Mish Mash Tuesday

Back in April of 2007 super-producer Jerry Weintraub (Nashville, Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, Karate Kid I, Karate Kid II) put his 6.63 acre ocean front estate in Malibu, CA on the market with an astronomical and truly breathtaking asking price of $75,000,000.

The gated and secured property includes an 11,810 square foot main house with 7 bedrooms and 11 poopers plus two separate guest houses, fitness facility, two barns, stables, a north/south-aligned tennis court, swimming pool and spa and a private road down the bluff to the beach.

With no takers the property was taken off the market and guess what kiddos, it's back on the market with a drastically and radically reduced asking price of $42,500,000. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's a stunning and staggering 43% discount from the original asking price.

Whether a 43% discount is enough to scare up a big-bucks buyer remains to be seen but whatever someone pays it'll be a colossal windfall for Mister Weintraub who paid a mere $1,300,500 for the multi-parcel property back in the late 1970s and 80s.

photo: Coldwell Banker Malibu West

Actor John Krasinski (The Office) spent $921,500 in March of 2005 for a 1,279 square foot house in the Norma Triangle are of West Hollywood, CA. A few months later he flipped the 3 bedroom and 3 pooper residence back on the market where it languished for nearly 6 months before being de-listed. In September of 2009, Mister Krasinski re-listed the walled and gated Country English cottage with an asking price of $1,245,000. But Mister Krasinski–bless his fickle real estate heart–had the property de-listed again just two and a half months later.

This week unlucky in real estate Mister Krasinski hoisted the little house back on the market with a much lower asking price of $945,000, a number that just might get the deal done.

In the summer of 2009 Mister Krasinski and his then girlfriend now wife paid $1,857,000 for a privately situated house above the Sunset Strip. Back in early March of 2010 Your Mama heard through the Tinseltown celebrity real estate grapevine that he had that property quietly back on the market with an asking price of $2,195,000. Iffin we're being honest we'd confess that we don't really know if Mister and Missus Krasinski still have the house (quietly) up for sale but property records do reveal that the house is still owned by the cute couple.

photo: Westside Estate Agency (via Realtor.com)

Hot-headed Oscar-winning actor Aussie actor Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind) and his wife Danielle Spencer have been on the hunt for a new family spread in the swank suburbs of Sydney (Australia) for quite some time. Way back in 2007 they (reportedly) had a looks see at Altona, a lavish waterfront manse in Point Piper then listed with a spine-tingling asking price of $50,000,000 (AUS).

In 2009 they (reportedly) make an offer on the former French consulate called Le Manoir but they were edged out by international media heir Lachlan Murdoch–that would be Rupert's son–and his wife Sarah who paid a neck snapping $23,000,000 for the property.

They next, in late December 2010, (allegedly) took a shine to the huge and hulking Headingly House, the family seat of former ambassador to France John Spender and his ex-ladee-mate, Italian born Australian fashion designer Carla Zampatti. There were multiple reports that Mister and Missus Crowe were thisclose to closing on the posh property but, alas, that purchase never came to fruition.

Now all the Australian tabs and news outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald are reporting the Mister and Missus Crowe finally settled on and purchased an estate with the unfortunate name of Te Puke (pronounced teh-pook-eh", a 1909 mansion with a 1927 Arts and Crafts style second floor in ritzy Rose Bay for which they paid ten million Australian buckaroos, an amount that Your Mama's currency conversion contraption shows converts to just about ten million American dollars. The house overlooks the fairways of the Royal Sydney Golf Club and is reported to have six bedrooms.

As far as we know Mister and Missus Crowe still own a $14,000,000 penthouse pad at Woolloomooloo's Finger Wharf in Sydney and an 800-ish acre rural spread in Nana Glen–about 350 miles north of Sydney–where the couple got hitched in a chapel he had built on the grounds.

photo: The Sydney Morning Herald

Neil Patrick Harris Lists In Studio City

SELLER: Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka
LOCATION: Studio City, CA
PRICE: $1,599,000
SIZE: 2,408 square feet, 3 bedrooms 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Now that actor/singer/presenter Neil Patrick Harris and his singing and dancing man-mate David Burtka have settled with their twin babies into their new (and newly remodeled) 2.1 million dollar digs in Encino, CA they've hoisted their previous L.A. residence in the hills of Studio City, CA on the market with an asking price of $1,599,000.

We've discussed Mister Harris ad nauseum on several occasions so we'll suffice to sum up his professional life succinctly and incompletely by saying only that he's successfully steered his child super-stardom as a geeky teenage doctor prodigy (Doogie Howser, M.D.) into an enviably successful and adult career on television (How I Met My Mother), Broadway (Cabaret, Assassins) and the silver screen (the Harold and Kumar Go to... film franchise).

Property records show that the out, proud and a-list homosexual–presumably with some sort of input from Miss Burtka–purchased the modestly scaled 1950s shingled ranch-style residence in Studio City in the spring of 2007 for $1,500,000. Although the house remains largely as it was when purchased Misters Harris and Burtka did have some work done on the landscaping, the hardscaping and the kitchen, which was completely remodeled and now looks suspiciously like the over-processed custom kitchens of about a bazillion mcmansions in a gajillion upscale gated tract developments. It even has a massive Medieval-looking pot rack that looks to Your Mama like it's aching to brain some naughty chef.

What was not changed, apparently, is one of the guest bathrooms done up in high-glitz and garish with mirrored walls, ceiling and vanity, rust colored marble floors and counter tops, peach colored sheers over the window and–the real cherry on the decorative cake–a twinkling chandelier. It's just awful and beyond gaudy but it's also, because it is so bodly tacky, magnificent from an anthropological point of view. At first we couldn't figure out why a couple of youngish gays would keep such a tragedy and then we kept looking at the listing photo of the bathroom and it slowly dawned on us that we too would keep it intact. We'd just leave the door open and rope it off and let guest peer in like it was the decorative arts wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anyhoo, the according to listing information the 2,408 square foot house sits up a gated drive and has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, pitched and beamed ceilings, dark-stained hardwood floors with a red over-note, multi-paned windows and French doors and a couple of fireplaces.

A slim corridor runs along the rear of the house where there is a built in barbecue center that opens out to a lovely oval swimming pool and raised spa, both surrounded by an expansive brick terrace. A pergola-shaded dining terrace has sparkly and long if not exactly jet liner views of the San Fernando Valley.

Now then, it's back to Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's scheduled vacation...

listing photos: Engel Multimedia for Prudential California Realty

Larry Ellison Beefs Up Property Portfolio

BUYER: Larry Ellison
LOCATION: Rancho Mirage, CA
PRICE: $42,900,000
SIZE: 18,430 square feet

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen children, Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter are, technically, on a bit of a vacay out in the California desert where we spent the better part of the last several days watching tennis match after tennis match after tennis match down in Indian Wells, CA from the comfort of the the triple-wide BNP Paribas box and ate about 12 pounds of freshly prepared sushi served with smile by the lovely Monica.

The BNP Paribas Open, for non-tennis fans, is partially owned by tech tycoon and multi-billionaire businessman Larry Ellison who sat court side for the finals yesterday in a red baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a gray t-shirt that displayed his surprisingly beefy and tanned biceps to lovely effect. Seeing Mister Ellison there with is pin-thin and much younger broo-net female companion reminded us that the hardware and software tycoon recently added another trophy property to a real estate portfolio that already jam-packed with exceedingly lavish and luxurious private residences.

Mister Ellison, a man with a net worth in the neighborhood of forty billion bucks, is nothing if not a real estate baller of epic proportions. His primary home, a sprawling 20-plus acre Japanese-themed compound built around of lake-sized koi pond in Woodside, CA, is widely rumored and oft reported to have cost the big spender upwards of $200,000,000 to build and landscape.

In the early summer of 2010 Mister Ellison dropped a comparatively paltry $10,500,000 to acquire Beechwood, a palatial Italianate pile with 39 rooms on the historic and ridiculously swank Bellevue Avenue in the Gilded Age resort community of Newport, RI. The 15-bedroom mansion, erected in 1851, measures around 19,000 square feet and includes 15 bedrooms and numerous baronial formal entertaining spaces such as a massive mirrored waterfront ballroom designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt and added to the already hulking house in 1881 by Mister and Missus William Backhouse Astor Jr. who used the gigantic house to help solidify their position in the upper echelons of American blue-blood high-society to which they were so desperate to belong.

Along with media-mogul Gerald "Jerry" Perenchio, Mister Ellison is one of the largest landowners in Malibu, CA where he owns a reported $180,000,000 (or more) worth of (mostly residential) real estate including but far from limited to a Mediterranean mansion in the gated Serra Retreat where other celeb property owners include Kelsy Grammer and James Cameron. Mister Ellison also owns five contiguous lots on Carbon Beach, arguably the best stretch of sand in the Bu, that he reportedly bought in rapid succession in 2003 for around $65,000,000.

In early 2008 he forked over $12,600,000 to buy his 20-something year old a-list bi-sexual daughter Megan a super-modern mansion in the famed Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip. A year later young Miss Ellison–who produced the 10-time Oscar nominated film True Grit–decided she needed more space–or something like that–and acquired the Steve Hermann-designed house immediately next door purchased, according to property records, for $6,250,000 from media mogul Byron Allen.

Property mad Mister Ellison's most recent residential real estate acquisition brings us back around the the desert where we Your Mama, the Dr. Cooter and our two long-bodied bitches Linda and Beverly are currently holed up in an otherwise lovely mid-century modern house but for–much to our chagrin and we regret to inform–the rather disturbing amount of track lighting throughout the entire house.

Now chickadoodles, we know we're not breaking any real estate news here today but we thought it might be fun none-the-less to have another look-see at Mister Ellison's new desert hideaway, the 249-acre Rancho Mirage, CA estate known at Porcupine Creek.

The property was built and previously owned by Tim Blixseth and his and Edra Blixseth, phat livin' and hard partying former real estate billionaires who at one time owned a 150-foot yacht called the Toothfairy complete with nouveau riche necessities such as a grand piano, an elevator and a glass-bottomed hot tub. Mister and Missus Blixseth got themselves into some seriously hot water in the mid-naughts over alleged financial malfeasance regarding the financing of the Yellowstone Club, an ultra-exclusive private resort in Big Sky, MT. In a tale too long and complicated for Your Mama to tell here, the Blixseths had a messy messy messy dee-vorce and, ultimately, they lost all their money.

Anyhoo, in 2008 the dee-vorcing Blixseth's put their Rancho Mirage estate on the market with a rather insane an asking price of $75,000,000. With just an itty-bitty pool of potential buyers who might be willing to spend that kind of money for an insanely high-maintenance property with a private 19-hole golf house the resort-style estate went unsold. The price was later lowered to a still sky-high $55,000,000.

In 2009 our man Larry Ellison bought a 50% state in the BNP Paribas Open. Now in need of a place to shack up when in town for the tennis tournament, Mister Ellison went house hunting and eventually settled on the Blixseth's Porcupine Creek, which had by then been snatched by the bank due to foreclosure. By all accounts Mister Ellison dropped $42,900,000 for his new oasis in the desert that includes a palm tree-lined driveway that winds through meticulously landscaped grounds to a massive circular drive that wraps itself around an 80-foot diameter fountain that shoots water 80 feet into the air. So hugely scaled that if a person did not know better they would be forgiven for mistaking the front of the house with it's monumental fountain for a resort hotel.
Of course Your Mama don't know a plantation shutter from a can of cat food but we have to presume that Mister Ellison already has his team of smart architects, hardworking landscape designers and nice gay decorators busting their hiney's transforming the Blixseth's dream house into whatever it is that he imagines it ought to look like. And that's probably a good thing because the Blixseth's day-core was so garishly grandiloquent ridiculously recherche that Your Mama had to get a nerve pill down in us just to peruse the photos that accompanied the listing.

If the fountain weren't histrionic enough, the Blixseth's taste for decorative excess that bordered on high-camp put the pedal to the metal immediately inside the front door in the the foyer where a sheet of water spills over has a tile mosaic that depicts a golfer and a woman in period dress and umbrella standing on the estate's backyard golf course. It is such a strange and twisted visual in which to greet guests that Your Mama can't imagine how a person would even come up with such a thing as an idea and then manage to sell it to a client as an amazing idea. As if that freaky little gem were not bizarre enough, the Blixseth's had the ceiling in the "her" powder pooper off the foyer painted with a mural that depicts a handful of leering painted ladies...harlots, whores, ladies of the night. Seriously. They did.

The monstrous main house measures 18,430 square feet, according to multiple reports, and besides the over-the-top formal spaces stuffed to the gills with imported antique fireplaces, imported hand-carved coffered ceilings and over-scaled herringbone hardwood floors some of the less formal entertaining spaces include a gigantic game room with a stained-glass rotunda ceiling, Carrera marble bar and built-in banquette seating that was originally installed in a European church. The house, designed for large-scale entertaining, includes at least two full kitchens, a smaller one with a stained glass dome ceiling in the eating area and another for large-scale events that includes a walk-in fridge and a walk-in freezer.

The family's private quarters include several guest suites and a children's wing with an Alice in Wonderland-themed play room and nearby nanny quarters. Near the children's wing, according to reports, the Blixseth's installed a sunken trampoline and a full-size circus carousel, which is just plain ridiculous iffin anyone were to ask Your Mama, which of course no one did.

The mansion-sized master suite comprises the entire second floor of the shopping mall-sized mansion. Accessible by stairs or–for the lazy, boozy and/or infirm–an elevator the owners' quarters contain a vast bedroom, private balcony with spa and long views over the grounds and golf course, his and her bathrooms with walk in showers, garage-sized his and her closets, his and her offices and a coffee kitchenette for those mornings when the homeowner doesn't want to wait for the staff to schlep a continental breakfast all the way from the kitchen

Attached to but completely separate from the main house are four 600-square foot casitas and clustered together near the estate's main guard-gated entrance are four guest houses, each with a private address and mail box and each done up with a different themed day-core: Old Hollywood, Africa, Asia and Mediterranean. Don't even get Your Mama started on what we think of themed guest bedrooms because we're about ready to blow a gasket just thinking about the horrors of "themed" day-core. The 1,860 square foot guest houses each contain a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, a walk-in wine cellar, and laundry facilities, although one presumes some uniformed minimum wage employee of the estate actually does that dirty work.

Recreational amenities include a resort-style swimming pool complex with palapa that puts those of many tropical hotels to shame. There's also a full commercial-grade spa facility with check-in desk, work-out room with state-of-the- art fitness equipment, two massage treatment rooms, steam room, Vichy shower room, hot tub and a hair salon because when you are this rich you do not wash and set your own damn hair. Along with the 19-hole golf course, there is a full-scale club house with locker room, bar, lounge and pro shop.

What Mister Ellison plans to do with all that land and all that house and all those guest houses is not known but it is truly mesmerizing and dizzying to imagine the annual taxes, upkeep costs and staff wages that all combined much run well into the millions each year. However, for a man with a net worth in excess thirty billion bucks who once owned a boat longer than a football field–the Rising Sun, now owned by David Geffen–with annual maintenance and operation costs in the tens of millions, the cost of maintaining Porcupine Creek is pocket change.

photos (top): Simon Berlyn for Palm Springs Life
photos (bottom): Christie’s Great Estates via Luxist

Soap Actor Justin Torkildsen Gets a Quick Sale

SELLER: Justin Torkildsen
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,150,000
SIZE: 2,274 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: On the 10th of March (2011) actor Justin Torkildsen put his Los Angeles, CA residence in the celeb-packed Outpost Estates neighborhood on the market with an asking price of $1,150,000. Just four very short days later the updated and upgraded 1960s post and beam contemporary was in escrow and on it's way to being sold. Four days, children, four days.

Your Mama freely (and proudly) confesses that we had no idea who this Justin Torkildsen person is until we took to the internets to sort out his professional what's-what. Turns out that a teen aged Mister Torkildsen made a brief splash in the male modeling world in the mid- to late-1990s when he posed for Nautica adverts that appeared on 7-story billboards in New York City's Times Square. In 1999, at the tender and fresh-faced age of 18, Mister Torkildsen secured the role of Rick Forrester on the long-running soap story The Bold and the Beautiful, a revolving-door part that has been played over the years by no fewer than six actors. He worked alongside daytime drama stars like Tylo Hunter, Jack Wagner and Susan Flannery and in 2001 Mister Torkildsen was awarded a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actor in a Drama Series. He was nominated for the same award the following year but, alas, did not win.

Mister Torkildsen's time on The Bold and the Beautiful came to a close in 2006 and according to his anemic resume on the Internet Movie Database he's barely worked in the entertainment industry since.

Property records show that Mister Torkildsen purchased the property for $995,000 in October of 2002. This was on the heels of his Daytime Emmy award and shortly after he married a gal named Bonnie Binion, a member to the scandal-ridden Las Vegas Binons who at one time owned Binion's Horseshoe casino. We're not sure when Mister and Missus Torkildsen's mutual adoration swirled down the Tinseltown terlit of love but they were dee-vorced in 2008.

Listing information shows the 2,274 square foot mid-century modern has a total of 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, a count that includes a deluxe guest suite on the lower level with private entrance, massive brick fireplace and private pooper with steam shower.

The upper level master suite has hardwood floors, a pitched and beamed ceiling and a complete wall of jalousie windows and sliding doors. The children will forgive Your Mama for this: Despite their old-fashioned vibe, we lurv us some jalousie windows. We can't help it and we will no longer feel ashamed of that particular architectural fondness. The master bath looks well-sized for a modestly-scaled residence and includes walls of rectangular-shaped and olive-colored tiles The cabinetry–a magnificent creation in walnut–or is that teak?–that floats off the floor and has a matching walnut–or is it teak?–counter top. Normally we feel iffy about wood counter tops but in this case it's rather striking, in a good way.

Anyhoo, The main living area, wrapped in floor to ceiling sliders (and jalousies), had three distinct zones. A dining area with new-fangled picnic table style dining anchors one end of the long room and the other end functions as a casual and cozy area for things like reading, listening to music, or staring at the boob-toob. In the center a "formal" seating area is arranged around a massive freestanding brick and concrete fireplace.

The star of this show is unquestionably the spare and narrow but well-equipped u-shaped kitchen with it's custom-built walnut cabinetry that floats sexily off the hardwood floor. We're not thrilled with how blond the floor is against the walnut cabinetry but that's fixable and none-the-less we're swooning. Our adoration may or may not have something to do with the fact that Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's kitchen has flat fronted walnut cabinetry that looks very much like that in this kitchen. We might even imagine that it's possible the same architect who did hp our kitchen did over this one too. Stranger things have happened, hunnies.

The too-slim backyard has a couple of small decks that organize the functionality of the different areas and in between a ratty-tatty patch of grass and a long smooth concrete wall where a sheet of waters slips down into a long trough. What might be great back here would be a raised plunge pool for those particularly sweltering days and and spa because although we don't find it particularly relaxing to sit in a vat of boiling water and slug back white wine we recognize that many do.

Your Mama has no clue where Mister Torkildsen plans to go once he vacates the premises but it looks like he's probably going to have to high tail it to elsewhere sooner than expected because after just four short days on the market, the house was put into escrow. That means this house was on the market less than a week. This lightening quick sale will surely spike the beaten down optimism of all those home owners and property purveyors who dearly want to believe the real estate go-go days of the mid 2000s are on their way back. Maybe they are and maybe they're not. Whatever the case, Your Mama has got to get on the road–we've got tickets to the tennis tourney out in Indian Wells, CA–so we're just going to let the children claw each others' eyes out in the comments.

One. Two. Three. Go!

listing photos: Coldwell Banker Beverly Hills North