OWNER: Warren Beatty and Annette Bening
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $27,500 per month
SIZE: 10,594 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTE: It appears that long-married Hollywood honchos Warren Beatty and Annette Bening may have, at long last, moved back to the Beverly Hills (Post Office), CA estate they moved from after the 1994 Northridge earthquake rendered their 9,401 square foot mansion uninhabitable. In 1996, with their third bun in Miz Bening's oven, they moved about two miles west to a privately situated Mediterranean-style mansion where they lived for 10 or 15 years but recently made available for lease at $27,500 per month.
During the late sixties and throughout the 1970s Mister Beatty was at the electric apex of his movie stardom with Oscar nominated roles in Bonnie and Clyde (1968), Shampoo (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1979). It was during this time the devastatingly handsome Mister Beatty solidified his place among the pantheon of legendary Hollywood actors and notorious Tinseltown cocksman.
It was also then, in 1972, that an unmarried Mister Beatty dropped $193,000 on a 3.4 acre celebrity-style estate set above Mulholland Drive with views that stretch–on a clear day–downtown Tinseltown to the Pacific Ocean. A house existed on the property at the time he bought it but at some point Mister Beatty replaced the original residence from 1938 with what has been described at a "white glass house.
By the time the 1994 Northridge quake rocked and knocked Los Angeles to its knees the longtime Lothario, then in mid-fifties, had a few years earlier made an honest woman of Annette Bening, an Oscar nominated actress (The Grifters, 1991) who would go on to earn three more Oscar nominations (American Beauty in 1999, Being Julia in 2005 and The Kids Are All Right in 2011) and bear Mister Beatty a total four children.
We're not sure where the Beatty-Benings moved immediately after their Mulholland Drive mansion met it's quaking fate in 1994 but property records do show that in the months afterward they spent $510,000 to acquire an adjacent 1.107 acre parcel with an existing 1,798 square foot house. Maybe they shacked up there, maybe they didn't, we don't know. In February of the following year the Beatty-Benings spent another $175,000 to purchase a second adjacent but vacant 1.205 acre parcel.
That brings us back to May 1996 when Mister Beatty and Miz Benning bought the large Mediterranean mansion now up for lease–in Real Estate Speak– at twenty-seven-five per month. The online listing does not provide many juicy details of the house nor any photographs of the house, grounds or interior spaces.
What listing information does describe is a large, two-story Mediterranean mansion with 6 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms plus various grandly scaled rooms with high ceilings and "great flow for large scale entertaining." French doors and windows throughout the house bathe and flood the interior spaces with light. Well, okay, Your Mama don't know the light actually bathes or floods in, but listing information does state the inside of the house is "Very light."
There's a sizable motor court at the front of the house, broad tree-ringed lawns that surround it and a swimming pool and spa. Unlike their old (and now new again) estate less than two miles away, this property does not sport a tennis court.
photo: Google
In April 2004, long after they'd done decamped to the Mediterranean manse they now have up for lease, the Beatty-Benings unexpectedly expanded their former Mulholland Drive compound. Records show they couple paid $2,200,000 for an adjacent, exactly one acre mini-estate that then had and still appears to have a 3,104 square foot house with its own long, gated driveway, detached two-car garage, San Fernando Valley views, and a swimming pool and spa.
Since 2004 there has been some parcel merging going on at the Mulholland Drive compound, which is way too banal to parse here. Suffice that Mister Beatty and Miz Bening's old but newly improved Mulholland Drive compound encompasses 6.712 ridge line acres and contains a total of three separate residences including a newly built, V-shaped Mediterranean-style mansion of unknown proportions, swimming pool and tennis court.
For all we know the Beatty-Benings have been living up in their new house on their old property above Mulholland Drive for a long time. Whatever the case, we'd like to offer them a housewarming gift and we promise it won't be a weirdly ironic collection of endangered species erasers or an even more deeply disturbing door draft stopper in the shape of Santa Claus doing the splits.
