LOCATION: Thousand Oaks, CA
PRICE: $8,500,000 (listing price)
SIZE: 8,456 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Hold on to your britches, y'all, because Your Mama has recently and repeatedly had scuttlebutt slip down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine that still-conserved international pop star and twang-talking X Factor judge Britney Spears has done bought herself a new mansion. And it's not, not surprisingly, that bluff-top, ocean-view spread in Malibu (CA) those wily X Factor people tried to pass off as her house last week when small groups of the show's hopeful contestants were invited to belt their wannabe pop star hearts out at one of the four judge's homes.
Property records don't yet reflect a transfer of ownership—which makes this all just a juicy little tidbit of celebrity real estate rumor and gossip for now—but all signs and several unsolicited sources point Your Mama towards Miz Spears purchasing a sprawling, Hacienda-style casa in sleepy and upscale Thousand Oaks, CA that was last listed on the open market in April (2012) with an asking price of $8,500,000.
Listing information we managed to brutishly inveigle out of the internets shows the multi-winged, single-story red tile-roofed residence in question, located behind the 24-hour guarded gates of the prosperously peopled Sherwood Country Club, was completed in 2010 and measures 8,456 square feet with five bedrooms and 7 bathrooms.
The unfortunately tennis-court-free mini-estate comprises two separate and slightly elevated parcels that total more than 1.4 mostly flat acres and allow for long, unobstructed views over the mansion-dotted hills and painstakingly manicured Jack Nicklaus-designed 18-hole golf course that weaves and winds its way through the super-swank ex-urban development like the tentacles of an unnaturally green octopus.
An arched, wood front door set deeply into an also-arched portico opens into a tremendous center hall entry that will certainly impress guests and the pizza delivery person too with its soaring ceiling, sumptuous limestone tile flooring and high-arched window that mirrors the arched front door and perfectly frames a distant, craggy outline of the surrounding mountains against the almost always clear blue southern California sky.
An architecturally thrilling and vaguely ecclesiastical parabolic colonnade runs alongside the airy formal dining room that's expensively outfitted in with wide plank oak floor and a high wood-beamed ceiling. An adjoining semi-circular wet bar with enough seating for at least six bleary-eyed booze hounds to sidle up to the thick slab marble counter top—or maybe it's granite—and get a good, glassy-eyed look into the also semi-circular, glass-fronted and temperature-controlled walk-in wine room.
The luscious custom oak floors extend into the immense, L-shaped open-plan family living space that includes a double-island chef-friendly kitchen with gray-veined white marble counter tops, top grade appliances and adjacent butler's pantry that we imagine is probably far larger and better equipped than most kitchens. A dizzying but sturdily impressive system of exposed beams and trusses stretch across the almost ludicrously lofty great room that's decoratively divided into a large breakfast area and even roomier family room space with fireplace and giant glass pocket-doors that glide open and disappear into the walls, allowing for an all-but-seamless merging between indoor and outdoor living areas.
Other public and semi-private rooms, according to online listings we dug up, include a library—that Your Mama is cynical enough to think will always suffer from a dearth of actual books, a pair of separate offices and a home theater/bonus room.
Listing information isn't specific as to whether each of the guest/family/domestic bedrooms have access to a private john or not but does state the spacious master suite is complete with two massive walk-in closets and a pair of bathrooms, one for the lady of the house and one for her live-in manager/mister/co-conservator.
The vast limestone tiled outdoor living spaces encompass a lounge area with fireplace, separate dining area and, in between, a semi-circular built-in barbecue center. The deep, covered verandas that extend off the back of the house give way to a (mostly) flat and fully-landscaped backyard with liberally watered and perfectly clipped lawns, rose gardens and ample sunbathing terraces on the long sides of the infinity-edged swimming pool and spa. Listing information goes on to declare the house has a five car garage plus a separate bay for golf cart storage accessible through a porte-cochère that connects the driveway at the front of the house through to an nearly enclosed rear motor court.
Miz Spears has a long, long, loooong history of house hopping—see next paragraph—and it remains to be seen how long she'll stay put in the Thousand Oaks mansion she's (allegedly) just acquired. Given that she's now living a much more stable—if still conserved—life with Mister Trawick, Your Mama hopes—selfishly, for our own sanity, natch—this is the last move for the (in)famously peripatetic Miz Spears for a very long time.
Shortly after she dumped Kevin Federwhatever, her free-loading second husband and father of her two children, Miz Spears fled the couple's marital mansion in the guard-garted Serra Retreat in Malibu (CA) and bounced around to several high end rentals in The Bu including—so the celebrity property gossip goes—a land-side cottage situated behind the illustrious gates of Malibu's Colony that Shabby Chic high priestess Rachel Ashwell sold to sitcom star Peri Gilpin in the summer of 2010 for $3,550,000.
In January 2007, well into the all-to-public unraveling during which she fraternized with some pretty unsavory sorts, repeatedly flashed her pudenda for the paps, shaved her hair off in a random beauty parlor in the San Fernando Valley and wound up being involuntarily committed the mental ward and Cedar Sinai, Miz Spears impulsively shelled out $6,750,000 for a fully-furnished 7,400+ square foot mock-Tuscan-style mansion in the guard-gated Summit community just off Mulholland Drive on the ridge between Beverly Hills and Studio City.
Sometime in late 2008 or early 2009, on the mental mend and beyond ready to leave the house in the Summit where she lived during much of her jaw-dropping and—let's be honest—downright sad downward spiral, Miss Spears decamped to the so-called Chateau Suenos, an approximately 10,000 square foot Macmansion in The Estates section of The Oaks community in Calabasas, the same neck of L.A.'s proto-suburban woods where the slickly produced tweenage heart throb bubble gum pop star Justin Beiber now lives in an almost-as-large Spanish-style mansion he bought in April 2012 for six-and-a-half million smackers.
In early 2011 by then romantically attached to her current fiancé, Tinseltown bigwig talent agent Jason Trawick, Miz Spears and clan high-tailed it to the guard-gated, celebrity-choked and equestrian-oriented Hidden Hills enclave where she rented a ginormous, 19,107 square foot multi-winged pseudo-Tudor mansion/compound with a total of 10 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms on 3.39 landscaped acres.
Hidden Hills is, of course, the same community where Jennifer Lopez owns a home as do Melissa Etheridge, Nicolette Sheridan and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne who have become so desperate to unload their Hidden Hills house they put it out for lease earlier this year at fifty grand a month and moved it to a plush, rented hacienda-style casa located on a wide, tree-lined street in the flats of Beverly Hills.
Apparently Miz Spears didn't cotton much to the Tudor-style pile in horsey Hidden Hills because by the end of 2011 she'd once again packed up her two tots and collection of Daisy Dukes and settled into yet another rented mansion, this time a 10,567 square foot architectural ugly duckling inside the 24-hour guarded gates of the hoity-toity Sherwood Country Club where initiation fee were reported last year by the folks at The Hollywood Reporter to be around $160,000 and some of the deep pocked members are said to include Mel Gibson, Will Smith, Kevin James and Justin Timberlake.
Located far far far from the maddening crowds and ever-present paps in Tinseltown, the Sherwood Country Club is none-the-less a coveted location with all sorts of celebs and other high-profile peeps looking for a luxurious suburban country club sort of lifestyle. Disgraced former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo recently sold a red brick Georgian-Colonial mini-manse that backs up to the community's 2nd fairway and Hollywood scion turned reality t.v. star turned baby factory Tori Spelling and her actor husband Dean McDermott leased a 2.45 acre estate with an approximately 9,000 square foot main house inside the Sherwood Country Club gates in April (2012). To be honest, chickens, we're not sure if they remain in residence.
Avid celebrity real estate watchers will recall the verdant and affluent Sherwood Country Club is the same golf-centric community where financially-embattled former professional baseball player Lenny Dykstra lost the 6.6+ acre estate and neo-Georgian mansion he bought from former professional puck pusher Wayne Gretzky to the salivating maw of foreclosure in the fall of 2010 and it's also the same gated enclave where tennis titan Pete Sampras custom built a hulking, 13,000-ish square foot contemporary with a separate 1,200 square foot guest house and 2,000 square foot fitness facility and, even before the paint was dry, caught a classic case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped it on the market in March 2010 with a $25,000,000 price tag. The sprawling Sampras estate, pretty much right next door the Brit and Jase's new digs, is still for sale with a reduced asking price of $19,950,000.
listing photos: Re/Max Olson via Zillow
