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Pee-Wee Herman’s Personal Playhouse in L.A. Could Be Yours for $5 Million

Ten months after his death at age 70, the Los Angeles estate of actor, comedian, writer, and producer Paul Reubens—best known for his childlike, red bow tie-wearing alter-ego Pee-wee Herman—is available for the first time in almost four decades, asking just under $5 million. Built in the late 1950s and boasting nearly 3,000 square feet of living space, the midcentury ranch house sits atop a promontory in the sought-after Oaks neighborhood of Los Feliz and comes complete with views of the Griffith Park Observatory and the iconic Hollywood Sign from nearly every vantage point.

A California Institute of the Arts theater student and member of West Coast comedy troupe The Groundlings—where he originated his Pee-wee character in the 1970s—Reubens went on to become a film and TV sensation in the ’80s, starring in The Pee-wee Herman ShowPee-wee’s Big AdventureBig Top Pee-wee, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The recipient of a 1988 Hollywood Walk of Fame star, he’s also known for his work on Mystery MenBlow, and Murphy Brown, the latter of which earned him an Emmy nod.

Though his image was somewhat tarnished in later years due to a couple of arrests—one for indecent exposure and another for possessing obscene material—he subsequently appeared in a new version of The Pee-wee Herman Show at L.A.’s Club Nokia and on Broadway, as well as the movie Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.

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May 31, 2024No comments
Judge Judy Selling Manhattan Apartment as She Looks ‘to Simplify’

The Brooklyn native, 81, and her husband, Jerry, who is also a former television personality and judge, paid $8.5 million for the home in 2013, records show.

The eight-room unit, in a pre-war building designed by the renowned architect Rosario Candela, is the “epitome of refined living,” according to the listing with Tom Postilio and Mickey Conlon of Compass.

“Judy has impeccable taste in real estate, and this home is no exception,” Postilio said. “Any devotee of Sutton Place will find this home completely in tune with its surroundings. Its timeless design bucks trends in favor of style, and this penthouse has style in spades.”

A 29-foot entrance gallery leads into the home, which has a living room with a wood-burning fireplace; a formal dining room with floor-to-ceiling French casement doors; a wood-paneled library; and a chef’s kitchen that doubles as a social hub and casual dining area, the listing said.

There’s also a curved staircase with its original wrought-iron balustrade and four bedrooms, including a corner primary suite. The real show-stopping feature might be the expansive wraparound terrace, though, which has “jaw-dropping vistas of the New York skyline and the East River,” Conlon said.

“Every room in the home is a place you want to be,” he added. “The light and views are extraordinary, and the quality of craftsmanship throughout is impeccable. That said, you’d have a hard time coaxing us off that terrace—even on the coldest day of the year.”

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May 24, 2024No comments
Rihanna Finds a Buyer for $25 Million Los Angeles Penthouse

The 40th-floor unit also once belonged to “Friends” star Matthew Perry

Rihanna has found a buyer for her multimillion-dollar Los Angeles penthouse.

It took two months, almost to the day, for the billionaire pop star and businesswoman to get a contract signed on the sky-high residence, which was once owned by the late actor Matthew Perry.

The full-floor pad, on the 40th floor of the 42-story Century building in Century City, hit the market on March 11 for $24.95 million. The sale was pending as of May 10, listing records show.

The identity of the buyer and the final sale price won’t be revealed until the deal closes.

The 9,290-square-foot residence is the “pinnacle of luxury living,” according to the listing with James Harris and David Parnes of Carolwood Estates. The firm declined to comment on the deal.

The big-ticket home, which has walls of windows taking in the city skyline and Pacific Ocean, is fitted with features, including a great room with towering ceilings, a library with a fireplace, a lavish screening room, a chef’s kitchen and a family room.

There are also four bedrooms, including a primary suite with a sitting area, fireplace and marble bathroom, an office and four expansive terraces totaling 1,900 square feet of outdoor space, according to the listing.

May 13, 2024No comments
Thailand’s foreign income tax changes now in force

Starting this year, Thailand’s Revenue Department has revised its approach to taxing foreign income received by tax residents. Paul Ashburn of HLB Thailand summarises the changes Historically, if a person was a tax resident of Thailand and they received income from offshore, they could avoid paying Thai tax on such income by receiving the income offshore and deferring any remittance into Thailand until the new year. To address the disparity in the taxation of income from sources outside the country compared with income earned within the country, the Thai Revenue Department issued instructions to revise the tax treatment of foreign income remitted into the country by individual taxpayers, effective from January 1 2024.

Revenue Department instructions No. Paw 161 and Paw 162 state that a tax resident of Thailand who derives assessable income from an employment or business carried on abroad, or from a property situated abroad, shall be required to include such income in their personal income tax return for the payment of tax in the year that the income is brought into Thailand. The instructions were issued by the Revenue Department as guidelines to revenue officers when conducting tax audits or advising taxpayers on the taxation of foreign income under the Revenue Code. The law remains unchanged. Prior to the Revenue Department issuing these two instructions, the law had been interpreted as limiting the taxation of foreign income to income that is derived and remitted into Thailand in the same tax year. Foreign income earned in 2023 or prior years that is brought into Thailand after December 31 2023 will not be subject to tax.

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By Paul Ashburn
April 25, 2024No comments
Inside Sofía Vergara’s Personal LA Paradise

Sofía Vergara doesn’t mince words about the condition of her palatial Beverly Park manse when she acquired the property. “There were arches on top of arches, all with columns. It felt like a castle in Transylvania,” recalls the effervescent actor-producer, currently playing against type as Colombian cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco in the Netflix series Griselda. “But the layout was perfect, and I loved that you could see the landscape from every room, even though there wasn’t much of a garden to look at yet. I knew what I would do to make it my own,” she insists.

There were, predictably, a few challenges. Despite the voluminous rooms and high ceilings, Vergara wanted the house to feel “homey and comfortable, a place where people would want to hang out and relax,” she says. On top of that, the existing 1990s architecture did not exactly conform to her vision of “a house with history and texture, a well-lived house.” The structure may not have been new, but it most certainly wasn’t old in the way the actor fancied. After Timothy Corrigan worked for several years on the architectural design and interiors, ultimately Instagram led Vergara to the perfect collaborator to fully realize her transformation mission. Having long followed the work of Ohara Davies-Gaetano, Vergara simply dialed up the Los Angeles–based designer and got started. “I called her, we clicked, and I fell in love with her ideas,” the actor recollects. “When I handed her my inspiration folder, I realized most of the images were hers.”

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February 6, 2024No comments
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s Former New Orleans Home Sells for $2.8 Million

The historic French Quarter estate that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt lived in for a decade has officially been sold for a cool $2.8 million.

The aughts power couple purchased the 1830s traditional-style house for $3.5 million shortly after their 12-year relationship began, when Pitt became heavily involved in rebuilding homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. They sold it a decade later in 2016 for $4.9 million, records show. The house changed hands multiple times since Pitt and Jolie sold it, including to Paul Allen, the late Microsoft cofounder who died in 2018, as well as to recording engineer Cosimo Matassa.

Since the property was first listed for $5.35 million in September 2022, it underwent a series of price fluctuations. A year later, it dropped to $3.25 million. In early November of 2023, the estate was relisted at $3.475 million. In December, the house went up for auction with bidding starting at $1 million. “The campaign resulted in nearly 1,000 inquiries from buyer prospects and registered 12 bidders participating in the auction,” Scott Kirk, president and CEO of auction managers Interluxe Auctions, tells ELLE DECOR, before it was ultimately sold. The buyer has not yet been identified on public records.

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January 23, 2024No comments
Step Inside Taylor swift 8 M USD Home

Taylor Swift may be best known for her impressive music career, though with eight homes across four states, she may be adding “real estate mogul” to her repertoire pretty soon. The 33-year-old superstar—who recently completed the first U.S. leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour—is worth an estimated $570 million, according to Forbes, $150 million of which she has invested in real estate.

Swift has come a long way, from country girl to global pop star. Her rise to the top began on a Christmas tree farm in Cumru Township, Pennsylvania, before the Swift family moved 15 minutes away to a five-bedroom home in Wyomissing, just outside of Reading. It was in a Georgian Colonial–style home that she first began to exhibit an interest in music and started to play guitar. At 14, Swift convinced her parents to move to Nashville to pursue her music career—which is where she made her first official real estate purchase, in 2009, a condo that she still owns today.

Swift has been shaking off doubters ever since, amassing eight diverse pads, ranging from a $150 million penthouse in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood to an 11,000-square-foot historical landmark in California. And there’s no telling how much more she’ll conquer in the kingdom of real estate (and what new songs she’ll sing about them), amid a successful tour that Forbes estimates will make her a billionaire by the end of this year.

Curious to see the spaces Swift inhabits? See below for a closer look at the star’s properties.

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GTCRFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo

October 3, 2023No comments
Tom Ford Buys Jackie O.’s former Hamptons

Tom Ford has paid $52 million for Lasata, the Hamptons estate where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent her childhood summers, the Wall Street Journal reported. The property went on the market for $55 million in May, more than double what the seller, film producer David Zander, paid for it in 2018 from another fashion designer, Reed Krakoff. The sale closed last week.

The sale occurs less than a year after Estée Lauder struck a roughly $2.8 billion deal to acquire Tom Ford’s fashion label. The fashion mogul has since made several real estate purchases, including a modern Palm Beach mansion, for which he shelled out $51 million in December 2022 and later swapped for an even larger 1930 abode in the same area owned by private equity CEO Brian Kosoy in an off-market transaction, per the Real Deal.

lasta

Stephen Kent Johnson/OTTO

Lasata’s guests are welcomed by chic lounge seating.

Located in East Hampton, New York, Lasata—or “place of peace” in the Algonquin language of the native Montaukett people—was originally built in 1917 in the Arts and Crafts style for Manhattan lawyer George Wellington Schurman before changing hands in 1925 to John Vernou Bouvier Jr., a lawyer who became a grandfather to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Little Edie Beale, and Lee Radziwill. Young Onassis and her six siblings returned to the grand 10-bedroom manse in summers, learning to ride horses and likely meandering the property’s unending orchards. The property spans roughly seven acres, including a two-bedroom guesthouse, a caretaker’s cottage, a pool house, and a three-car garage.

See Inside Jackie Kennedy’s Summer Home
lasta

In 2007, fashion designer Reed Krakoff and his wife, interior designer Delphine Krakoff, bought the grand 10-bedroom abode for $20 million. Eleven years later in 2018, producer David Zander nabbed it for

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August 17, 2023No comments
Thailand ranked among the 10 best countries for expats

Thailand ranked among the 10 best countries for expats. Annual survey reveals Thailand is growing in popularity with expats. Thailand has been ranked among the top 10 places for expats to live, according to the annual Expat Insider Survey carried out by InterNations. The latest rankings see Thailand move up to 6th place from 8th place in 2022 and 14th place in 2021. Each year, InterNations, a global community for people who live and work abroad, conducts its Expat Insider survey. Now in its tenth year, the survey quizzes over 12,000 expats to generate a ranking of 53 countries across the world. It analyzes factors such as quality of life, ease of settling in, personal finance, and more.

InterNations, the world’s largest expat community with more than 4.8 million members, ranked Mexico (1st), followed by Spain, Panama, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Bahrain, and Portugal (10th) as the best destinations for expats in 2023. The worst destinations for expats were found to be Kuwait (53rd), Norway, Türkiye, South Korea, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Malta, New Zealand, and Japan (44th). According to the survey’s findings, Thailand ranked 6th place overall and came in 1st in the category of finding affordable housing. The report stated that “for expats, it is easy to afford a comfortable life in Thailand, and they are happy with the leisure options and the friendliness of the local residents.” Thailand was described as the “perfect place for thrifty expats.” The survey found that expats’ money goes a long way in Thailand, with 76% rating the general cost of living positively.

July 13, 2023No comments
Cameron Diaz Takes Us Inside Her Gleaming, Kelly Wearstler–Designed Apartment

Cameron Diaz is that rare actress who can rock a surfboard as convincingly as she does the red carpet. Whether riding a rogue wave or a wave of publicity, the towering blond, blue-eyed beauty with the blinding smile oozes glamour both on and off the screen. So it makes sense that when it came time to rethink the interior of her apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, Diaz looked to the West Coast’s reigning queen of razzle-dazzle, Kelly Wearstler, to give the space a healthy dose of Hollywood swagger.

Diaz found a kindred spirit in Wearstler. “I blame my love of sparkly, shiny things on my Cuban roots,” says the Southern California–born actress, who points to the formative years she spent on the beach for her tomboyish ways. “But I also wanted a place that felt very homey, very tactile. Kelly is unparalleled when it comes to striking that mix.”

Diaz—whose breakout role was in the 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary—owned the 2,400-square-foot prewar apartment for several years before she decided to heed the impulse she had on first seeing the place, which featured all-white rooms done up in a vaguely nautical theme.

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May 26, 2023No comments