SELLER: Katy Perry
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $ 6,925,000
SIZE: 8,835 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 7 full and 4 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama has been hearing for months already that Miz Perry wants to unload her never-lived in L.A. compound, Park Hill, and—so the scuttlebutt went—she unsuccessfully had it shopped around off-market for a few months in the high seven millions before finally hoisting the grand estate on the open market today with an official (and notably lower) asking price of $ 6,925,000.

In June 2011, almost a year after nine time Grammy-nominated international pop music super star Katy Perry wed her now ex-husband—that would be raunchy and unkempt looking British comedian Russell Brand—in a lavish ceremony in India they dropped six and a half million clams on Park Hill, an historic, double-gated celebrity-style compound of nearly three acres nestled onto a private promontory just above the frequently traffic clogged mouth of Laurel Canyon in West Hollywood (CA).

According to the good people at Paradise Leased and The Movieland Directory, Park Hill was built in the mid-1920s for successful real estate developer C.F. DeWitt who lived in the house until shortly after his wife committed suicide in the house in the mid-1930s. Eventually the house was bought by Dan Laiken, the ex-CEO of National Lampoon who was put in the pokey in 2010 on a securities fraud conviction. It was Mister Laiken’s people who sold the house to Miz Perry and Mister Brand.

Alas, the erstwhile couple broke up in a blaze of tabloid publicity and speculation just a few months after purchasing Park Hill. Mister Brand chivalrously granted complete ownership of Park Hill to Miz Perry who—so we’ve been told by someone in the position to know—never actually occupied the property. (She moved, instead, to a modest if hardly inexpensive rental in a storied West Hollywood apartment house and he snatched up a contemporary crib at the tippy-top of the Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip where all the streets are named after—you got it—birds.)

Current listing details reveal Miz Perry’s unwanted real estate albatross looms over a parking lot-sized motor court, stands three stories high at the back, measures in at a roomy but hardly humongous 8,835 square feet and contains a total of seven bedrooms, seven full and four half bathrooms. There are also two fireplaces—living room and library—and loads of original architectural detailing and vintage fixtures such as the silhouette chandelier that hangs in the stone-walled and marble floored front foyer and stair hall.

The mansion’s public rooms are nothing if not baronial and include a capacious, 45-foot long double-height living room with dark-stained wood floors, a heavy beamed wood ceiling, massive carved stone fireplace that originally warmed an Italian castle and a towering Palladian window that opens to a small terrace with big city view. The room’s quirky pièce de résistance is an old timey minstrel’s gallery from where musician once serenaded residents and party attending guests. The partially panelled dining room isn’t exactly the size of a royal banquet hall but is absolutely impressive with its hand-stenciled honeycomb pattern wood ceiling.

Some of the other living and entertaining spaces include a library with fireplace, media lounge, and spacious, center island country kitchen with snack counter, built-in banquette seating, high grade appliances and fixtures and an adjoining breakfast room with a hand-painted groin vaulted ceiling. All in all it looks like the kitchen in a suburban macmansion but anyone who pay seven million for this place can surely afford to replace the existing kitchen with something more stylish and/or suitable for a house of this magnitude.

The bulk of the property’s landscaped grounds are at the front of the house where’s there’s a giant circular drive but there are balconies and terraces all around, some with city views, and tucked back into the steep, planted hillside there’s a lagoon-style swimming pool with waterfall.

In addition to the main manse, the impressively scaled compound includes a two story detached structure with a three car garage upstairs and a caretakers apartment plus art/music studio below. A second detached guest house sits high on the hillside above the swimming on a legally separate lot and includes a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom according to listing details.

listing photos: Teles Properties
The Real Estalker

Your Mama has known for quite some time now that pop music superstar Katy Perry has been house hunting in Los Angeles and that she’s eager to get rid of Park Hill, the nearly three acre gated estate she and ex-husband Russell Brand bought for $ 6.5 million back in their happier matrimonial days (June, 2011) but never actually occupied. We even snitched such to the children in early February (2013).

So, it comes as no surprise then that celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ reported this week that otherwise unidentified “real estate sources” told them that Miss Perry would liked to have quietly sold the 8,835 square foot 1920s Mediterranean in an off-market deal for close to eight million clams. Alas, despite being shopped around off market and toured by a handful of qualified buyers—including, it was tattled to Your Mama, to at least one famously real estate obsessed actor—the 7 bedroom and 9 bathroom residence remains a costly high maintenance albatross around Miss Perry’s real estate neck.

The folks at TMZ went on to report that ex-Missus Brand is getting increasingly antsy and actually plans to foist the Laurel Canyon crib on the open market in two weeks and that the asking price will be in the “mid 7s.” TMZ‘s snitch went on to say that Miss Perry might be willing to sell the property in the high six millions if someone would just offer it. One of Your Mama’s better connected celebrity real estate canaries told us not too long ago she might even be willing to take even less, something closer to a break even point, but that’s just some real estate rumor and gossip that you did not hear from Your Mama.

aerial photo: Pacific Coast News
The Real Estalker

BUYERS: Richard Perry (and Jane Fonda)
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $ 7,300,000
SIZE: 7,513 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama gets loads of emails and phone calls from all-kinda folks who want know who bought what, where and for how much. Over the last few months we’ve received an unexpected and unusual number of queries about the real estate activities of later-in-life lovebirds Richard Perry and Jane Fonda.

Mister Perry is an accomplished music producer of the highest magnitude with more than a dozen gold records and a slew of A-grade credits with superstars like Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Diana Ross, the divine Martha Reeves, Babs herself, Percy Faith, the Pointer Sisters, Leo Sayer, Donna Summer, Neil Diamond and Andy Williams, to name just a handful or two. Miz Fonda is, natch, the Jane Fonda, the snappy, smart and sassy two-time Oscar winning actress/activist/aerobics instructor once, best and still known in many circles as the campy but preposterously sexy Barbarella and/or the political lightening rod Hanoi Jane.

The queries began almost immediately after our June 2012 (dis and) discussion of the celebrity pedigreed Sunset Strip home Mister Perry then owned, unofficially but openly shared with Miz Fonda and had up for sale for nearly $ 13 million. Finally for the curious, there’s an answer via the long-legged gal at Trulia Luxe Living. Mister Perry and Miz Fonda have decamped the lower Sunset Strip for the stylishly au courant Trousdale Estates ‘hood at the very eastern edge of Beverly Hills (CA). Property records show the gated and completely renovated residence was actually acquired by Mister Perry at the tail end of June 2012 for $ 7,300,000.*

Listing information still available on the internets shows the original residence was built in 1961, had not been on the market in 44 years and had been the long-time home of a “legendary TV & film director.” That Tinseltown legend turns out to have been recently deceased and wildly prolific three-time Emmy winner John Rich. Although Mister Rich worked regularly well into the late 1990 he started out way back in the middle 50s (I Married Joan, Where’s Raymond). His Showbiz Salad Days were, arguably, the early 1960s to the early 1980s when he directed and/or produced numerous episodes of a long list of iconic sitcoms and westerns that include The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, the Brady Bunch, That Girl, All in the Family and Benson.

Anyhoo, listing information goes on to indicate the spacious and re-conceived mid-century modern has four bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 7,513 square feet.

The jagged, angular exterior opens to an airy, multi-level interior with long expanses of crisp white walls, vaulted and beamed ceilings, glass-railed staircases and long ribbons of windows and sliding doors. In addition to some of the more (melo)dramatic flourishes such as an all-glass elevator, the house is chock full of fancy-pants eco-friendly features such as bamboo floors, photovoltaic solar panels, three ventless bio-ethanol fueled fireplaces and double-glazed thermal windows with motorized shades.

The foyer flows into a reception lounge large enough to accommodate a baby grand piano. A short but wide set of steps descends into the formal living room proper that’s anchored by a sturdy stacked stone fireplace and visually open to the outdoors through a towering wall of windows that extend from the knees to the ceiling.

The open-concept dining room and kitchen has a second (bio fuel) fireplace exotically set into a wall of glass that allows the fire to be seen and enjoyed both inside and outside. It’s an undeniably extraordinary and architecturally arresting visual feature, a real-live, more is more WOW! moment. Howevuh, not that it matters a lick and just between us chickens here, Your Mama thinks that fireplace conceit is a bit too too, you know? Especially in a residence that already has a glass-walled elevator.

Anyhoo, the expensively equipped kitchen and adjoining butler’s pantry orbits around a massive center island with lowered snack counter. The streamlined but still organic-minded kitchen has all the expected upscale finishes and swank accoutrement that includes what may or may not be walnut cabinetry, mossy green quartz counter tops, top-quality commercial style appliances and a flat screen t.v. that lifts up out of the counter top at the touch of a button.**

The master suite includes a walled sunken sitting room with another one of those (bio fuel) fireplaces set into a wall of glass—once really is enough when it comes to a showstopper like this—and a pair of large bathrooms with steam showers, soaking tubs and radiant heated floors. There’s also at least one to-die-for-sized walk-in closet with icky tan wall-to-wall carpeting, walls lined with miles of hanging racks and a nipple-high built-in dresser stuck smack in the center of the room.

A separate lower-level media/game room, accessible via a glass-railed stairway or that painstakingly engineered glass-elevator, has cork floors and plenty of space for a pool table, television/movie viewing lounge, and a booze-hound’s dream bar with sink, dishwasher, ice maker and under-counter wine fridge.

Multiple outdoor living areas include a couple of dining decks directly off the kitchen that overlook the swimming pool, a serene side terrace with stone fountain and a lounging nook set high enough in a concrete wall as to be difficult to climb into without a stepping stool and a flat grassy pad with outdoor fireplace and views that extend down the canyons and across the city.

A deep overhang shades the lower level rooms and runs around two sides of the dark bottomed rectangular swimming pool. Sunbathing terraces run along either side of the pool, away from the house to a slightly raised deck that pushes out over the canyon.

Back in late June (2012), right about the time Mister Perry closed on his and Miz Fonda’s new love nest in Trousdale Estates, Your Mama discussed the much more traditional mini-mansion in the lower Sunset Strip area that Mister Perry owned and and had on the open market with an idealistic but ultimately unrealistic $ 12,750,000 price tag. The asking price for the 5 bedroom and 8 bathroom knoll-top house, originally built for Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, eventually plunged to $ 10,000,000 before a somewhat mysterious corporate entity came along and purchased the property for $ 8,500,000.

Miz Fonda, who may or may not still maintain a one bedroom and 1.5 bathroom rental apartment at the star-studded Sierra Towers building, also long-maintained a 4,764 square foot multi-unit combination penthouse in Atlanta, GA that she unsuccessfully  first attempted to sell for $ 4,500,000 in May 2010. By June 2012 the asking price had crashed to just $ 1,195,000. As far as we can tell, the penthouse has yet to sell but does not appear to currently be listed for sale on the open market.

*Miz Fonda’s name does not appear on any of the property records documents we peeped but that does not mean she does not have some sort of stake in the place.

**It could be a press of a button that causes the t.v. to rise up out of the counter top but it could also be a flip of the switch or the swipe of a hand-held touch screen or some other action our caffeine starved brain can’t even conceive right now.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills South

The Real Estalker

SELLER: Richard Perry
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $ 12,750,000
SIZE: 5,935 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Legendary music producer Richard Perry has quietly hoisted his long-time Los Angeles, CA residence, perched on a private knoll on a narrow, curving street just above the Sunset Strip, on the open market with an asking price of $ 12,750,000.

Mister Perry’s high-flying, professional salad days were unquestionably the 1970s an 80s when he produced more than a dozen gold and platinum albums for music industry movers and shakers such as Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Diana Ross, Leo Sayer, Neil Diamond, Martha Reeves and Captain Beefheart. Although the septuagenarian still keeps his professional toe in the water, nowadays he’s more likely to be most familiar with gossip glossy readers as the very tan man-friend of still-sizzling-at-75 Jane Fonda.

Property records aren’t specific as to when Mister Perry acquired his Sunset Strip residence or how much music industry moolah he coughed up for it but current listing information shows the gated estate was originally built in 1942—for Ronald Reagan and first wife Jane Wyman—and occupies an elevated .72 acre hillock with nearly unobstructed 340-degree views over the twinkling lights of Tinseltown.

The main house, set high above the street on a steep bluff, measures in at a sizable but hardly huge 5,935 square feet, and includes a total of 5 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms; a paneled formal living room with fireplace; formal dining room; library; wine cellar; indoor and out door spas; and a master suite with fireplace and dual poopers. At least one room in the house has a boozer-friendly, built-in wet bar and walls lined floor to ceiling with scads of photographs of famous people and gold records.

Listing information shows the property offers upwards of ten off-street parking spaces along the wide, gated driveway that swoops up past the north-south aligned lighted tennis court and around the front of the house to a small motor court and three-car garage. The swimming pool and adjacent Balinese-style pool pavilion are somewhat awkwardly situated across the driveway on a large flat plateau.

Some of Mister Perry’s nearby neighbors include English actor Michael York, decorator/restaurateur Lynn von Kersting—co-owner of showbiz industry eatery The Ivy on Robertson Boulevard—and movie producer John Goldwyn and his hotelier man-mate Jeff Klein who owns the chic, celeb-stocked Sunset Tower Hotel.

Miz Fonda decamped Atlanta a few years ago and rented an apartment in Los Angeles at the star-studded Sierra Towers building just off the Sunset Strip where other high-profile condo owners include (but are not limited to) pickled and preserved Showbiz and music industry icons like Sharon Osbourne, Cher, Joan Collins, Diahann Carol and Elton John.

The children may recall Your Mama discussed Miz Fonda’s airy, art- and crafts-filled loft with its mortifying Pepto-Bismal-pink, womb-like entrance hall back in May 2010 when it was first put on the open market with an asking price of $ 4,500,000. Unfortunately for Hanoi Jane, the 4,764 square foot loft hasn’t yet appealed to a buyer and the price has been slashed to $ 1,195,000.

Miz Fonda recently told former D-list turned B-plus-list comedienne Kathy Griffin that she hasn’t spent a single night in her rented 1 bedroom and 1.5 bathroom rental, preferring instead to shack up at Mister Perry’s pad from where she said she can see her (unused) apartment from the bathroom window.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills South

The Real Estalker

SELLER: Katy Perry
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: (reportedly) $ 2,750,000
SIZE: 1,450 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It will come as no surprise to celebrity real estate watchers that soon-to-be divorced blue-haired pop star Katy Perry wants to unload the petite New York City penthouse she bought just before her extravagant wedding to English comedian Russell Brand in the fall of 2010.

No official listing for Perry’s penthouse appears online—at least not one Your Mama could find in our two admittedly half-assed few minutes of looking—but recent reports out of New York City indicate the California Gurl wants $ 2,750,000 for the loft-like aerie in TriBeCa that records reveal she scooped up in September 2010 for $ 2,680,000.

Listing information from the time Miz Perry purchased the penthouse shows it measures about 1,500 square feet with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, living room with exposed wood ceiling and built-in cherry wood cabinetry, a stainless steel kitchen open to the dining area, and a lower level limestone bathroom with radiant heated floor. A sculptural cherry wood staircase winds up to the penthouse’s petite second floor master bedroom that does not appear in the floor plan to have a single closet but does offer a convenient if itty-bitty bathroom and direct access to a south facing terrace with open city views.

Your Mama discussed Miz Perry’s penthouse pied a terre back in September 2010 when she added the penthouse to her property portfolio. The children will note that, as of this morning, the above listing photos and floor plan for Miz Perry’s penthouse are from the time and show it as it was when she acquired it and, depending on any alterations they may have made, may not be a very good indication of the state of things today.

It’s not clear if Miz Perry’s soon-to-be ex-husband Mister Brand has any official/legal ownership of the penthouse but at the time of the purchase an anonymous source told the NY Post the couple purchased the property to help with their (no doubt) considerable tax burden. Make of that what you will.

Mister Brand and Miz Perry married in a lavish ceremony on a tiger preserve in India did not, for reasons unfathomable to Your Mama, sign a prenuptial agreement. Lucky for her Hello Kitty pocketbook, in a chivalrous (and probably good-for-publicity) move Mister Brand has allegedly declined the to accept the 50% portion of Miz Perry’s earnings he’s legally entitled to, which would be somewhere around twenty million clams.

That’s all well and good but what Your Mama really wants to know is what’s going to happen to the Los Angeles mansion the once happy couple picked up last summer for $ 6,500,000. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

listing photos and floor plan: Corcoran

The Real Estalker