Archive for October 2011

Monday Morsel: Big Bang's Simon Helberg



SELLER: Simon Helberg
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $849,000
SIZE: 2,569 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Today's second morsel comes by way of Zillow who last week beat us to the punch on their report about The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helberg pushing his (relatively) modest and charming if not exactly inexpensive Los Angeles, CA crib on the market for $849,000.

Mister Helberg may not, we recognize, be a household name or tabloid fixture but he was none-the-less born and bred in Tinseltown. His father is comedy actor Sandy Helberg (Spinal Tap, High Anxiety) and his mother Harriet Helberg a (former) casting agent for t.v. shows like Night Court movies like The Jazz Singer. Mister Helberg the younger, now in his early 30s and married to actress Jocelyn Towne, has been floating professionally around Hollywood since the early Noughts. Before landing on the Emmy-winning sleeper hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory in 2007 he had recurring roles on a number of tee-vee series including MADtv, Joey and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

As noted, property records show unlucky in real estate Mister Helberg purchased the residence in May 2008 for $950,000. Mister Helberg's property, while not without copious charms, won't be most real estate snobs idea of a dream house as it sits smack in the heart of a densely-packed neighborhood many fancy-pants Angelenos may have been through but probably not to, a leafy and palm tree-sprinkled enclave in the northern reaches of the decidedly down market Koreatown neighborhood between downtown and the historic (and far more upscale) Hancock Park.

Anyhoo, a few quick flicks of the well-worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that even with an unlikely full-price sale Mister Helberg faces a not insubstantial loss of $101,000 not counting carrying costs, upgrade and renovation expenses and real estate fees.

Listing information shows the restored and updated 1910 Craftsman-style residence measures 2,569 square feet with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathroom. A detached single car garage at the rear of the property has and attached office and bathroom and upstairs there's a self-contained guest suite with vaulted ceilings, private bathroom and open plan living area with full kitchen.

A covered porch at the front of the house marks the entry into a long entry/living room with stained-glass windows, wood floors, beamed ceiling, and stone fireplace. Built-in, half-height book shelves separate the living area from a lounge/reading nook with window seats tucked under the windows.

The dining room, one entire wall fitted with a built-in buffet with glass-doored cabinets, leads into the kitchen, updated with a Suburu-sized Viking range with 8 burners and two ovens, A family room at the back of the house has a bank of French doors that slide (as opposed to swing) open to a small deck that steps down to a wee tiled terrace in the back yard.

Lawn surrounds the wee tiled terrace and extends back to the detached single car garage/office/guest house.

listing photos: Nourmand & Associates

Monday Morsel: Snapper David La Chapelle

BUYER: David LaChapelle
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,739,500
SIZE: 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Today's first tidbit comes courtesy of the fine folks at Curbed who recently revealed saucy, surrealistic and some might say soo-blime photographer and artist David LaChapelle recently coughed up $1,739,500 for a spectacularly re-done if somewhat sedate new apartment in New York City townhouse built in 1854.

For many years Mister LaChapelle, a staple on the downtown NYC arts, culture and nightlife scenes for–dare we say–decades, lived in the East Village but apparently plans to move on over to the west side where he's acquired a one bedroom and one bathroom parlor floor apartment at the western end of Chelsea, once The Big Apple's gayest neighborhood, now home to the super-fab High Line, a number of excellent dining establishments and a thick crush of high-brow art galleries.

Listing information and marketing materials for the floor through residence show it encompasses a three generous but far from gigantic rooms placed front to back, each with marble fireplace. When the French and pocket doors the divide the rooms are all open the tow allow a view from the front of the apartment clear through the back and out the over-sized bay window that opens to a north-facing private terrace set into the tree tops.

The center room, in its current decorative configuration, does triple duty as the entry, dining room and office area. To the south, through elaborate French doors with side lights and fan-shaped transom, the lone bedroom offers a pair of south facing windows that look out onto the leafy street. The architect and/or decorator solved the closet problem–there is not according to the floor plan a single built-in closet in the entire apartment–with a matching pair of custom-designed and manly-looking wardrobes.

The main living area at the far back of the apartment has a flat screen tee-vee mounted over a chocolate marble mantel, a pair of built-in book-case, a deep bay window, and a sliver-wide kitchen with integrated appliances and white Shaker-style cabinetry topped by thick slabs of grey-veined white marble.

The dynamite old-school Italianate architectural details such as the elaborate plaster moldings–either preserved and restored or painstakingly re-created–and the finely-finished masculine-edged day-core belie the wired up reality of the one-bedroom residence equipped with a new-fangled Crestron home automation system that controls the lighting, integrated audio and visual systems, and electronically operated window treatments.

Your Mama has discussed Mister LaChapelle previously. In the early days of 2009 we prattled on about a 1924 Spanish style casa tucked snugly up into the hillside behind the Chateau Marmont Hotel owned by Mister LaChapelle and at that time listed with an asking price of $1,550,000. Property records show Mister LaChapelle sold the house for fifty grand over asking price in December of the same year to a noted L.A.-based art photographer.

Prior to that, back in the celebrity real estate Dark Ages of January 2007, Your Mama ooed and cooed over the 1,350 square foot two-bedroom East Village apartment Mister LaChapelle had listed at $1,995,000. The apartment was taken off and put back on the market a time or two and the asking price eventually fell to $1,695,000 when it evaporated from the open market in April 2009. The peeps at Property Shark show the famous photographer finally sold his East Village white elephant in June of this year (2011) to an corporate entity for $1,683,000.

Mister LaChapelle may be the most famous photographer to currently reside in the building but he isn't the only high profile photographer who has owed a piece of the townhouse pie. Property records show way back in 2005 Diego Uchitel, another high-profile picture snapper of famous folks, sold a similarly sized one bedroom and one bathroom floor through apartment for $1,295,000. Mister Uchitel's old apartment was until a couple weeks ago listed with a $1,400,000 price tag and some of the children may recall that over the summer Mister Uchitel and his fashion executive wife put their stylish upstate New York bolt hole on the market at $2,995,000. We're not sure what's happened to this listing and we haven't yet bothered to look. We'll amend when we get around to it.

listing photos: Stribling New York

Book Review: Unreal Estate

After much anticipation amongst real estate-o-philes in Los Angeles and no doubt around the world author and journalist Michael Gross' latest exposé Unreal Estate finally hits the bookstores and online retailers tomorrow.

We are a fan. And not, mind y'all, just because a substantial quote by yours truly appears on the book jacket and not either because we are also referenced and quoted repeatedly in chapter three. It's because, for better and worse, we love a thick and juicy real estate tale of the rich and famous and at that Mister Gross is a master.

Many of the children surely already know–and all of the children who care a whit about such trivial matters should–Mister Gross penned 740 Park, a delectably hair-raising history of 740 Park Avenue–one of the most exclusive and enigmatic buildings in New York City–and its parade of improbably wealthy residents.

Your Mama spent a good portion of the unusually warm weekend tucked into a butterfly chair in our shaded back yard with an advanced copy of Unreal Estate, a 500-page tome that exhaustively unravels the hidden histories of more than a dozen of Los Angeles' greatest and most storied estates in what's commonly called the Platinum Triangle, the high-priced nexus of Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills and Bel Air. The rarefied high maintenance real estate, as delish as it is to read about, acts primarily as the lubricant for Mister Gross' real subject(s): the astonishingly luxurious, weirdly insular, sometimes sordid, often unsavory and frequently tragic palace intrigues of their (usually) well-heeled and (always) high-living residents.

Take for instance the extreme decadence and rather sordid melodrama that has surrounded Grayhall, a vast, 20-bathroom Beverly Hills pile built by a Boston banker and later owned by a laundry list of Tinseltown legends like silent film superstar Douglas Fairbanks, too-tan actor/gadabout George Hamilton who lived in unhappy ickiness in the posh mansion with his brother and mother, a high-flying (and shady-seeming) international financier named Bernie Cornfeld who, like Hugh Hefner, housed a bevy young women in dorm-like bedrooms, and Herbalife's multi-level marketing master Mark Hughes and two of his wives.

Tabloid-inclined readers will enjoy the scads of scandalicious morsels about about west coast movers and shakers like now deceased Holmby Hills resident Alfred Bloomingdale, heir to the eponymous department store fortune, Ronald Reagan kitchen cabinet member, and enjoyer of kinky sex who kept a much younger mistress on retainer for a dozen years. His long-time wife and widow Betsy remains ensconced in the couple's grand Delfern Drive mansion and a prominent and powerful force amongst the hoitiest of the toitiest in Los Angeles' haute society.

Then there's poor Dolly Green, the privileged daughter of Burton Green, a co-founder of Beverly Hills. The grande dame, sometimes portrayed by Mister Gross as rather crass and course, lived large and fast but ultimately died alone but for and at the mercy of her domestic staff and legal advisers. Miz Green lived lavishly in a spectacular Wallace Neff-designed mansion on Bellagio Road in Bel Air now owned by soap opera tycoon Bill Bell and his philanthropically-minded wife Maria.

We recommend Unreal Estate be read in close proximity to an internet-abled computer because it's good fun to key in the (often provided) addresses of the discussed estates for a delicious aerial peep of the very real unreality of real estate in the Platinum Triangle.

Late last week the Deadline Hollywood blog announced that Mister Gross' book has been optioned by the folks at HBO for a Joel Silver-produced series. Mavel tov Mister Gross!

Mister Gross will be reading from Unreal Estate in New York Wednesday (Barnes and Noble on East 86th Street at 7pm) and at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles on November 10 at 7pm.

photo: Broadway Books

Tips for Organizing Your Recipes


When it comes timeto actually think about making that interesting pasta dish, it’s often nearlyimpossible to locate the recipe. Why not start out with a simple organizationproject that will make looking for that recipe so much easier!
First off, gothrough all the recipes you’ve ripped out of magazines on a whim and discardany you really don’t think you’ll use. If you’ve got recipes floating about inyour Email Inbox or saved in your Favorites, now is the time to go through them,print off the ones you think you’ll use, and delete the rest. Use one of theseideas to organize them:

  • Place them in a photo album with self adhesive pages.
  • Copy them onto recipe cards and use dividers to organize a recipe box.
  • Use a three ring binder and protect pages with plastic protector sheets.
  • Organize recipes in an accordion file with various categories.

To easily retrieveyour recipes, separate them into different categories that make sense to you.It could be "Ones to Try", "Old Faves", "MainDishes", "Desserts", etc. You can always change the categoriesin the future if need be -- the main thing is to get them into some kind oforder.
Like many things inlife, organization is a key to success. Meal planning and cooking will becomeso much easier once you can find what you’re looking for. So set aside a blockof time and start getting organized!

Ipull out all the stops to sell your home.
Lonnie Snyder
REALTOR ®
Keller WilliamsRealty Southeast Sound
Phone:  206-406-2710           
 

LonnieSnyder is a full time real estate agent and REALTOR® with Keller WilliamsRealty specializing in Residential Real Estate for buyers and sellers inWashington's Kent, Renton, Newcastle and South Bellevue.

Roasted Garlic and Brie Appetizer

Here’s a new recipeyou can use and file under Appetizers! The delicate, mellow taste of roastedgarlic ensures this appetizer recipe will be a huge hit. Here’s what you’llneed:

  • 2 - 3 whole garlic bulbs
  • 1 round Brie cheese
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • sliced french bread
  • sliced pears or apples (optional)
 1.) Preheat oven to375 degrees.
2.) Slice end off the garlic bulbs to expose the cloves.
3.) Drizzle olive oil over the cut ends and add a bit of salt & pepper.
4.) Put in aluminum foil cut side up and wrap around the bulb.
5.) Place garlic on a baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes or until cloves aresoft.
6.) Wrap the brie in aluminum foil and bake for the last 20 minutes.
7.) To serve, place brie and garlic on a platter with some bread and fruit. 

Here’s a great tipto keep in mind. If you roast a few extra bulbs of garlic in the oven, you’llhave leftovers to be used for enhancing mashed potatoes, soups or even as a lowfat alternative for garlic bread!

Ipull out all the stops to sell your home.
Lonnie Snyder
REALTOR ®
Keller WilliamsRealty Southeast Sound
Phone:  206-406-2710           
 

LonnieSnyder is a full time real estate agent and REALTOR® with Keller WilliamsRealty specializing in Residential Real Estate for buyers and sellers inWashington's Kent, Renton, Newcastle and South Bellevue.

Clothing Designer Christian Audigier Lists Topanga (CA) Compound


SELLER: Christian Audigier
LOCATION: Topanga, CA
PRICE: $3,299,000
SIZE: 3.15 acres, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama apologizes for today's delay. It's been a trying week to begin with and this morning we were down and out with a still not entirely cleared up technical issue in the form or a misbehaving lap top computer. Almost as soon as we managed to get the lap top bandaged and running on three cylinders we had to dart out to our Beverly Hills dermatologist to have a little thing removed. Needless to say, we're a bit bedraggled and definitely behind the eight ball this Friday and, indeed, this entire week. We will be properly back up in the celebrity real estate saddle soon. Anyhoo, we only digress in our complaints.

Today's celebrity real estate subject comes courtesy of an historic and decoratively idiosyncratic Topanga, CA compound owned by consummate self-promoter/clothing designer Christian Audigier and recently put on the open market with an asking price of $3,299,000. According to the fine folks at Trulia, the neo-Mexi-western meets Tinseltown style compound is also available for lease at a rate of $16,500 per month.

In his teen-aged youth French-born and bred Mister Audigier worked for iconic 1980s Italian fashion label Fiorucci and became–according to the interweb–an in-demand wunderkind of denim who consulted for this, that and a bunch of other designers. Eventually Mister Audigier landed in Los Angeles and lit out on his own. His first real claim to household name fame was the formerly ubiquitous Von Dutch trucker that used to be worn by scad of celebs like Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher and made Mister Audigier a mountain of money and famous the world over.

He followed up Von Dutch, amongst other projects, with Ed Hardy, a casual but glittery brand that consists of anything and everything that can be blinged-out, bedazzled and/or brazenly emblazoned with graffiti and/or a vintage tattoo design: Swarovski crystal-encrusted tennis shoes, you ask? They got 'em; Rhinestone-studded t-shirts for men? Oh yes indeed, children, but only if you dare; Smart phone cases and chintzy key chains? But of course, mon chéri; Mister Audigier, bless his heart, even gets people to pay him–pay him, children–to drive cars that besides getting its owner from place to place acts as a free and moving billboard advertisement for Mister Audigier's Ed Hardy brand.

At some point, it seems, Mister Audigier realized the salad days of too-tan men wearing gold chains and low-rise tattoo-printed jeans have come to a close. A quick perusal of their online shopping portal reveals that much of the newer Ed Hardy merchandise presents itself in a much less sparkly and flamboyant manner than for which it became (in)famous.

Listen chickens, we don't mean to be mean here but let's be dead honest. Whatever one may think of or however one may judge Mister Audigier's unsubtle self-promoting ways, his flashy (and some might say trashy) lifestyle, and his many fad-oriented fashion brands, the man mastered the fine and gruesome retail art of selling bizarrely bedazzled shit for whole lotta shinola. Y'all can crucify him for making bank on all his over-labeled brands but it's not his fault vast numbers of fashion fools were willing to pay upwards of $200 for a t-shirt with a giant rhinestone studded skull on it. It might be harsh for Your Mama to blast off like this but those people who were all too willing to spend real money on Ed Hardy hairdryers and corny sneakers jazzed up with a glittery dragon should have known better. Don't hate the playa, baby, hate the game.

Anyhoo, property records show that it was in July 2008 that Mister Audigier purchased his semi-remote spread nestled high in the Santa Monica Mountains. Tucked into a tight hair pin curve on a winding road that runs between Malibu and Woodland Hills, the irregularly shaped 3.15 acre estate cost Mister Audigier, as per property records, $2,075,000.
Listing information shows the electronically gated compound–the arched sign over the driveway identifies it, natch, as the C-A Ranch–includes a 3 bedroom and 2 bathroom Spanish style main house from 1931 and a quartet of guest cottages. A one-time–and, we presume, deconsecrated–chapel on the property can now used for more heathen purposes generically identified in the listing as "entertainment." We're not sure but we wonder if that stone-walled space shown in listing photographs, the one where several over-sized and differently colored chandeliers are hung low in a wacky cluster over the coffee table, is the old chapel hall. Whatever that room is, it's a miracle some babe in a bedazzled bikini or shirtless male model with a crystal-studded cell phone case haven't sued Mister Audiger after bumping their pretty heads on those darkly beautiful but dangerous-looking things.
 Anyhoo, throughout the house there are vintage Malibu-style tile details and, from the few listing images available, Mister Audigier appears to have done up and worked over the interior spaces with mixy-matchy sort of day-core that includes a saddle or two; one giant ball crafted with itty-bitty bits of driftwood; an Indonesian-looking carved wood fireplace mantel; worn, tufted leather sofas; wall-mounted animal skulls laden with multi-colored cowboy hats; fur bedspreads and pillow shams; deer antler table lamps; and fancy looking guitars set around in unlikely spots. It's visually aggressive and certainly feels to Your Mama more than a little self-conscious. We, in fact, had to steel our battered nerves with a handful of Tootsie Rolls when we really gave the listing photographs a good inspection. Even still, we'd rather stuff our face with candy and look at decorating derring-do like this than one of those mortifying milquetoast (mc)mansions where everything is brown and beige.
A flagstone terrace surrounds surrounds a long and dark-bottomed rectilinear swimming pool. One side of the pool is lined, boo-teek hotel-like, with 10 or 12 chaise lounges, matching market umbrellas and a couple of curtain-lined poolside cabanas for dining and lounging in a shaded environment.

Lush green lawns mix with more desert-friendly landscaping around the house. Pathways meander through thickets of mature oak, pine and olive trees to the various corners of the property that includes a stream and what listing information calls a "young vineyard."

His neo-Mexi-western meets Tinseltown-style compound in Topanga is not, as it turns out, the only of Mister Audigier's decadently dressed homes currently on the market. Just over a year ago, Mister Audigier heaved his highly-styled 8,276 square foot mansion in Los Angeles' hoity-toity Hancock Park 'hood on the market with an $8,299,000 price tag. Since then, Mister Audigier, who bought the 7 bedroom and 7 bathroom residence in early 2007 for $4,780,000, has had the architecturally dignified (but tarted up) 1920s era mansion off and on the market a couple of times. It was re-listed about two weeks ago with a reduced asking price of $7,650,000.

listing photos (both properties): Sotheby's International Realty

British Sketch Comedy King Matt Lucas Snaps Up West Hollywood Mini-Compound


BUYER: Matt Lucas
LOCATION: West Hollywood, CA
PRICE: $2,900,000
SIZE: 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms (total)

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The British are coming! The British are coming! Well, British sketch comedy king Matt Lucas is coming to West Hollywood anyways.

Mister Lucas, a pudgy, pasty-faced, bald-pated and utterly fearless comedian has toiled in Britain's Big Business of Show since the mid-1990s. He rocketed to comedic fame in the mid-Noughts when he co-created, co-wrote, and co-starred in the super-smart, toilet-humored, and deliciously un-p.c. sketch comedy program Little Britain.

On Little Britain, canceled in 2006, Mister Lucas portrayed a slew of jaw-dropping sad-sack characters including Andy Pipkin, a slovenly middle-aged man who pretends to be disabled, and Vicky Pollard, a pink track suit-wearing chav teenager with a brassy blond pony tail and a rat-a-tat-tat motor-mouth. Little Britain had a brief run on American television (2007-2008) but British Humor–caps intended–doesn't always fly with the American telly watching audience and the show was canceled after a single season.

More recently Mister Lucas appeared as both Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and as Kristen Wiig's sublimely creepy roommate Gil in this year's mega-hit Bridesmaids. He currently does it up as a variety of characters on BBC America's Come Fly with Me, a tawdry mock-reality spoof based on a pair of British documentaries about the airline industries. We haven't watched much of the show but what we have viewed makes Your Mama need a nerve pill in all the best and worst ways.

Mister Lucas giddily hinted in the fall of 2010 to Jimmy Fallon he might want to drop any pretense of artistic integrity, "move a bit" to Los Angeles, and "sell out" for fame and fortune. Subsequently, in late August of this year, Mister Lucas announced he planned to move to America–to Hollywood–in order to "make a go of it over there."

We don't know Mister Lucas so we haven't a clue what his professional opportunities or commitments may be but it does appear the man plans to plant some proper real estate roots in Tinseltown. Deeds and documents Your Mama rather randomly ran across show in mid-September (2011) the dryly quick-witted 40-ish year old British comedy phenom dropped a star-sized $2,900,000 on a celebrity-style compound on one of the most desirable streets in West Hollywood, CA.

Your Mama thinks two point nine million is an ass-load of dinero for a house without a swimming pool. But, children, when considering the high price we must also consider Mister Lucas' centrally located and privately situated stateside compound is a veritable Los Angeles Residential Real Estate Unicorn: The compound is actually and in complete truth located in short walking distance to all sorts of places an upscale (and possibly homosexual) resident might want to go like Trader Joe's, the dry cleaner, a fancy gym, well-stocked pharmacy, City Hall for parking permits, and the Pacific Design Center for high-end decorating doo-dads, gew-gaws and hoozy-goozies. Dining options accessible without a car are myriad and include the Restaurant at the Sunset Marquis and the original Barney's Beanery not to mention Nobu and a Koo Koo Roo with outdoor seating.

Anyhoo, the two-residence compound was sold by the estate of recently deceased vocalist/songwriter Gil Garfield whose claim to fame was a few top 10 single hits in the 1950s with a trio called The Cheers. Bert Convey was a third of the trio before he became a game show host. Redfin shows Mister Garfield purchased the property in April 2007 for $3,499,000, a number that means Mister Garfield's estate took a substantial $600,000-plus loss on the property.
In addition to the West Hollywood mini-compound Mister Garfield also owned an historic estate in Palm Springs (sold in May 2011 for $1,750,000) and a John Elgin Woolf-designed and Michael Taylor-decorated Hollywood Regency-style residence just above Los Angeles' Sunset Strip currently on the market for $2,995,000 (shown above). Your Mama hears from our amigo Juan Totellyousomething–a long-time pal of Mister Garfield–that singer Michael Bublé leased the Woolf-designed residence before he bought his Bird Street aerie in the spring of 2009. At one time Mister Garfield also owned the house next door to his Woolf-designed digs that he sold to boo-teek hotelier Jeff Klein, owner of the Sunset Tower Hotel, and his man-mate John Goldwyn, a Hollywood scion and film and television producer (Dexter, Baby Mama).

Anyhoodles poodles, we digress and we're here to discuss Mister Lucas and his new American bolt hole. Listing information for the gated and high-hedged property shows the main house, a single-story Spanish-style casa, was built in 1928 and includes 3 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms. The Los Angeles County Tax Man shows the house measures 2,245 square feet, which may or may not be accurate. The living and entertaining areas of the main house include a large living room with vaulted ceiling and fireplace, formal dining room plus a circular breakfast room, and a state-of-the-art kitchen with stainless steel cabinetry and a massive work island with a view of a courtyard garden through a vast and very contemporary wall of glass.

Lush landscaping, secluded courtyards, open terraces, and a variety of pathways and fountains surround and separate the main house from the unusually large two-story guest house near the back of the property. Listing information shows the guest house encompasses a living area, kitchenette, 2 bedrooms, one bathroom and a roof top terrace accessed by a swooping exterior staircase.

When queried, Señor ToTellyousomething whispered to Your Mama the guest house is "close to" 2,000 square feet and that the lower level, a loft-like space with kitchenette, was used by Mister Garfield as an art studio where he made abstract paintings. The second floor–previously occupied according to  Señor ToTellyousomething by Mister Garfield's private chef/man Friday–contains a bathroom, bedroom and living area that opens through wide banks of sliding windows to a sunny roof terrace with tree top views. Sadly, as mentioned above, the property does not currently have a swimming pool. It should and if Mister Lucas wants Your Mama to shove our big ol' backside into a swimsuit for a pool party–and we're absolutely certain he does not–we recommend the newly expatriated actor add one before next summer. Just a thought.

Welcome to Hollywood Mister Lucas.

listing photos (Lucas compound): Rodeo Realty
listing phtoos (Woolf-designed residence): Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills North

How to Customize Your Decor With Color

You can personalize your next painting project with a color scheme especially suited to your style, taste or even fondest memories. The first step is to find a photograph that recalls a happy trip or vacation. Select the dominant color in that picture as the paint color for your room. For example, a trip to a resort or cottage can be recollected by using the blue of the sky as your dominant color, with the green of the surrounding trees as the accent color.

With colors it's all about adjusting perceptions. A paint color can actually change our perception of the size and shape of a room itself. The right color in the right place for example, can make a room appear larger and brighter, or more intimate and less empty. It can even make a long and narrow room look more square-shaped, or vice-versa.

To make a room appear:
• Larger: use a pale color to create the impression that the walls are further away.
• Brighter: use a pale shade, like a light yellow.
• Smaller: use a dark color to make the room more intimate and less empty. Reds and earth shades for example, give the impression that walls are closer to us.

To change the perception of room shape:
• Long & Narrow to Square: paint the shorter walls in a darker color than the longer ones.
• Square to Long & Narrow: paint the two facing walls you wish to look longer in a lighter color.

Flat paints add richness and depth to the color of your room. Even high-traffic household areas like hallways, playrooms, bathrooms and kitchens can hold up easily with a lower gloss, but washable paint.

I pull out all the stops to sell your home.
Lonnie Snyder
REALTOR ®
Keller Williams Realty Southeast Sound
Phone:              206-406-2710           
 

Lonnie Snyder is a full time real estateagent and REALTOR® with Keller Williams Realty specializing in Residential RealEstate for buyers and sellers in Washington's Kent, Renton, Newcastle and SouthBellevue.