'House' Actress Olivia Wilde Sells House

SELLERS: Olivia Wilde and Tao Ruspoli
LOCATION: Venice, CA
PRICE: $3,095,000
SIZE: 3,011 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In early February it was revealed in the tabs, blogs and gossip glossies that increasingly in-demand actress Olivia Wilde and her hubby Tao Ruspoli called off their marriage of nearly 10 years. By mid-March they'd listed their gated and recently renovated residence in nitty-gritty and arty-farty Venice, CA with an asking price of $3,095,000.

After just two days on the open market, the status of the listing on Redfin was changed from 'active' to 'pending.' That's right, hunnies, this house had a deal within days.

Miss Wilde, who currently stars on the self-consciously quirky Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated hospital drama House M.D., was born a Cockburn. The well-educated siren hails from a family thick with impressively accomplished, globally-concerned and socio-politically minded journalists who include Leslie, Andrew, Patrick and Alexander Cockburn. Look them up, people, they're every one the real damn stuff.

At the dewy age of 18, freshly graduated from the rigorous and exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, Miss Wilde ran off to rural Rappahonnock County, Virginia where she eloped with Tao Ruspoli, a documentary filmmaker, Flamenco gee-tarist and founder of The Los Angeles Filmmakers' Cooperative with aristocratic familial roots; He is an Italian count or a prince or something noble-sounding like that whose drug-addicted playboy father Allesandro "Dado" Ruspoli–the 9th Prince of Cerveteri–lived a famously hedonistic life and palled around with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Orson Welles.

The erstwhile couple, card-carrying members of both the blistering L.A. art scene and the bohemian demi-monde, called it quits, according to one inside source, "for the typical Hollywood reasons. Her career has exploded and she saw being married is not as much fun." The snitchy source went on to tell the folks at Us magazine that young Miz Wilde's career is on the upswing and being hitched "was weighing her down."

Records show that Miss Wilde and Mister Ruspoli only purchased there Venice digs in January of 2010 for $2,325,000. Current listing information shows the 3,011 square foot contemporized crib, located on one of Venice's super-charming walk streets and conveniently just walking distance to the funky Abbott Kinney shopping district, was originally built in 1920 with recent renovations by mcmansion-detesting Los Angeles architect Adam Wheeler.

The house itself has what Your Mama calls a "mullet thing" going on, all business up front and party at the back. Although partially shielded from view by thick foliage and a tall fence, from the front–the façade that faces the walk street–the house presents as a boxy and quotidian clapboard-sided Colonial. (Listing information called it Cape Cod but we're pretty sure it's a Colonial). However, around the back, the large for the area but unconventionally trapezoidal parcel required a significant chuck of the house be lopped off at an angle that in uninspired hands might have easily resulted in an architectural disaster.

A glassy extension off the side of the house, clad in what looks to Your Mama like reclaimed wood siding that's been installed vertically, introduces a visual tension between the original, horizontally clapboarded portion of the house and the more modern addition. At first, each of the conjoined masses appear defiantly dismissive of each other. A closer inspection of the listing photos reveals that Mister Wheeler the architect acted as a real damn justice of the architectural peace and married the two opposite-seeming sections with identically-pitched roof lines.

The addition contains the living room that unfortunately does not have a fireplace–which would be delicious for taking the edge of damp and misty sea side mornings–but does have a vaulted ceiling with exposed trusses, a bleached-out wood floor and at least one large panel of glass that disappears into the wall and unites the room with the grassy outdoor area that's completely fenced and tree-ringed for privacy.

The hexagonal Mexican paver tiles in the large sky lit dining room extend into a cozy library-nook lined with shelves chock-full of actual books and into the sleek but stylistically warm galley-style kitchen turned out with white oak cabinetry, mesquite counter tops, open shelving, discrete high-grade appliances–there's even a built-in microwave–and a sweet built in breakfast banquette. We do so love a banquette. In fact, Your Mama is at this very moment, as our pudgy fingers fly across the keyboard of our trusty laptop computer, sitting in the built in breakfast banquette in our kitchen.

A wooden staircase in the central hall leads up to the second floor master bedroom, a long room with coffee-colored distressed wood floors, crisp white walls and a vaulted ceiling. The attached bathroom, an odd triangular shaped space that might have bedeviled any number of architects and designers, has a vaulted wood ceiling with exposed beams and trusses, a floating mesquite wood vanity topped by a pair of simple white vessel sinks that look like cereal bowls and a free standing soaking tub for two. At one end of the room, where the walls converge in a narrowing space that a more prosaic architect may have relegated to a linen closet, Mister Wheeler the architect created a sexy open shower cubby with two shower heads.

The house opens up to the yard through a series of French doors and the aforementioned sliding glass panel in the living room. According to listing information the lush grounds were worked over by renowned Los Angeles landscape designer Jay Griffith. A deck runs long the front of the house and steps down to a tree-shaded dining and entertainment terrace where Christmas lights are hung wonderfully willy-nilly in the trees and a hodge-podge of gigantic decorative medallions cling to the fence. We understand that these medallion things provide visual texture and movement to the intimate eating area spot but, in all truth, we hate them.

While we find the three different floor coverings (tile, smooth bleached wood and dark distressed wood) a real disappoint and we're never thrilled with vessel sinks–or that silly orchid someone set next to them in the listing photos–overall Your Mama is rather covetous of this house and appreciative of Miss Wilde and Mister Ruspoli's particular brand of down-to-earth boho-chic day-core that's pretty specific to cultured and affluent hipsters with artistic bents.

We don't have any idea where either Miss Wilde or Mister Ruspoli will set up there bachelor and bachelorette pads but should Mister Ruspoli want to go back to Italy to lick his relationship wounds he has access to at least a couple of historical and deluxe family properties, the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome and the Castello Ruspoli north of Rome in rural Vignanello.

listing photos: Deasy Penner & Partners

Scott Baio is Forty-Something and Buys New House

BUYER: Scott Baio
LOCATION: Woodland Hills, CA
PRICE: $1,850,000
SIZE: 6,312 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a communique the other day from The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial and later confirmed with property records, Your Mama has learned that former teen idol turned reality tee-vee denizen Scott Baio and his Missus Renee Sloan recently put their toddler daughter in a papoose and decamped suburban Encino, CA for the even farther-flung Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills where they paid $1,850,000 fr a large house in a guard-gated community.

At sixteen, just a slim little thing with a Dorothy Hamil hair-do, Scoot Baio was baby-faced and fantastic as Bugsy in the 1976 film Bugsy Malone that featured only child actors. If any of the children have not seen the movie, do. It's really quite a hoot. Young Mister Baio rocketed to the top of the Teen Idol heap with his next role as Chachi Arcola on Happy Days. After that there was the Happy Days spin off Joanie Loves Chachi, the proto-Skins film Foxes with Jodie Foster and a couple of Emmy nominations for lead roles in made-for-tee-vee movies (Stoned, all the Kids Do It). Then came Charles in Charge, an insufferable sitcom on which he portrayed a manny–that's a man-nanny–that somehow ran for five seasons.

After Charles in Charge closed up shop in 1990 Mister Baio's showbiz career in front of the camera kind of hit the skids and he began doing a little directing (The Wayans Bros., The Jamie Foxx Show, The Parkers). Sure, there were a couple of short-lived series (Diagnosis Murder) and a slew of small parts on various boob-toob programs (The Nanny, Veronica's Closet, Touched by and Angel) but, really kids, in all honestly, by the mid-1990s Mister Baio was all but washed up in Tinseltown. It wasn't his fault, really. No matter how hard he worked or talented he may have been, the public, his still moistened and turgid fans, clung to their Teen Beat fantasies and didn't allow Mister Baio to become a full-grown man-actor.

In 2005 Mister Baio secured a recurring and well-done role on Arrested Development but, like so many others on the shady-slope celebrity nowadays, he quickly veered towards reality tee-vee. He did not, to his credit, attempt to revive his career on that disturbing but outrageously popular Dancing With The Stars program. Instead he opened the doors to his own "real life" on Scott Baio is 45...and Single on which he's portrayed as a slightly bitter golf-playing commitment-phobic lady's man in his mid-forties with a girlfriend who wants to marry him. The girlfriend finally gets her heart's desire to be betrothed to Mister Baio in November 2007, about a month after the birth of the baby they made out of wedlock.

A bit over a year ago Your Mama discussed Mister Baio's long-time home, a gated mini-estate in Encino, CA he bought in 1994 for $1,385,000 and had listed with an asking price of $2,895,000. Property records show the single-story 4 bedroom and 4.5 pooper pad sold in late September 2010 for $2,500,000. Two months later, according to records, the couple closed on their new crib in the Westchester County Estates, a gated community in hot as Hades Woodland Hills. Oh, pleeze property developers. That has to be about the most mind-boggling and stoopid name for a gated community in California that Your Mama has ever had the misfortune of coming across. All the children who passed sixth grade geography will already know that Woodland Hills in in Los Angeles County in California and that Westchester County is a (mostly) upscale and bucolic bedroom community just north of New York City.

Anyhoo, listing photos for Mister and Missus Baio's new 5 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom mock-Med digs shows a couple of lonely and precarious-looking balustrades that flank the front walk that streaks across the slim yard and passes through an archway into a covered porch. The front door opens to a predictably "classic" mcmansion-style impress-the-guests entry with double-height ceilings and a curved staircase that attempts but fails to project wealth and stateliness. Instead it screams, "I'm a really boring suburban mcmansion!"

Since listing photos of the 6,312 square foot mcmansion reflect the impossibly bland decorative taste of the seller Your Mama is refrain from any discussion of the agonizing lack of color throughout the entire house, nor will we speculate on how it came to pass that a Shabby Chic-y and hat-festooned armoire wound up smack in front of a pair of French doors in the master bathroom. And do not, children, even get Your Mama started on that miniature grand piano in the living room or all the furniture that was set unnecessarily catty-wompus like the desk in the office/library and the hand-painted armoire stuck up into an awkward corner in the master bedroom.

Adjacent and open to the entry, a sunken formal living room has "dramatic" double-height ceilings, perfectly lovely if slightly under-scaled herringbone-patterned wood floors, a fireplace and a pair of towering arched windows. A set of French doors with side lights connects the formal living room to the formal dining room that has a mirror installed on the ceiling that, we imagine, allows diners on one side of the table to peer directly down into the décolletage of a female diner on the opposite side of the table.

A bedroom suite with private facilities on the main floor gives guests or a live-in domestic a modicum of privacy. The main floor is completed by an office/library with some built-in cabinetry, a powder pooper, laundry room, three-car garage, family room with fireplace and a commodious center-island kitchen with a view of the backyard and an–ach!–sensibly neutral beige tile floor installed on the bias.

Upstairs three family bedrooms share two bathrooms and the expansive master suite features an acre of pale beige wall-to-wall carpeting, a raised sitting area with fireplace, French door that open to a narrow balcony, dual walk-in closets and a sizable but unimpressive bathroom with separate tub and shower.

A set of double doors, also upstairs, lead to a home theater room with milk chocolate brown leather reclining seats with cup holders conveniently built into the arms, a built-in snack counter and an eye-popping 123-inch screen.

A thick ring of trees surrounds the backyard of the .41 acre lot and provides privacy for the swimming pool, spa, Mexican tile terraces, various grass patches and a sunken dining terrace shaded by a hip-roofed canopy held up by classical-ish column that are in direct architectural vernacular combat with the (faux-) Mediterranean-style mcmansion.

Your Mama can't fathom why a person would trade a gated mini-estate in Encino–already far more suburban than we care for–that has a long celebrity-style gated drive, a wide swathe of lawn, elevated swimming pool, spa, gazebo with home-theater equipment, barbecue area, Koi pond with waterfall and a lighted damn tennis court for a big ol' beige "Mediterranean" mcmansion with fewer amenities on less than half the land in downmarket Woodland Hills. Such are the ways, butter balls, of the rich, the famous and the "famous."

listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty

Whoopi Goldberg Getting Out of Vermont

SELLER: Whoopi Goldberg
LOCATION: Marlboro, VT
PRICE: $2,300,000
SIZE: 6,100 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The smock-wearing, always outspoken and passionately opinionated comedienne and chat show hostess Whoopi Goldberg has been much in the news the last few weeks for taking publicity-seeking possible presidential candidate Donald Trump to task on The View for his relentless obsession with the circumstances of president Barak Obama's birth.

While all that is as fascinating as it comes, what currently concerns Your Mama more than the hilarious spectacle of Mister Trump's political posturing are the real estate doings of the Oscar, Grammy, Tony, (Daytime) Emmy, Golden Globe, Image, Kid's Choice and People's Choice award winning actor/activist/agitator/comedienne/writer/producer/talk show host Whoopi Goldberg.

Sometime in 2004 Miz Goldberg snatched up a sprawling farm in the rural and gorgeous Green Mountains near the southern Vermont community of Marlboro. Marlboro, about four hours north of New York City, may seem like Hicksville or Bumfuckegypt to some city sophisticates but the rolling hills are no stranger to high-culture: The world-famous Marlboro Music Festival is held in, well, Marlboro. Iffin Your Mama is being honest–and we always are–we'd confess that we really haven't any idea how much cash Miz Goldberg coughed up for her country hideaway, often referred to in online marketing materials as the Robinson-Winchester Farm.

In the fall of 2009 the dread-lock tressed Miz Goldberg–born the much more prosaic Caryn Elaine Johnson–listed her 3,600 square foot Wooster Street loft in New York City's SoHo with a price tag of $3,990,000. The 2 bedroom spread, filled to the gills with a stunning collection of artworks by African American artists–sold more than a year later in January 2010 for $2,985,000 to Emily and Ben Lerer. We don't know a damn thing about Missus Lerer but we do know that Mister Lerer is a budding internet media mogul who founded the deeply metrosexual cool-hunting site Thrillist.com and happens to be the off-spring of Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer.

Right about the time Miz Goldberg listed her loft in lower Manhattan she laid out $2,800,000 for a stately mansion with 8 bedrooms and 6 full and 2 half bathrooms in the historic and exclusive Llewellyn Park enclave in West Orange, NJ.

All went quiet on the Whoopi Goldberg real estate front until two days ago when a gal named Vernice Vermontite directed our celebrity real estate attentions to Miz Goldberg's country bolthole in southern Vermont she has on the market with an asking price of $2,300,000

Big Momma ur-gossip Cindy Adams reported back in 2009 that Miz Goldberg owns "an 8,000-acre farm in Vermont." And maybe she does. However, the Vermont property Miz Goldberg currently has on the market near Marlboro spans, according to listing information, 745 acres and includes 640.7 acres of conserved land–that means it can never be developed–67 acres of pasture land, 15 miles of groomed horse and buggy trails and a 22-acre sugar bush. A sugar bush is not, contrary to how it sounds, a naughty lady part but rather a stand of trees tapped for the production of Vermont's famous maple syrup.

Portions of the farm's main house date back to the late 1700s and the original structure–a simple two-room cabin–has been added on to several times. The Colonial crib, with it's plain but dignified exterior, now measures around 6,100 square feet and includes, according to listing information, 4 bedrooms and 3 full and 2 half bathrooms. Listing information states that the house was "meticulously renovated by Whoppi [sp] Goldberg in 2004." The residence was taken down to its bare bones and rebuilt in a manner that added up to date conveniences and preserved original details such as the two-sided fireplace with beehive oven believed to be part of the original cabin.

The main floor of the residence has wide-plank wood floors, rustic rough-cut wood beams, exposed posts and 12 over 12 paned windows that stretch down from the ceiling almost to the floor. The open-plan space has a well-equipped galley-style kitchen and several physically comfortable-looking but decoratively uninspired sitting areas that present a visually confusing and psychically disharmonious hodge-podge of furniture "styles."

In addition to the historic main house the property includes, according to listing information, multiple pole barns, an indoor riding arena, a beautiful heated horse barn with tack rooms, two run in sheds with water, a two bedroom bunk house with kitchen and living room and a two story cement barn used as a wood working shop.

As far as Your Mama knows, in addition to her mansion in West Orange, NJ, Miz Goldberg continues to own a small house in Berkeley, CA she bought way back in 1985 for $335,000 as well as a 5 bedroom and 6 bathroom mansion she bought in 1993 for $2,547,525 in the same Pacific Palisades, CA neighborhood where other high-profile property owners include Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg, mouthy comedian Bill Cosby, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard. She reportedly also owns real estate in upstate New York and in the Hamptons but we don't nuthin' about either of those alleged properties.

listing photos: Palmiter Realty Group

Your Mama Keeps Hearing...

...from well-placed peeps in the Platinum Triangle real estate scene that dancing chat show hostess Ellen Degeneres and her actress wife Portia de Rossi (Arrested Development, Nip/Tuck, Better Off Ted) have their secluded Beverly Hills, CA compound quietly on the market with a mind-bending price tag.

Your Mama first discussed this celebrity real estate rumor way back in mid-February but it seems to be bubbling back up to the surface and, indeed, twice yesterday we heard about this again from a couple of contacts who tend to know about these things. One of our better informed sources snitched to Your Mama that the numbers being batted around Beverly Hills are $49,000,000 for the main house (which includes a detached guest house, staff quarters and an underground garage) and a buckle-your-seat belts-ballsy $60,000,000 for the entire compound (main house plus two adjacent residences purchased as a privacy buffer).

When queried about the sky-high price, one of our more eloquent informants, let's call her Miss Formerly Seductive Realtor Sally (who–it should be noted–needs an honest head shot), hissed and snorted that the Sapphic couple's "absurd desire for $60 million" is pie in the real estate sky, partick since the compound is not in Beverly Hills proper but, "It's BH POST OFFICE for God's sake."

The distinction between Beverly Hills and the Beverly Hills Post Office may not be clear–or matter–to anyone who does not live in either Beverly Hills or the Bev Hills Post Office but the issue becomes abundantly clear when it comes time for residents to call the po-po or send their precious children to public school. Beverly Hills is a city all of its own where residents in need of the law call the fast-responding Beverly Hills Police Department and have the option of sending their off-spring to the well-regarded and high-testing Beverly Hills High School. The Bev Hills Post Office, on the other hand, is part of the City of Los Angeles–rather than the city of Beverly Hills–and as such residents have to cough up the cash for private school or send their kiddies to lackluster and economically starving public schools and they have to call the notoriously slow-responding Los Angeles Police Department when they need an armed officer.

Anyhoo, Missus and Missus Degeneres–it seems Portia took Ellen's name making it quite clear who wears the pants in that family–started to cobble together their compound above Coldwater Canyon in late 2007 and, before they'd put away their checkbook, spent a combined (and approximate) $48,000,000 on the multi-acre and multi-parcel property.

Missus Degeneres–Ellen–is notoriously fickle when it comes to real estate, rarely staying put for more than a few years at a stretch. In the last 5 or 10 years Missus Degeneres has owned scads of contemporary cribs in Los Angeles, several ranches in the Santa Ynez Valley and an historic George Washington Smith-designed mansion in Montecito, CA.

As far as Your Mama knows–and we really know so little–in addition to their up-for-sale compound in the Bev Hills Post Office, Missus and Missus Degeneres's only other real estate holding is a ten million dollar horse farm in the scrubby hills outside Westlake Village, CA and a two bedroom condo in a boring Beverly Hills building bought in late 2010 for $835,000.

We really have no idea where Missus and Missus Degeneres might go when–and if–they sell their Bev Hills Post Office compound. Ages ago we heard through the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine that Hollywood's most famous property-luvin' scissor sisters were poking around in the equestrian-friendly and guard-gated Serra Retreat in Malibu but we shall see, children, we shall see...