The Real Estalker – Ali Landry Lists Spanish Casa in Los Feliz
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
SELLER: Ali Landry and Alejandro Monteverde
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $ 1,925,000
SIZE: 3,700 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It’s not so tough to spot a celebrity or “celebrity” owned home when online listings make a point to call it out as “Celebrity Owned.” Such is the case with the online marketing materials for a fairly modest if hardly inexpensive Spanish style casa in Los Angeles’s star-studded Los Feliz community owned by model/actress/entertainment news hostess Ali Landry who shares with her Mexican-born filmmaker husband of six or seven years, Alejandro Monteverde, and listed it this week on the open market with a price tag of $ 1,995,000.
Miz Landry, native of the great state of Loozeeanna, is a brown haired bayou babe turned beauty queen who may have come in 7th at the 1990 Miss Teen USA competition but took home the sash and crown as Miss Louisiana USA in 1995 and, the following year, Miss USA. For several years in the late 1990s she was best known as the wholesome yet smoldering, gymnastically inclined spokeswoman for Doritos brand chips. In 1998 she was named to People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People and she popped up in all her scantily clad physical glory on the 100 Sexiest Women lists for both FHM and Stuff Magazine.
Her television career picked up a little steam in the late 1990s and early Aughts with recurring roles on Pensacola: Wings of Gold, Felicity, and Eve. Nowadays, among other mostly ho-hum Showbiz projects, she regularly hosts Tinseltown award show fashion wrap ups for TV Guide and occasionally guest hosts on E! News.
Since 2006 she’s been married to and making babies with Mexican-born filmmaker Alejandro Monteverde whom she met at a church bible study. The couple have been open—public, really—about their decision to abstain from sex before they were married. That’s really neither here nor there as regards to the real estate matter at hand but it is probably pretty damn unusual in the sexually gluttonous land of Hollywood hook ups and does sort of tie in to a recent interview she gave during which she stated that she and hubby “are seeking to provide more Christian based entertainment projects” such as the direct to DVD Me Again staring Miz Landry, David, A.R. White, and Hollywood holly roller Della Reese.
Despite her more than two decades in the Business of Show, Miz Landry is is perhaps still most famous—at least in the snarky eyes of schadenfreude bitten celebrity bloggers and gossip glossy readers—not so much for her professional accomplishments as for her six year relationship and two-week, whiplash marriage to swahvey t.v. personality Mario Lopez in 2004. By her own public account she dumped his meticulously manicured and man-scaped dog-ass due to his inability to keep it in his pants.*
Property records show Miz Landry purchased her vintage Spanish casa in the prosperous hills of Los Feliz in January 2004—just before her marriage mistake with Mario Lopez—for $ 1,099,000. Current listing details show the updated 1927 Spanish residence has a total of four bedrooms and three bathrooms in about about 3,700 square feet. For the record, the L.A. County Tax Man puts the house at 2,781 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Make of the discrepancies what you will.
Set a bit above the street the asymmetrical structure visually coalesces at its center where a turret stands next to an elaborately tiled archway that effectively signifies the main entrance and connects through to a tight, partially tiled entry portico. Inside there are cocoa brown hardwood floors, original stained glass windows and vibrant tile detail work, most of which does not appear to be original but—what do we know?—very well may be. A gently coved ceiling provides both a soupçon of grandeur and a feeling of cozy intimacy in the living room where a rustic wood mantelpiece surrounds a wood-burning fireplace with decorative iron screen and French doors provide direct access to an elevated terrace with over-the-tree-tops view.
The formal dining room has a wood-paneled ceiling (that we don’t particularly care for) and an off-center French door with direct terrace access. A two-tiered antique chandelier effectively apes the overlapping circular shapes in the abstract artwork and lights a rustic farmhouse table topped with a hodgepodge of stone, ceramic and glass things. The adjacent kitchen doesn’t appear in listing photos to be particularly big but is well equipped with an “eat in island” plus commercial-style range top backed by an extra wide tiled inset arch. The medium brown raised panel cabinetry and the mottled granite counter tops are big snooze for Your Mama but the copper apron front sink is decadent in a way we can appreciate.
The upper level master suite, furnished with a behemoth four-poster bed and settee that appear to consume almost the entire space, has a weirdly pitched ceiling and direct access to a city view veranda. The attached master bathroom is “Moroccan style” according to listing details and also has a slightly cattywompus ceiling. It also has a long sink vanity, a semi-private crapper cubicle, and a free-standing soaking tub set on a stone tile floor in front of a pebble stone-tiled arch-shape punctuated by three smaller, wood-lined arched insets for displaying candles, bubble bath products and other bath time accouterment.
Two more family bedrooms share a hall bathroom and a fourth bedroom with private bathroom offers a separate entrance that’s perfect for live-in domestic staff and naughty, boundary-crossing house guests—like Your Mama’s dear old boozy b.f.f. Fiona Trambeau—who have an uncontrollable and prurient tendency to squirrel someone in for an indiscriminate slap and tickle without their host(s) being the wiser. Anyways…
The living and dining room (as well as the kitchen) connect to a spacious and elevated pergola shaded terrace for dining, lounging and barbecuing. A lower level walk out basement family room has white washed brick walls, ashy brown wood floors and bursts at its brick seams with what appear to be a carefully if exuberantly curated and displayed assortment of vintage flea market finds and religious iconography. Listing details show the faux-basement has a fireplace and a wide bank of sliding French doors that open to a compact, plaza-like Mexican-paver tiled terrace with a tiled quarter moon-shaped fountain that does double duty as a spa.
We really don’t know where Miz Landry and Mister Monteverde plan to move but we’d bet both out long-bodied bitches that their desire to move has something to do with their recent announcement that they’re expecting a third child. Mazel tov!
*Okay, people, use yer noggins. Miz Landry didn’t call him a “dog-ass” say he didn’t “keep it in his pants” or otherwise publicly discuss Mister Lopez’s obviously laborious grooming habits. Not so far as we know anyways. But she is on record repeatedly saying she kicked Mister Lopez to the curb—or whatever the kids call dumping a dog-ass spouse or trifling baby daddy nowadays—due to his infidelity.
listing photos: Keller Williams / Los Feliz
The Real Estalker
