, Never Been Kissed)who–according to Ivana–are about to put their Beverly Hills, CA crib on the market with a price tag somewhere around $20,000,000.They paid, as per property records, $5,450,000 for for the house in June 2004.
We're not sure exactly how large or how many bedrooms the house currently has but the Los Angeles County Tax Man shows the Cox-Arquette crib measures 4,994 square feet and includes 3 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms. What we are sure of is that the sleek single-story house, supremely sited on a near one-acre mostly flat promontory in the lower Trousdale Estates neck of Bev Hills, was originally designed by A. Quincy Jones in the late 1950s and that the style-minded couple subsequently had the house worked over by Cory Buckner, a Los Angeles-based architect who, literally, wrote the book on A. Quincy Jones.
Miz Cox is well known amongst celebrity property watchers for her intense interest and investment in notable SoCal architecture. In early 2007 the savvy aesthete coughed up a total of $17,150,000 for a two-parcel bluff-top compound in Malibu, CA. She spent the next couple of years and God only knows how much money to have the tightly knit collection of fairly ordinary mid-century ranch style structures transformed into somber-paletted, airy machines for modern living by L.A. architect Michael Kovac. The low-key but high-brow day-core was handled by Miz Cox's friend, the much in-demand decorator Trip Haenisch whose long list of celeb clients include Christina Aguilera, Hank Azaria, Cheryl Tiegs, Edward Norton and William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman. She had the house photographed for Elle Decor recently and, hunnies, it's out and out gorgeous.
Just after she and her soon-to-be ex-hubby bought her current 2-ish acre spread in Malibu they sold their previous house in the Bu, a courageous curvilinear beach front extravaganza originally designed by John Lautner. They sold the house for a stone-cold $27,500,000 to high hoggers Frank and Jamie McCourt, the controversial owners of the Dodgers whose recent split and subsequent divorce proceeding have mesmerized Angelenos due to its feverish vitriol and astronomical settlement numbers that include more than $600,000 per month in spousal support and housing expenses for ex-Missus McCourt. No, puppies, Your Mama did not drunkenly add an extra zero to that number. Ex-Missus McCourt reportedly gets nearly a quarter million in spousal support each month and another four hundred grand or so to pay the super-sized mortgages on seven luxury properties. But we digress...
Your Mama doesn't know if Miz Cox and/or Mister Arquette own any additional properties outside of Los Angeles. We don't find any evidence they do but that does not mean a damn thing. What we do find evidence of, buried deep in the somewhat confusing property records, is that in December 2008 they paid an unknown amount of money for a property immediately adjacent to their house in Beverly Hills. We don't have any idea why Miz Cox and Mister Arquette bought the property or what plans they have for it now that they will soon be divorced.
photo (top): Pacific Coast News
photo (bottom): Cory Buckner Architects
