Blog Left Sidebar

True to his word, the artist’s outlandish furnishings were removed, and, today, the mansion exudes understated elegance. The main residence boasts 10 bedrooms and 13 baths, along with all manner of grand amenities, including a ballroom, wine room, rooftop tennis court, gym and indoor sports court, a four-car garage,  a pool with a swim-up bar and waterslide and a secretive grotto.

Not to be completely upstaged, the second 3,300-square-foot residence located at 1255 Sierra Alta Way boasts a fully appointed, high-end kitchen, bar and billiards room, den, spa, a two-car garage and, of course, its own pool.

Ready to call the palace your own? The estate can be purchased for $30 million via The Oppenheim Group. If that’s a little too steep, you can do as Prince did and rent the main residence for $80,000 a month. Just don’t get any grand ideas about painting the walls.

via@Robb Report

When it’s finally safe to release ourselves from social distancing and entertain with friends again, Tony and Martel Hale would like to have you over. In fact, the Emmy winners (she for makeup, and he for Veep) designed their three-bedroom Los Angeles home, where they live with their daughter, Loy, to be just the type of welcoming respite where their loved ones can walk in, kick off their shoes, watch an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and maybe even stay the night. (There’s a guest house with a Murphy bed for that.)

And should you be the lucky recipient of a dinner party invitation at the Hales’, the Southern pair (she’s from Anniston, Alabama; he grew up in Tallahassee, Florida) probably serve up cheese straws and a one-pan rosemary-lemon chicken, a Southern Living recipe that’s their go-to. “We love to have people visit,” Tony says. “When someone walks into the house, we want them to feel joy. There’s a cozy, sit-by-the-fire, have-a-glass-of-wine vibe to the house.” Who among us couldn’t use a little of that right now?

When the couple moved into the Studio City ranch house five years ago, they called upon friend and Martin & Brockett interior designer Jason Martin, who had worked on their first house in Griffith Park, to give it a homey feel. “I wanted it pretty, and I wanted it Southern; a bit modern, and a bit traditional,” says Martel in her Alabama drawl. And a relaxed feel was key: “I remember saying I don’t want to sacrifice comfort for something just being cool or looking good,” Tony says.

So Martin filled the space and its guest house with tufted furniture, cozy monochromatic shades, and the kind of showers you’d want to spend all day in. The couple’s master bedroom is a prime example of their comfort-based philosophy: You could literally roll from the bed onto a tufted sofa, then right onto cozy overstuffed ottomans, never once encountering a hard surface.

The couple’s homey atmosphere is also thanks to plenty of personal touches, like the Saturday Night Live costume sketches lining a wall in the kitchen—Martel salvaged them from the trash when she was on the makeup team there in the late ’90s to early ’00s. Their kitchen table was a wedding present from Martel’s mother. In the living room, the couple hung photographs by a production coordinator from Arrested Development. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tony’s Veep costar, told them about the artist whose work they now display in their powder room. But most importantly, the pair and their daughter use every room of the house. “There’s a puzzle on our dining room table as we speak,” Martel says.

As Martin can attest (he and his husband have been hanging out with the Hales on an almost-weekly basis for the last 16 years) their unpretentious love of home and hosting isn’t just a line. Even during my interview with the duo and in subsequent emails, Tony and Martel invited me to come over the next time I’m in L.A., a request I’m holding them to when this is all over. “That’s what’s so exciting about having a home with a design aspect to it,” Tony says. “It’s a real gift to anybody who comes into the house. It’s a service to them. I just want you to have just a real, restful time here.”

via@Architectual Digest 

When Casey Wilson and her husband, David Caspe, started their search for a family home, she knew exactly what her dream house was: The problem was that she didn’t know if it actually existed in Los Angeles. “Maybe this is kind of cheesy, but I’ve always loved the movie Father of the Bride, and I had this idea in my head of the white house with the dark trim,” the Black Monday actress says. The couple’s favorite neighborhood, Los Feliz, however, was filled with a preponderance of Mediterranean and modern homes, and not many in that traditional East Coast vein. Luckily, their friend Doug Levine, an interior designer and architect, had been keeping a close eye on the real estate market in the area and alerted the couple as soon as a listing for a private almost farmhouse-like home became available.

Although they lost out with their first bid, the approximately 4,000-square-foot house hit the market again a few months later, and the couple quickly snatched it up. But as picture-perfect as its exterior was, they knew a major renovation of the 1938 home was in order. Its current state was dark and claustrophobic: exactly what Wilson, a lover of warm and comfortable spaces, didn’t want. To realize her and Caspe’s vision for a welcoming home that was perfect for entertaining—“Our favorite thing in life is sharing a meal or drink with friends,” she says—they enlisted not only Levine to work on the interior architecture but also firm Nickey Kehoe to create the interior design. It was an unusual arrangement for Levine, who normally focuses on interior design himself, but working with Nickey proved the men were perfect foils. “At the beginning, we didn’t want to step on each other’s toes,” Levine says. “But it was actually so easy. It’s really fun watching someone else with talent take what you’ve done and add their layer on to it.”

Levine’s goal was to open up each floor’s layout: On the first floor, which is where the family does their entertaining, he added in a proper foyer by expanding out into the house’s substantial front veranda. When it was completed, “it looked like it was always there,” Levine says. Upstairs, in the more private areas, he blew out the ceilings in the bedrooms to cathedral-like proportions and added in larger windows to take advantage of the property’s lush green landscape. The basement, which was the former owner’s secondary closet, is now a sleek dark bar space with room for up to 100 people. “We’ve done Thanksgiving and Christmas parties there; everybody’s loving it,” Wilson says.

For the interior design, Wilson relayed to Nickey that she loved pattern and color. “We wanted the whole house to feel warm when you came in,” she says. “Like it was a hug and welcoming to everyone.” Caspe found he did have to be the voice of reason when it came to some of Wilson’s design wishes, though. “He said, ‘If you had your ideal way, we would just strap two mattresses to you and you would just lie down wherever you were,” she laughs. “’At a certain point, we have to have a chair; it can’t also be a couch and a bed.’ ” Nickey toed the line by imbuing the home with bright color, multiple patterns, and prints, all of which read as inviting. “We wanted to create a space they are super-comfortable in and that feels casual enough in the less formal areas of the house but then formal enough that entertaining still feels like it’s an elevated experience,” says Nickey.

The family also embraced wallpaper, which can be found everywhere from the powder room (a floral Sandberg) to the guest bedroom (a subtle salmon-colored print by Lee Jofa). The most arresting, however, is the outdoor-scene Iksel wallpaper in the forest-green dining room, which lends a refined, traditional air to the room. “It’s unbelievable,” Wilson says of the print. Although Wilson initially protested Nickey’s use of green in the home, he was finally able to convince her of the color’s utility in everywhere from the striking dining room to the cheery mint-green in the kitchen. “There are so many beautiful vistas in the exterior; everywhere you look outside, it’s green. So we incorporated the outdoors inside. It just felt like such a natural thing,” Nickey says. “Todd got me good with green and now I love it,” Wilson says. “I always said, ‘You know, I hated it, and now I hate it so much, I love it.’ ”

via@Architectual Digest 

An antiques and taxidermy obsessive, Von Teese holds the past—its sensibility and attention to detail—in reverence. She was adamantly opposed to bulldozing through with a conventional modern-things-up design approach. “I like feeling like I am living in this house in a very similar way to the way somebody did in the ’20s or ’30s,” says Von Teese. “It made a big difference to me when I was buying the house that someone lived here for so long and raised their children here. The owner even got married here.”

“I bought this house [in part] because the kitchen wasn’t overly renovated. I like to keep things as historical as possible.” Still, the kitchen was…brown, and so she immediately started to make her mark there: “Brown is my least favorite color in the entire world.”

via@Architectural Digest

With the help of designer David Cafiero, the Hollywood hitmaker lovingly preserved the studio in the Cape Cod fishing village

Four years ago, TV maestro Ryan Murphy ushered his husband, photographer David Miller, into the Province­town studio where Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann once painted and taught. Thanks to the efforts of later owners, its best features had survived—a mammoth window, a humongous hearth, and above it, a dizzying perch that let Hofmann’s acolytes peer down at art in the making. As Murphy and Miller flipped through archival photos of Hofmann arranging still lifes or the limbs of human models, they shared an impulse: Protect this space.

“The room is its own work of art,” notes Murphy, who, like Hofmann, has done much to boost Provincetown’s creative culture. Seven years ago, he and Miller married here in the dunes, later purchasing a waterfront house—near where the Pilgrims first landed—for them and their two sons to breathe in salt air. (The good vibes have clearly done Murphy well; last year he signed a $300 million contract with Netflix, then the largest Hollywood deal of its kind.) Hofmann, on the other hand, arrived at the Cape Cod fishing village in 1935, taking up residency at Provincetown’s legendary painting school, the Hawthorne barn, before buying his own studio from fellow artist Frederick Waugh in 1945. For the next two decades, Hofmann used the complex to feed fresh talents some avant-garde concepts. If you’ve ever taken a painting class, then Hofmann has kinda, sorta taught you. Pushing shapes to the foreground through color, pulling the viewer’s eye deeper into the canvas, any mention of “plasticity” at all—those lessons bear the Teutonic accent of his guiding voice.

Upon taking stewardship of the studio, with the goal of adapting it as a guesthouse for entertaining, Murphy and Miller handed the keys to Manhattan-based designer David Cafiero, also a pillar of P-Town. He listened for whatever notes could still be struck in the chapel-like space, marveling at the nautical planks that Waugh had fused into walls and nooks. Something of a salvage artist himself—the designer had just restored the Hawthorne barn—Cafiero found wood boards and ship timbers that could be fashioned into a more spare and spacious kitchen. “The happiest discovery was under the linoleum, where we found floor planks that match those in the main room,” says Cafiero, who also replaced prefab kitchen cabinetry with whitewashed shiplap. At the couple’s insistence, all appliances live below the counter, making room for a shelf dotted with finds from Murphy’s antiques-shop rounds—just not too many. “It’s a big space,” says Murphy, “but we wanted to empty it, not fill it.”

Throughout the studio, the couple thought small, situating treasures at eye level. In the main room, a bronze statue of Narcissus points toward a German-porcelain Pan. A life-size bust of Joan of Arc sits next to a delicate cast of Barbra Streisand’s head (made for a puppet show at the 1964 World’s Fair). And two black-and-white Herb Ritts portraits converse from across the room: one a mud-crusted profile of Madonna-ex Tony Ward, the other a smiling Elizabeth Taylor, fully made-up but shorn and scarred after brain surgery. The latter was a gift from Julia Roberts, star of Murphy’s 2014 adaptation of The Normal Heart. She, like La Liz, Miss Streisand, and Bette Davis, who stayed at the studio in the 1980s, is the inspiration for a chapter in the memoir that Murphy has been writing in the perch above the hearth. The book’s working title, naturally, is Ladies.

 

The challenge for Murphy was to make the space both his and Hofmann’s. Then he considered a modest remnant of the artist’s classes: an easel marked with strokes of paint, where the brush had surpassed the canvas edge. It must have felt “hauntingly familiar,” to use the words of another Murphy leading lady, Stevie Nicks. With stints first at Paramount and later at Fox, Murphy has commandeered the scenic loft where artists once made giant backdrops, leaving many drips and slashes. Murphy kept those happy accidents for all to see when he made the spaces into offices, wishing his writers might commune with the visionaries who preceded them. The Hofmann easel has that same feeling, and so too does its accompanying paint-­plastered stool, which the artist used as a palette. “Those pieces, the tools of his trade—those are our Hofmann works of art,” Murphy says. “They’re beautiful and they’re personal.”

On television, Murphy revives spirits, real and imagined, so he’s keenly aware that some still find refuge in the Hofmann studio. “You feel it the minute you walk in; so many have been here, and some may have stayed,” he says. He’ll leave the séances to TV, but he does have a ritual that keeps the place alive. After chatty dinners at their main residence, Murphy walks guests the few blocks to the Hofmann studio. Miller has gone ahead to light the giant Georgian chandelier, held aloft by ship rigging and warm with the glow of thick taper candles. Cafiero has witnessed the spectacle, with studio executives, starlets, writers, and local artists among the wide-eyed visitors. “You get dinner and a show,” the designer says, “only the floor show is on the ceiling.”

 

After the arrival of her third child, Ellen Pompeo realized the family had outgrown their summer retreat in Sag Harbor, NY. She listed the Hamptons hideaway for $3.8 million. Two years later, the stylish farmhouse was sold for $2,995,000.

The actress bought the place in 2011 for $925,000, property records show. After tearing down the existing cabin, she built this exquisite 2,400-square-foot home in 2013. It’s rustic on the outside and refined and modern inside.

This incredible three-story, five-bedroom, four-bathroom home with a pool sits tucked away on more than 8 acres.

Highlights of the interior spaces include a double-height ceiling in the living room, cozy fireplaces, and a roomy country-style kitchen.

So what attracted the new buyers to this property? Their representative, Martha Gundersen of Douglas Elliman, says they simply fell in love.

“The buyer loved the privacy and uniqueness of the house,” Gundersen explains. “They wanted something beautiful and turnkey. They had initially been looking for something close to the ocean, but this property was too special to pass up.”

Pompeo recently signed on for two more seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy,” which was unsurprisingly renewed for a Season 17 by ABC, making her the star of one of the longest-running shows in TV history.

Pompeo and husband Chris Ivery have bought and sold an impressive portfolio of real estate, including an oceanfront retreat in Malibu, CA, a mansion in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood, and a Spanish-style villa in L.A.’s Hollywood Hills, which was sold in June 2018 for $2,765,000, according to property records.

via@realtor.com

Actress Michelle Pfeiffer and her TV producer husband, David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies,” “Ally McBeal,” “The Practice”), finally unloaded their spacious estate in Woodside, CA, according to Variety. The property was sold for $22 million—about $7.5 million less than their original asking price, property records show.

The luxury compound was initially listed in spring 2018 for $29.5 million. It is located about 30 miles south of San Francisco in one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S., which has included residents such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and finance guru Charles Schwab.

Despite the discounted final price, the off-market sale is still one of the biggest transactions in the San Francisco area for 2019. The $22 million transaction was apparently all cash from a “mysterious buyer,” according to Variety.

Set on 8 acres at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, the Mediterranean-style main house measures 6,000 square feet and has four bedrooms and 4.5 baths. The main level includes a great room with seating areas, an elevated media and library area, and three sets of French doors to the main terrace.

The estate has at least five satellite structures, including three detached guest or staff apartments (each with its own bathroom and kitchenette), a guesthouse with office, and a separate gym.

The grounds feature a gated pool and spa, tennis court, main terrace with fireplace, and a cedar hot tub. The property includes an apple orchard, three fenced and covered vegetable beds, natural grasses, meadows, and a formal lawn. There’s also a historic octagonal barn with 10 stalls, as well as a fenced paddock for horses.

Pfeiffer continues to have a resurgent career at the age of 61. The actress recently starred in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Avengers: Endgame,” and “Murder on the Orient Express.”

via@realtor.com

Self-help guru and TV personality Phillip McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, is selling the Beverly Hills, CA, mansion for $5,750,000 where his rocker son, Jordan McGraw, had been living with his bandmates. And it’s quite an eyeful! Part playhouse, part Tim Burton homage, the outrageous, high-dollar design and questionable taste have sparked some big-time controversy on the web.

Ever since the Los Angeles Times first published the photos from the listing, social media has had a field day poking fun at the unconventional—dare we say, crazy?—interiors that only a 20-something with unlimited funds could have dreamed up.

In summer 2016, a then-28-year-old Jordan offered The Daily Mail a tour of the estate. “The idea is kind of Tim Burton threw up on a canvas, and it turned into a house,” he explained.

Regurgitation isn’t usually a design aspiration for a nearly $6 million Beverly Hills mansion, but, hey, Dr. Phil’s kid clearly had a vision for interior decoration that’s unique. He dreamed up the wild wonderland with the help of L.A. design firm Mogul, according to the Mail.

As you enter the property, which the listing calls “eclectic,” there’s a snake fountain, a reference to “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” giving guests just a hint of the acid trip to come. In the foyer, there’s the bedazzled bar at the bottom of the entry, which is meant to look like the rabbit hole in “Alice in Wonderland.” And the showstopper? It’s the jaw-dropping, glassed-in wall of guns adorning the dining room.

Some of the photos, including one of the wall of guns, have been removed from the listing after receiving tons of social media criticism. The home’s listing agent, Billy Dolan of Hilton and Hyland, didn’t return a call and email for comment.

Black velvet wallpaper aside, the five-bedroom, 6,170-square-foot estate sits on a gated half-acre just minutes from the Beverly Hills Hotel, and has plenty to offer potential buyers willing to take on a remodel.

For his part, after leaving his stamp on the decor, Jordan has left the property behind to tour with the Jonas Brothers.