Brooke Mueller Flips Out in Tarzana

SELLER: Brooke Mueller
LOCATION: Tarzana, CA
PRICE: $3,550,000
SIZE: 9,200 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The bad news for Charlie Sheen's third ex-wife Brooke Mueller is that she's back in the tabloids and back in rehab...for the 19th time. The occasional actress and Paris Hilton pal was rushed to the hospital last week, so the stories go, due to an over-dose of Adderal, a name-brand psychostimulant most commonly prescribed to treat ADHD, with which—it seems—Miz Mueller suffers.

The good news is that notoriously erratic Miz Mueller, who grew up privileged in Palm Beach (FL), is well known amongst celebrity real estate followers for flipping high-priced properties in the Los Angeles area and has just about sold the Tarzana, CA mansion she bought less than a year ago from former Spice Girl Mel B and her movie producer hubby Stephen Belafonte (Bad Lieutenant, Thank Your For Smoking) for $3,000,000. After the addition of some glammy wall treatments, Miz Mueller flipped the property back on the market about a month ago with an asking price of $3,550,000 and two weeks later it was put into escrow with an unknown buyer for an unknown amount.

Not counting carrying costs, renovation expenditures and real estate fees, Mel B and Mister Belafonte took a $159,000 financial bath when they sold the the privately situated, .62 acre mini-estate in an affluent area of the quintessentially suburban community that they bought in September 2009 for $3,159,000.

Current listing information describes the property in all capital letters as  "STUNNING, CELEBRITY GATED COMPOUND!" with four bedrooms and six bathrooms in approximately 9,200 square feet. The scandalized Los Angeles County Assessors office puts the house at a much smaller but still substantial 6,737 square feet. Your Mama's best guess—and it 'tis just a guest, dearies—is that the additional square footage indicated on current listing information is made up for by the detached guest house/games room/state of the art movie theater.

The double front doors, tucked into a shallow porch immediately and inelegantly adjacent to the attached three car garage, open into a macmansion sized double-height foyer outfitted with a curved Scarlett O'Hara-style staircase, a jazzy Swarovski crystal chandelier and shimmering gold-toned walls. The formal living room has a floor-to-ceiling carved stone fireplace and a wide bank of French doors that swing open to a narrow covered veranda. There are milk chocolate colored hardwood floors in both the formal living and dining rooms as well as animal print area rugs.

Listen people, Your Mama can really get behind a good animal print rug. We adored the idiosyncratic animal print shenanigans installed throughout Templeton, socialite Cornelia Guest's stately estate in stiff-lipped and old money Old Westbury, NY. The wide, celery-colored corridor with the worn leopard print wall-to-wall carpeting, potted geraniums and gilt-framed paintings strikes Your Mama as the very height of East Coast blue blood decorative chic. It may not be to everyone's preference or palatte but that does not mean it's not absolutely correct.

Anyhoo, the formal dining—lined with smoked mirrored glass panels meant, we imagine, to glam glam the room up—connects directly to a blood red den/family room with another carved stone fireplace, a ho-hum suite of distressed leather club chairs and sofa and direct access to the back yard entertainment areas through a pair of French doors.

The adjoining kitchen—unquestionably large and well-equipped—is a prototypical suburban center island eat-in situation tarted up with a Swarovski crystal chandelier, high grade appliances that include a commercial-style six-burner range, slab marble counter tops and wood cabinets finished in what may be the most unnatural yellow-beige color we have ever seen.*

The main level also includes, as per listing information, a coupe of "JUNIOR SUITES," an "PHENOMENAL OFFICE," laundry facilities and a separate stairway to a spacious fitness room lined with floor to ceiling mirrors on at three walls that ensures that each and every flabby this and cellulite-d that is remarkably and painfully visible ad infinitum from every angle. No thank you.

The upstairs master suite encompasses a plum-colored bedroom the size of a ballroom with fireplace, two bay windows and a lot of open space under yet another decadent Swarovski crystal chandelier. We're not sure if Miz Mueller just never got around to furnishing the room or if she maybe she likes the open space so she can do yoga and/or turn cartwheels on the big bone-colored shag rug. The master suite also includes a roomy walk-in closet custom fitted for function over style and an all-beige tile slathered bathroom with two sinks, make up vanity, separate soaking tub and glass enclosed shower.

The fully developed and landscaped areas around the house include a party-sized motor court at the front and a meandering terrace at the back of the house with a built-in fire pit fully realized outdoor kitchen and lounge set up with snack counter and massive stacked stone fireplace. Around the side of the house, overlooked by a covered veranda on both the first and second floors, is a large rectangular swimming pool with a slightly elevated spa and tanning terrace. We love that the pool appears to be set into a the tree tops but we're not so fond of the ticky-tacky child safety fence that surrounds it. We understand their utility and all that, they're just usually so visually incongruous, intrusive and, well, ugly.

The entire property has been expensively equipped with top of the line surround sound throughout and CAT 6 high speed wiring and—natch—a state of the art security system.

We really don't know what Miz Mueller's post-rehab real estate plans are but, given that she's a bit of a house flipper, we expect she'll soon enough snap up another expensive house in the Los Angeles area that she won't live in or own very long. In May 2005 she—along with her wealthy socialite mother—paid $1,525,000 for a glassy mid-century modern up in Nichols Canyon that they turned over with a nearly $800,000 profit—not counting costs– in August 2007 for $2,317,000. Shortly thereafter, in November 2007, she paid $2,575,000 for an especially appealing 1927 Mediterranean in the Los Feliz area that she listed in June 2009 and finally sold in October 2011 for $2,900,000 to actor Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory).

*Of course, the cabinets may actually be the most gorgeous shade of yellow-beige we've ever seen and it's just a shortcoming of the photograph that makes them appear the color of dog vomit.

listing photos: Keller Williams Realty

The Proenza Schouler Boys On the Move in Manhattan

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: If you're the sort that forgoes the hyper-elitist and punishingly expensive world of high-fashion for $12 cords from Old Navy and those disturbingly ubiquitous Croc shoe-things you may not be immediately familiar with the names Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough. If you are, on the other hand, a card-carrying fashionista or even a wannabe fashionista who subscribes to Visionaire and obsessively watches fashion shows on the You Tube then you well know they're the sartorial superstars behind the artfully conceived, exuberantly-priced and sick successful Proenza Schouler label.

Mister Hernandez and McCollough, now in their early 30s, met while students at Parsons School of Design where they were nurtured by mincing Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn. Even before they finished fashion school they gained the star-making support of Vogue's all-powerful editrix Anna Wintour who championed their perfectly tailored and meticulously crafted designs. Since they joined forces in 2002 they've earned two hotly coveted CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year Awards—first in 2007 and again in 2011—and in the last few years have branched out from making perfectly calibrated skirts and dresses to eminently more lucrative lines of handbags and shoes. Your Mama expects they'll soon push some toilet water on to the market that will dump massive amounts of moolauh into their bank accounts like water over over Victoria Falls.

While they they are business and personal partners who co-own and share a late 19th-century center hall Colonial on 106 rustic acres in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts that they bought in March 2008 for $1,125,000, property records reveal these honchos of ladies habiliments have owned separate residences in lower Manhattan since at least the mid-Aughts.*

In July 2004 Mister McCollough coughed up $1,250,000 for a dynamite duplex penthouse in the West Village. A few months later, in November 2004, Mister Hernandez followed suit with the purchase of a compact suite of parlor level rooms in a 19th-century townhouse in the heart of the Chelsea that happens to be just a couple blocks from where Your Mama and The Doctor Cooter lived in un-wedded domesticity before we packed up and headed west several years ago and—even more importantly—just around the corner from the dee-voon Billy's Bakery.

Anyhoo, according to datum easily available online, on the same day in mid-October (2012 Misters Hernandez and Lazaro each put their separate apartments on the market with the same pair of Real Estates. Mister Hernandez's smaller apartment in Chelsea popped up at $985,000 but within weeks was reduced to its current $950,000 and Mister McCollough's larger duplex in the West Village was priced at $1,895,000 and is currently in contract.

We're not quite sure how much Mister Hernandez paid for his fully renovated parlor level apartment (above) but current listing information shows it has just one bedroom and one bathroom plus a den that could be converted to a second bedroom. Your Mama's rudimentary—and possibly inaccurate—calculations suggest the entire apartment comes in at less than 600 square feet.

Original wood floor run throughout the renovated and restored apartment that also has high ceilings, buff colored walls set against white trim work and moldings, historically correct six-over-six sash windows and an asymmetrically off-center red-brick fireplace in the living room that's flanked by book-filled built-in bookcases in the living room and a downright puny efficiency kitchen maximized with open shelving and an under-counter refrigerator.

The den/second bedroom opens directly to the rear-facing private terrace and the bedroom—such as it is as just seven feet wide according to the floor plan—has a generous amount of custom fitted wardrobes. The lone bathroom sits like an island in the middle of the apartment and while it does not have a window or even much room to turn around, does have an adequately sized stall shower lined with white subway tiles.

The monochromatic, earth tone-centric day-core mixes classic this and thats—i.e. the fluted column table lamp and the decadent gilt-framed mirror in the living room—with a little mid-century modernity—i.e. the probably pedigreed settee in the den—and strikes a decidedly masculine and simply tailored aspect with a perfectly distressed tufted leather club sofa and a typically toe-curlingly expensive and decoratively trendy shaggy Moroccan Beni Ouarain rug in the living room.

Mister McCollough's larger, south-facing duplex penthouse atop a fairly nondescript boutique condo building on a leafy cobblestone street in the West Village measures about 1,200 square feet, according to listing information, and looks like it might have been worked over by the same architect who did up the Chelsea apartment of Mister Hernandez.

The two-plus floor penthouse is currently set up as a spacious one bedroom with two windowless bathrooms, a small private terrace and an open-plan office space easily converted to a diminutive, closet-less second bedroom with the simple addition of one wall.

Entry is through an unexpectedly roomy foyer on the lower level. A floating staircase leads up to the main living level and an articulated freestanding partition divides the foyer from the decent-sized bedroom with its elevated wood burning fireplace set into a full wall of floor to ceiling wardrobes. There's also a wee walk-in closet and a meticulously tailored teak and tumbled Travertine tiled bathroom with open shower space, separate soaking tub and—curiously—an unholy mixture of sleek, silver toned contemporary and Old-Timey antique looking brass-colored fixtures.

Large, nearly floor to ceiling windows flood the south facing open concept living space on the upper level with natural light. The winter white walls and ceiling are counterbalanced by charcoal-colored floors of unknown material and a full wall of teak —or maybe it's ipe or mahogany or some other exotic wood we've never heard of—with an inset fireplace and wood box and a bank of built-in book shelves filled with actual books.

The galley style kitchen has streamlined cabinets painted the same snow white as the walls, matte black slab stone counter tops of unknown material, vintage (or vintage appearing) sink fixturing, full-sized high grade appliances and open shelving. A sculptural staircase set into the rear of the apartment in the office area leads up to a north-facing terrace with over the planter box views to the north.

We don't know where Misters Lazaro and Hernandez plan to decamp but we'd be shocked if they didn't—separately or together—move to more grandly proportioned quarters that befit fashion world darlings of their perpetual relevance and growing stature.

*Your Mama has absolutely no idea if Misters Hernandez and McCollough live together or apart in Manhattan, only that property records show they individually own separate apartments.

listing photos and floor plans: Corcoran

Weekend Wrap Up: Lloyd Blankfein

The economy may still be in the doldrums for most folks but the super rich are doing just fine as evidenced by Goldman Sach CEO Lloyd Blankfein's recent acquisition of a seven bedroom residence in the Hamptons that was last listed with an scorching asking price of $32,500,000.

The 100-ish year old cedar-shingled Colonial sits on nearly eight land-locked and entirely landscaped acres in low-key but hideously expensive Bridgehampton and includes, according to various online listings—seven bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, formal living and dining rooms, a super-sized country kitchen, sun room and a lodge-like family/game room on the second floor.

The expansive, fully-hedged grounds include meandering driveway, a heated swimming pool simply and elegantly sunk in the grass in the shade of a mature tree, full-sized tennis court, vast lawns and several clumps of sculpted formal gardens.

Mister and Missus Blankfein still own the seven bedroom and 6.5 bathroom house in Sagaponack that they unsuccessfully attempted to sell way back in spring 2007 for $13,995,000 and they also continue to maintain a residence in Manhattan where in 2007 they dropped $26,474,500 of his considerable bacon to purchase a 6,136 square foot duplex penthouse at the bi-towered 15 Central Park West building.

listing photos: Zillow

Weekend Wrap Up: Jessica Simpson

Even though she has a perfectly lovely Tinseltown pedigreed 5 bedroom and 6 bathroom house in Beverly Hills, singer tuned apparel mogul/preggers again new momma Jessica Simpson and her former professional pigskinner husband Eric Johnson are toying with the idea a new house. According to the gossip juggernaut X17, the rapidly procreating pair recently peeped at least one posh property in upscale and family-friendly Pacific Palisades, an 8,200 square foot shingled center hall traditional with 6 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms that was last on the open market in early December (2012) with an asking price of $11,500,000.

listing photo: Coldwell Banker / Pacific Palisades