Dasmarka Real Estate

1.
There seem to be some new and unsubstantiated rumors beginning to slip and slide down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine that globe trotting global do-gooding actor Brad Pitt might be setting down some real estate roots outside of the very out of the way community of Hickory Tree, TN, on the border between Tennessee and West Virginia. Apparently Mister Jolie likes to mosey on down that way to fly fish on the Holston River where there is some pretty good fly fishing action. Who knew? There are those in the area that speculate that the buyer of a million dollar purchase last year of a 50-acre river front spread in Hickory Tree just might be Mister Pitt. But before anyone gets too excited let's remember that over the years we've all heard (and repeated) a gajillion real estate rumors about Mister Jolie and Missus Pitt. Those two can't seem to go to the damn terlit without all us real estate gossips speculating about whether they're buying or leasing the facilities.

2.
For all her frequent vilification of "celebrity," former vice-presidential candidate turned quasi-political pundit and grand standing rabble-rouser Sarah Palin sure does seem to like being one. The Tea Party queen now has a reality program that films her and her brutish man-mate Todd as they do Alaskan things in Alaska. No matter what one thinks of Missus Palin and her politics Your Mama thinks all people can agree that people who do not want to be celebrities don't have reality shows built around them, you know? The show, which we confess to scrupulously avoiding, provides an eye-popping peep into the Palin homestead located on Lake Lucille in itty-bitty Wasilla, AK.

The fine folks over at Curbed posted some screen shots of the Palin pad in all its non-decorated glory that includes a lot of dead animals, a black leather recliner or two, loads of chairs in the kitchen on casters, a recording studio from where she can offer her take on things, and a two story wall of glass at the back of the house that over looks the lovely lake and, in the far off distance, Russia.

3.
There may only be 7 people in the world who care about super-philanderer Tiger Woods anymore, but for those seven people, south Florida gossip Jose Lambiet tossed up a new aerial photo of Mister Woods newly completely bachelor pad in Jupiter, FL where he's installed, natch, a 4-green golf course complete with sand traps.

4.
Speaking of Tiger Woods, his primary extracurricular ladee-friend Rachel Uchitel has flipped the New york City apartment she snatched up a couple of months ago with $1,625,000 in hush money back on the rental market with a monthly asking price of $9,995, otherwise known as ten grand a month.

5.
Those hardworking people over at Curbed (via The New York Times) dug up and displayed a cavalcade of juicy photographs of the very night clubby Italo Rota designed studio of eccentric and wildly successful Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, a man who never met an animal print he couldn't turn into a slinky dress or hoochie hot pants.

The studio, a glass box located on 36-acres in the Tuscan countryside and wrapped in remote controlled laser cut lattice-leaf screens, includes a 1 bedroom bachelor apartment for Signore Cavalli even though he is not a bachelor.

Mister Cavalli's crib includes a helipad for parking his iridescent purple whirlybird, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a wine cellar, tanning bed for keeping his septuagenarian skin a particularly distressing and unhealthy looking shade of orange, a high-tech DJ booth, a lot of stuffed animals, a bedroom with mink carpeting, a miniature monkey that Signore Cavalli has been known to kiss on the lips, a number of squawking parrots and a kitty named Pussy.

6.
The New York Times did a fun little article this week that profiled the well-born Swedish ex-pat turned gay porn star–who went the butch sounding name Tag Eriksson–turned über successful Manhattan real estate agent Fredrik Eklund, who sells ungodly amounts of real estate for the boo-teek brokerage Core Group Marketing. Mister Eklund's pornographic past hasn't stopped him from working with high-profile peeps like Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, and the pint-sized Olsen twins.

Yesterday the real estate blogs were abuzz with stories about Oprah Winfrey having a look-see at a $68,000,000 house in Alpine, NJ. Well, buttons, Miz Thing tweeted this morning that not only is she not moving to Alpine but that she never even went to look at the house and she's not sure how that rumored got started. Make of that what you will.

BUYER: Jonah Hill
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,865,000
SIZE: 3,660 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Young, rotund, bespectacled, often scruffy and Jew fro-ed comedy phenom Jonah Hill wasn't exactly discovered making jokes and slinging sodas at Schwab's drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. His father, a well known accountant for high net worth and high profile folks in the entertainment industry, did the books for Guns N' Roses and like many in that Tinseltown milieu Mister Hill attended the chock full o' celebrity off-spring Crossroards School in Santa Monica. Mister Hill's brother manages bands like Maroon 5 and Collective Soul and a couple of his b.f.fs happen to be the children of 2-time Oscar winning actor Dustin Hoffman. So, you know, he was sort of born with his wagon hitched to the Hollywood scene.

It was through his connection to Dustin Hoffman that Mister Hill was able to get an audition for what became his film debut, I ♥ Huckabees. It wasn't long before he hooked up with rising comedy movie maker Judd Apatow for The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, and Funny People. More recntly, Mister Hill had a hand in producing controversial comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's faux-documentary Brüno and he starred in Get Him to the Greek with Mr. Katy Perry. He did a bunch of voice over work in 2010 and has several projects lined up for the next few years that he's both starring in and producing. All that means is that regardless of how you feel about sophomoric, horny nerd terlit humor, young Mister Hill is busy busy busy...and rich rich rich. So newly weighed down with money that he recently went out and bought a fixer-upper mid-century modern house high in the hills above Hollywood.

According to the bizzy boys at Celebrity Address Aerial and confirmed with a somewhat circuitous route through public property records, 20-something year old Mister Hill–through a trust controlled by his father–splashed out a very grown up $1,865,000 to purchase a mini-compound designed by too little lauded architect Richard Dorman. The house, located in a sleepy enclave off Mulholland Drive, was built in 1959 for Los Angeles bidness man Fillmore Crank and his actress wife turned hotelier Beverly Garland (My Three Sons)

Listing information shows that in addition to the 3,066 square foot single story main house with its 3 bedrooms and 3.5 poopers, the nearly one-third acre property also has a workshop/storage room, a children's playhouse and a fully detached and permitted guest house with three-quarter bathroom. That means there's a shower but no tub, puppies. The house could clearly use some updating and upgrading, but children, take note of the simplicity of form, the hyper utilitarian board and batten exterior, and the magnificently deep deep deep eaves that help to keep the house cool during the high heat of the scorching Southern California summers.

A planted entry courtyard flanked by the two-car carport on one side and a bank of floor to ceiling glass sliders on the other leads deep into the modest if not exactly inexpensive compound where the front door opens into a massive foyer laid with Mexican paver tile floors. The living/dining room with fireplace, a room much longer than it is wide, has built-in book shelves and a variety of sliding glass doors that open the room to fenced and tree shaded courtyards that surround the house. The adjacent sky lit kitchen, a serious hot mess of an early 1980s remodel, needs a gut job to remove all the louvered cabinetry, peach colored tiles and that poor, sad little stained glass panel set into the door that opens to a lovely lounging and dining courtyard on the side of the house.

The master suite, which arguably occupies the home's most desirable location at the back of the house over looking the swimming pool and backyard, has dark hardwood floors that look like they were installed recently, glass sliders that open the room wide to the exterior, and a small reading nook separated from the sunken tub in the way out-dated master pooper by a not particularly opaque decorative wood screen.

At the back of the property the main house, the fully detached guesthouse and small playhouse ring the petite but adequate salt water swimming pool and attached spa. Multi-level terraces and decks with oodles of potted plants and surround the pool and are large enough for a handful of sun loungers and a dining terrace.

Listen, kids, Your Mama knows that this house–despite it being designed by the very skilled architect Richard Dorman–isn't exactly an architectural masterpiece. And we too have eyeballs and can clearly see there have been some severely botched alterations. All those multi-paned windows are, to be kind, architecturally criminal. But there are, as they say in the real estate bizness, some good bones to work with here so we do hope Mister Hill's got the good sense to hire a smart architect, a talented landscaper and a nice, gay decorator to turn this lackluster kernel of sand into the architectural pearl it wants to be.

Until late summer 2009, young Mister Hill had been living in the same West Hollywood condo-loft building where HGTV designer Kenneth Brown once owned a condo and where records show Mister Hill–through the same trust that purchased the house in the Hollywood Hills–snatched up a 2 bedroom and 2 pooper pad in November of 2007 for $1,050,000 and sold in August of 2009 for $835,000. A few flicks of the well worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's a not inconsiderable $215,000 loss not counting the fat real estate fees and commissions. Imagine for a moment, butter beans, being in your mid-twenties and having the financial fortitude to weather a two-hundred thousand plus dollar loss.

All the celebrity flibbertigibbets and real estate gossips are going hog wild over the news that soon to be retiring gab-fast queen Oprah Winfrey has been out looking at major estates with major price tags including a shingled English manor style pile on the former Frick estate in super-swank Alpine, NJ listed with a belly aching asking price of $68,000,000.

As the story goes in the New York Post, the billionairess showed up in Alpine, the most expensive zip code in the counter according to Forbes, around noon yesterday in a caravan of cars that included a couple of SUVs and a van. A source told the New York Post that, "Her [Oprah's] people requested that everyone leave the house so it would be empty when she walked through."

Of course she did.

According to listing information and previous reports on the property, the recently completed 42-room residence was built by New Jersey real estate mogul Richard Kurtz. The 30,300 square foot mega-mansion includes 12 bedrooms, 15 full and 4 half poopers, a 11-car garage, more than half a dozen fireplaces, 4 stair halls and an elevator, ballroom, conservatory, wine cellar, movie theater, massage room and an indoor basketball court. The 27+ acre grounds include a 65-foot long heated salt-water swimming pool with adjacent 2-pooper pool house, spa, tennis court, carriage house, extensive gardens and a heated 250-foot long driveway. The mansion is, as should be expected in a sixty-eight million dollar house, all wired up with a generator, fire compression system, a state of the art security system, and Smart House technology that allows things like the heating and cooling systems, lights and drapery to be operated from anywhere in the world from an iPhone.

Lord people, what does Oprah need with a damn indoor basketball thingy?

Anyhoo, Mister Kurtz famously purchased the 63-acre Frick estate in 2006 for about $58,000,000. He subsequently subdivided the thickly wooded property into 11 parcels, according to the Estates at Alpine website, that range from .99 acres to 5.686 acres with asking prices from $1-3,000,000 per acre according to a July 2007 article in the New York Times. The newly built beast first went on the market in 2008 with an asking price of $42,500,000. The price jumped to $52,000,000 and Mister Kurtz allegedly rejected an offer of about $36,000,000 after reconsidering and deciding he and the Missus wanted to live in the mini-mall sized house after all.

Your Mama has no idea if Mister and Missus Kurtz ever moved in to the mansion but in early June of 2010 it reappeared on the open market with its current even higher and more astonishing price tag of $68,000,000. There really aren't very many people in the world who can and would be willing to spend fifty or sixty-some million clams for a crib anywhere in the world let alone in New Jersey. We are not doggin' New Jersey, children There are plenty of insanely rich people there and some very pretty houses and countryside, just not that many who can pay sixty million smackers for a house. However, even though Your Mama would bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly that Miz Winfrey does not buy this estate, she's a good prospect if only because she's well known to dump vast and record breaking amounts of money on her real estate.

Miz Winfrey owns more insanely luxurious homes than Your Mama currently cares to count or recount including in Chicago, on Maui in Hawaii, and the Caribbean island of Antigua. The most significant and magnificent jewel in her real estate crown, however, is The Promised Land, a sprawling 42-acre spread in Montecito, CA with ocean and mountain views that she bought a number of years ago for around $50,000,000.

listing photos: Prominent Properties / Sotheby's International Realty

Sometimes a strange kismet occurs for Your Mama when it comes to this celebrity real estate stuff. For example, twice last week, out of the blue, in mid-November (2010), from two separate and entirely unconnected sources, Your Mama received information regarding the sale of a very ordinary–if not exactly inexpensive–condominium in a not particularly good looking building in Beverly Hills, CA that occurred way back in April of 2010. Listing information and prop records show the 1,693 square foot condo was sold for its full asking price of $835,000.

According to both of our sources–one of whom was the bizzy boys at Celebrity Address Aerial–the top floor 2 bedroom and 2 pooper condo was bought by talk show maven Ellen Degeneres. More accurately, property records show the condo was purchased through a real estate trust known to be controlled by Missus Degeneres. It's the same trust, in fact, whose name appears on the deeds and records for her primary residence in Beverly Hills that she bought from Will & Grace co-creator Max Mutchnick back in late 2007 for around $30,000,000.

The condo's front door swing open to a long front hall leads back to the beige carpeted living/dining room with walls partially covered in floor to ceiling mirrored panels, a fireplace, sliders that open to a long but narrow terrace with sunset views and plantation shutters over all the windows. The galley style eat-in kitchen has a new and decoratively dull earth-tone tile back splash, mocha colored cabinetry and black appliances, hardwood floors. One of the bedrooms has a massive built-in work station and storage and both have large walk-in closets.

The condo complex offers full-service amenities that include 24 hour doormen, concierge services, valet parking, private security, swimming pool, spa, state-of-the-art fitness center and a club room, whatever the real estate devil that is.

Given that Missus Degeneres and her actress ladee-wife Portia de Rossi already own a sprawling 4 or 5 parcel compound that overlooks Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills (Post Office), there are only so many reasons Your Mama can figure they might want an extra tw0-bedroom condo in Bev Hills.

1. Perhaps Missus Degeneres–Portia–wanted a crash pad where she could take a break during marathon shopping sprees on the nearby and snazzy boo-teek lined Robertston Boulevard?

2. Maybe Missus Degeneres–we mean Ellen this time–is downsizing her elderly mother into less luxe living circumstances?

3. Of course, Your Mama don't know a contact lens from a donut but iffin we were the betting type–and we're not–we'd put twenty on red number 27 that this condo, located about 3.5 miles from their compound up off of Coldwater Canyon, was purchased so that Missus and Missus Degeneres can put up some of their domestic staff.

Whatever it's for, it's just another, albeit very modest, property for Missus and Missus Degeneres to pop into their already bulging real estate portfolio.

Yesterday Your Mama worked out a real estate rumor about "housewife" Lisa Vanderpump from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills who several sources told us wants to sell her massive Richard Landry designed mansion up in the fancy-schmancy Beverly Park community so that she and her huzband Ken Todd can move to a smaller house.

We heard from Brenda Blabsitall that she wanted $35,000,000 but thanks to several other in-the-know children, we've come across a property website set up by the listing agent, none other than Mauricio Umansky, the hunky huzband of Miz Vanderpump's fellow "housewife" Kyle Richards. The property website reveals that the official off-market asking price for the Vanderpump-Todd mansion is not thirty-five million but $29,000,000.

The information presented on the property website includes an accurate bedroom and pooper count–7 and 10 respectively–and a couple dozen lush photographs of the mansion that includes two offices, an über-glam mirrored dining room table, a kitchen with concrete counter tops and smoked glass upper cabinets, and a billiard room with black walls and black wall to wall carpeting that we're certain makes their house gay Cedric want to murder them every time he has to pick the lint out of it.

There are also photos of Miz Vanderpump's behemoth boo-dwar, which includes a gleaming bathroom where the cabinet doors are done up with blush pink tufted velvet and trimmed with mirrors. We also get a peep into her sizable shoe and handbag room where Your Mama counted no fewer than six Hèrmes Birkin bags: white, orange, lime green, two pink, natch, and one heinously expensive brown crocodile skin number. That's enough Hermes handbags, hunnies, to put a child through a good college.

The guest rooms at the Vanderpump-Todd residence are, as expected, 5-star hotel style decorative fantasias of white slip covered things, gauzy cream-colored curtains, platinum gewgaws, crystal chandeliers, mirrored surfaces, and animal pelt throws and rugs.

It's far far far too fussy and feminine for Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's decorative palettes, but it's also all amazing and fascinating and, in its way, rather fabulous. Even though both the house and the day-core shout, "I am so rich it's just sick," it also, somehow, manages to look like an actual home where it's okay to put your feet on the furniture–"Oh, don't worry, darlin' we'll just replace it if it gets dirty." Or maybe, despite all the frippery she surrounds herself with, we find that we actually like Miz Vanderpump and as such give her a bit of a pass on the day-core here and there. Or are we just going soft in our dotage?

...that one of the "housewives" from the reality show tragicomedy The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has quietly floated her mega-mansion on the market. We first heard the rumor a month or so ago when Your Mama heard it from our gossipy comfrère Beverly Hills, a literary lassie who grew up among the Bentleys and Botox in the hills of Beverly and Bel Air. Miss Hills named names, but otherwise remained mum on the details.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon when our friend and informant Brenda Blabsitall gave us a ringy-dingy and in the course of our confab snitched that British-born Beverly Hills "housewife" Lisa Vanderpump–a.k.a Pinky–is quietly having her practically Rococo pile up in Beverly Park shopped around to qualified buyers. Your Mama said, "Mmm-hmm. We did hear that, yes. But how much?, gurl?"

Miss Blabsitall hissed into the phone, "Thirty five million is what the real estate ladee told me."

We said, "Pleeze." And then we asked, "Does the price include the hairless homo with the gay porn star figure that lives in the guesthouse and cleans Miz Vanderpump's pool?"

"Absolutely not. She goes where her Golden Goose goes."

Miz Vanderpump–a former sexpot ack-tress with "credits" from 1980s and 1990s programs shows such as Baywatch Nights, Silk Stalkings, and ABC Mantrap–and her gray-maned English huzband Ken Todd made their money in restaurants, nightclubs and the like. They currently own two restaurants in Beverly Hills, SUR and Villa Blanca. In 2004, property records reveal, the Vanderpump-Todds shelled out $14,000,000 for their opulent 15,480 square foot behind the guarded gates of the star-studded Beverly Park community. Records also show they bought the huge house from attorney turned telephone tycoon Sam Delug and his now ex-wife Rosette Delug, a well known character on the L.A. art scene.

Since the property is not "officially" for sale, we've not seen an official listing and therefore Your Mama can't be sure of exactly how many bedrooms are up in her crib and the actual number of bathrooms Miz Vanderpump and Mister Todd's terlit gurl must scrub. However, according to the Los Angeles County tax man, the hulking and bulky mansion sits on 3.29+ flat acres and contains 8 bedrooms and 9 poopers.

Pinky Vanderpump–who despite all the artifice comes across on the show like a genuine and thoughtful person–loves all things pink: blush, rose, rosé, hot, fuchsia, pink, pink, pink. We have it on good authority that she even dyes her damn dog Jiggy pink sometimes. Jesus Mary and Jehosephat, have you kids seen that 42-ounce canine? Your Mama needs an extra-strength nerve pill every time we spot that poor tiny creature Pinky or Mister Pinky always has clutched to their breast. Sad looking thing acts like it's in a coma. Anyhoo, Your Mama suspects that if you cut the woman, she'd bleed a lovely shade of pink.

Naturally, many of the massive rooms of Pinky's mansion are either wholly or partly did up with pink things. Pink things, crystally doo-dads and silver. Lots of silver baubles and bits. Miz Vanderpump, probably as part of her contract with Bravo, recently gave a brief, smoky voiced video tour of her mansion during which we get to see custom made pillows with the home's crest sewn into them strewn across the sofas in the little used formal living room, the swooping main staircase with silver dipped banister, and the wine cellar located through a pair of arched antique doors and down a long staircase with stone walls.

We also get to have a look-see into the couple's 2,500 square foot master suite with its ballroom sized bedroom and sitting area with fireplace. The master bedroom, not surprisingly, is completely bathed in a gauzy blush pink with silver and bejeweled accents. Mercy, celery sticks, Your Mama's mind goes in knots when we try to figure out why men–even not particularly manly men–allow their wives to do up the day-core in the master bedroom in the most excruciatingly emasculating and stereotypically feminine manner. Even more troubling is how and why it is that so many women seem to be so decoratively disregarding of their man-mates when it comes to the day-core in the master bedroom. These men may say they don't care but isn't it perhaps asking too much for a man to get, you know, in the mood up inside a hyper-feminized bedroom? That, puppies, is a puzzler of the sexes we will never solve. We also get to peep and poke around Miz Vanderpump's color coordinated "closet," which is really much more a fully customized boo-teek-like suite of rooms than what regular and even regular rich people think of when they think of a closet. Mister Todd has a custom fitted suite of rooms of his own for his sartorial collections.

The front of the house has some of the thickest and highest hedges in all of Beverly Park and the double gated drive and motor court leads back through a porte cochere to a rear motor court where the garages are located. Formal and meticulously maintained gardens surround the house and the grounds include, natch, an over-sized swimming pool with circular spa, slightly sunken tennis court, fountains, a gazebo, and terrace large enough to comfortably host a large charity event.

Given that Pinky and Mister Todd's children are no longer living at home, it makes sense the empty nesters might want to downsize out of such a humongous house. The ironic real estate truth for people like Pinky and Mister Todd is even if they cut their square footage in half, they'll still live in a sizable mansion. As John Mellencamp sings, "Ain't that America?"