Dasmarka Real Estate

Listen puppies, today is Your Mama's birthday–yes, it really is–so we've decided to give our self a wee break. Instead of working our fingers to the bone like we do most days we're going to spend the day on our back deck, sipping gin and eating the dee-voon white-trash birthday cake the Dr. Cooter made for us.

However, we hate to leave the children high, dry and starving for a celebrity real estate morsel so here are a few nuts and berries to keep y'all busy for a while.

1.
Alternative music maker Moby recently moved from New York City to Los Angeles where he's made house in the legendary Wolf's Lair, a storied castle perched high above Lake Hollywood. Moby bought the fairy tale property last year from divorcing music executive Jay Faires and tee-vee talker Debbie Matenopoulos.

The quirky house had first been listed with an asking price of $7,500,000. Property records show that Mister Moby paid $3,925,000 for the 3.31 acre aerie and according to a recent article in the New York Times, the picayune, pixie-like musician spent another couple million on renovations and restorations that included the installation of a new kitchen, the addition of three bathrooms to the main house, the conversion of a garage into a recording studio and situating a small meditation deck to hover serenely over the lake.

Photos in the New York Times reveal that Mister Moby has sparely but smartly furnished the house with pedigreed mid-century modern furniture that, as far as we're concerned, makes a delicious juxtaposition against the eccentric architecture and historical architectural details.

2.
We're not sure how many people actually care about this but for those who do Madonna's fire-ravaged childhood home in Rochester Hills, MI can now be purchased for just $49,000. Your Mama presumes there are a healthy handful of crazed "fans" who are, at this very minute, pawning their car stereos and selling their 14-karate gold jewelry to come up with the damn down payment. Iffin we were Madonna–and thank heavens we are not–we'd buy the property, raze the house and donate the land for a neighborhood park with taxes paid for the next 99 years. Just a thought.

3.
Your Mama gets a lot of questions about pocket listings: What are they? Why would someone do a pocket listing? Click here for the low-down on pocket listings. Let us know if you have any questions.

4.
It's no secret that celebrities have special real estate desires and needs and the money to buy them. Here's a list compiled by people at Zillow of the top 10 features famous folks look for in a home.

5.
Hip hopper Salt of Salt-N-Pepa listed her Melville, NY mansion with an asking price of $2,295,000. Who?

6.
An unidentified buyer paid a stunning $47,000,000 for a New York City townhouse originally built for one of those lavish living Vanderbilts. The 33-foot wide townhouse was sold as a pocket listing (see above) sans broker, which means no commission will be paid.

7.
Your Mama asks that the children consider the audacious brilliance of the tiger-striped wall-to-wall carpeting in this New York City penthouse at the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Our friends at Curbed think the high-floor corner condo, recently listed at $24,000,000, might belong to Band-Aid heiress Libbet Johnson whose brother Woody–that would be the owner of the New York Jets and father of tragic socialite Casey Johnson–happens to own the penthouse next door.

SELLER: Mark Cronin
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,550,000
SIZE: 3,444 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: While flipping and flitting through some of the newer listings around Tinseltown our beady little eyes were caught by a vintage house in the hills above Hollywood that property records reveal belongs to television executive Mark Cronin and is listed at $1,550,000.

Your Mama knows that most of y'all don't recognize Mister Cronin's name but he's one of the people responsible for creating, producing and/or writing some of the tawdriest, trashiest and most proudly meretricious reality television programs that have ever graced–or bedeviled, depending on your point of view–the boob-toob. Listen, hunnies, we are no stranger to reality tee-vee but even Your Mama's jaded jaw hangs agape when we happen across one of Mister Cronin's paralyzing and sometimes traumatizing creations. We don't want to watch these shows but iffin we come across one of them we can't usually help but to sit stunned, equal parts mortified and mesmerized.

Mister Cronin spent much of the 1990s as a writer and producer for foul-mouth shock jock turned plutocrat Howard Stern. In the late 1990s Mister Cronin turned to television eventually churning out a long list of some of the lowliest of the low-brow reality tee-vee turkeys including The Surreal Life, Flavor of Love, Charm School, Rock of Love with Bret Michaels, America's Most Smartest Models and the truly, deeply upsetting Bridalplasty on which a dozen self-loathing women compete to win plastic surgery procedures and a fantasy wedding. Gawd. It's enough to make Your Mama need a nerve pill with our early afternoon pitcher of gin & tonics.

As far as Your Mama can tell, most of the programs created, produced and/or written by Mister Cronin involve isolating a lot of bottom rung famous and quasi-famous folks in a Pee-wee's Playhouse-style mansion in L.A. and/or putting a whole mess of shockingly inarticulate and wildly volatile strippers all together in a house with an endless supply of booze and seeing what happens. Usually these thong-straps-up-above-the-waist-of-their-skin-tight-low-rise-jeans-wearing beehawtchas drink, get loud, pull hair and generally act like a bunch of feral animals who would rather push a girl down the stairs than politely ask her to step aside.

Anyhoodles noodles, property records show that Mister Cronin acquired his 1926 Spanish casa perched below street level but still above the tree tops in the steep hills above bee-yoot-iful Beachwood Canyon in October of 2004 for $1,849,000. The property was first put on the market, according to Redfin, in mid-October 2010 with an asking price of $1,849,500. The asking price was later reduced to $1,675,000 before finally settling at it's current $1,550,000.

A few quick flicks of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that even if Mister Cronin's Real Estate can pull a rabbit out of a hat with a full-price sale of $1,550,000, he'll still have to swallow the bitter financial pill of a $300,000 loss not counting real estate fees, carrying costs and any renovations he and the Missus may have had done.

Listing information describes the house as having 3,444 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 5.5 poopers on three elevator-less floors. Either Mister and Missus Cronin horrendous taste in bed linens and zee-ro use for books to fill the bookshelves that line one wall in the office/library or they've already stripped the house of personal belongings and done decamped to their bigger digs. More on that later.

A classic turreted entry leads to a step-down formal living room with original narrow-strip wood floors the run throughout the house, a fireplace, beamed and vaulted ceiling and windows on three sides some of which provide panoramic views of Los Angeles that rolls out like a glittering carpet below the house. The coral-walled dining room has an ugly and unnecessary pass through to the kitchen that Your Mama recommends the new owners seal up. The eat-in kitchen appears to have been fairly recently redone with granite counter top, Shaker-style birch cabinets, portable center work island and mid-grade stainless steel appliances. Although we can't be sure, the kitchen has a well-designed but generic Scandinavian thing about it that makes Your Mama suspect that this may be an Ikea kitchen.

The five bedrooms are split, according to listing information, between the three floors. There are two bedrooms on the upper level, a guest suite with separate entrance on the lowest level and in between the master suite with its severely dated and depressing bathroom. All you need to know about this bathroom, children, is that the fixtures are brass, the tile floor beige and the counter tops veined green marble, the sort more commonly found in in a library or banking institution. The master bedroom shares the middle level, according to listing information with a "media room" with a very ordinary-sized flat-screen television mounted to the wall and French doors that open to an elevated terrace with city views.

Sitting well below the house a city-view terrace that feels like a boo-teek resort in the trees has a lap-lane swimming pool, spa, patch of grass, tree shaded lounging area and what listing information calls an "entertainment ramada." Don't worry kids, Your Mama had to consult the dictionary to figure out what a ramada is too.

We are for sure and indeed rather fond of this ramada thing but we are also concerned about what happens when frolicking poolside and stricken with an uncontrollable need of a fresh gin & tonic, a candy bar or terlit. It is at least a long flight of stairs up to a pooper and three glutius busting flights up to the kitchen or wet bar in the library/office/family room. The children can be assured that our haughty house gurl Svetlana's solution to our need for poolside booze or a sugar fix would to stand at the window of the kitchen and toss bottles into the swimming pool. Her advice for anyone pool side in need of a pee? Cop a squat over in the bushes.

Over the last few months a considerable kerfuffle has erupted and tension created between neighborhood residents and the scads of tourists who drive their cars through the neighborhood to get to one of the best spots in all of Los Angeles to see and photograph the Hollywood sign, a beloved, powerful and internationally recognized symbol for Los Angeles and its movie-making history. It seems that some locals don't care for the newly installed directional signs that point tourists to the best vantage point for sign viewing. Many have mysteriously disappeared and the general consensus is that the culprit might be a neighborhood vigilante who ripped them down in the cloak of darkness in a grass-roots effort to thwart any out-of-towners who might want to use their narrow, quiet and dangerously curvy streets in order to get up close and personal with the sign.

Property records indicate the Mister and Missus Cronin packed up and moved to a stately mansion in swanky but very staid San Marino, CA, right next door to Pasadena. Listing information Your Mama teased up out of the interweb shows the couple's new 1924 "Italian Renaissance Revival" mansion sits on over one acre of manicured grounds and formal gardens. The 6,769 square foot villa has, according to listing information, six bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a library with three walls of leaded glass windows, an eat-in kitchen and a master suite with two bathrooms and three tiled terraces.

listing photos: Deasy Penner & Partners

...that east coast bound Tinseltowner Jennifer Aniston is not buying two apartments in a white-glove pre-war building in the West Village as has been reported here, there and everywhere, but three.

According to a source Your Mama freely admits we do not know, Miss Aniston plans to purchased not only Sally Hershberger's itsy-bitsy but exquisite jewel box penthouse listed at a mind-altering $5,900,000 and the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment directly below that's listed at $1,800,000 but also the unit next door.

The third unit, owned by a Canadian gal, measures 850 square feet according to listing information and like the other two units includes just 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom. Records reflect that the apartment was purchased just one year ago for $1,650,000 and the apartment first showed up on the listing services in early April with an asking price of $2,100,000, a number that has since been slivered to $1,995,000.

The asking prices for the three units combined comes to a staggering $9,695,000. It's unlikely Miss Aniston will be paying that amount for all three units that measure up to under 2,500 square feet of interior space and include a wrap around terrace with multi-million dollar views. Even if her Real Estates and Business Managers manage a 20% discount on each of the three units she's still looking at shelling out nearly eight million clams for three apartments that could quite easily cost Miss Aniston another couple million more to combine, renovate and decorate.

The children should note that the listing for this third unit that we heard through the celebrity real estate grapevine that Miss Aniston is purchasing is still marked "active" so this is all just rumor and gossip at this point, children, rumor and gossip.

It's such a lovely day Your Mama thought the children might enjoy a little afternoon picture pretty in the form of newly released listing photos of the Beverly Hills, CA mansion that sitcom and romcom actress Jennifer Aniston has on the market for a mouth-drying $42,000,000.

The new photos show previously unseen areas of the house such as both of the master bathrooms plus a dressing/sitting room and the all stainless steel galley-style kitchen that looks more like a machine for cooking that a cozy gathering place.

As many of the children surely already know, according to all the tabs and gossip glossies Miss Aniston plans to her bags and move from L.A. to N.Y.C where the always tanned and well-turned out Miss Aniston (allegedly) has in contract , as we type our fingers to the nubbins, two small apartments in New York City, one directly atop the other.

The one bedroom and one bathroom lower apartment, in a plum pre-war full-service dowager in the West Village, was last on the market for $1,800,000. Very high but not unheard of for a well-configured high-floor apartment with a dining nook, fireplace and stunning city views.

The second unit Miss Aniston is said to be acquiring is the itty-bitty jewel box-like penthouse pad directly upstairs. The apartment, also just one bedroom and one bathroom, is owned by hair honcho Sally Hershberger, a crafty gal who will pillage your pocketbook for close to a thousand clams to cut your hair. The eensy-weensy but painstakingly renovated apartment became quite well-known last summer among New York City real estate watchers after the well-heeled scissor sister heaved her downtown aerie on the market with an audacious, but apparently not unrealistic, price tag of $5,900,000. Miss Sally knows more than hair. Beehawtcha knows that the higher you price something, the more desirable it becomes to those who can afford it.

Your Mama expects that Miss Aniston will hire smart architects and nice gay decorators to combine the two units into a pristine duplex penthouse. We've already sketched out a possible plan for Miss Aniston's merger in the West Village but we'd love to know what her people come up with.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker Previews International

BUYER: Ed O'Neill
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,050,000
SIZE: 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Since the early 1990s and until 2004 or 2005 actor Ed O'Neill (Modern Family, Married With Children) owned a house on the canals in Venice, CA. At that point he and the family swapped the gritty urban density of Venice for peaceful Sullivan Canyon, a decidedly rustic but none-the-less uppity area of Los Angeles nestled on the border between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.

Records indicate that Mister O'Neill, a black belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu who will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year, acquired his Sullivan Canyon crib in February 2004 for $2,600,000. The Los Angeles County Tax Man shows the privately situated residence measures 3,165 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and a swimming pool.

Recently Mister O'Neill and Catherine Rusoff, his lady-wife of 25-ish years with whom he has two youngish daughters, snatched up a second house in Sullivan Canyon. The new house, a modestly scaled but architecturally significant house on a thickly treed lot, is separated from the O'Neill's current crib by two driveways to two other homes.

According to the property records Mister O'Neill paid $3,050,000 for a 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom modern ranch house originally designed and built in 1953 by much-coveted and ballyhooed California architect Cliff May as his personal residence. Mister May, for all those who live under an architectural rock, is the man responsible for the classic California contemporary ranch house that are typically designed to engage in a taut but intimate dialog with the surrounding landscape that results in a barefooted and seamless integration of indoor and outdoor living.

The house, which the Los Angeles County Tax Man says measures 1,944 square feet, sits on a lush .26 acre. Busted-looking brick pillars mark the entrance to a tree-shaded gravel driveway that rises gently to a large gravel motor court where the low profile, single story wood, stone and glass residence extends discretely into the natural landscape.

Say what you will about Los Angeles and its overly cliché and over-played plasticity, but real estate-wise there aren't a lot of other major urban centers in the world where a person can live in the middle of the city in serene circumstances that feel downright rural.

The understated board and batten exterior disguises airy and–dare we say–dramatic interior spaces that–bless the hearts of every previous owner of this home–still retain original architectural features that include a magnificent 23-foot long sky light that runs along the peak of the beamed and vaulted ceiling. Smooth grey terrazzo floors run throughout the entire house that was recently refreshed by west coast starchitecture firm Marmol-Radziner. The pre-fab promoting architects remained rightfully respectful of Mister May's original design-spirit of the house while they re-worked, updated and upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms and installed miles of lustrous, meticulously custom-crafted and utterly delicious walnut cabinetry.

A stone wall with extra-wide fire box gives necessary anchor and spatial order to the living room area of the vast open room that opens itself wide to the outdoors via a full wall of sliding glass doors. At the other end of the room the open, center-island kitchen not only has clean-lined walnut cabinetry but chunky solid walnut cabinetry so delectable Your Mama just wants to get up on counter and roll around nekkid. The kitchen, warmed by all the wood, is also a multi-tasking and hard-working state of the art kitchen with breakfast counter, top-end commercial grade appliances, two sinks and a glimmering stainless steel tile back splash. We love love love the sharp glint of the stainless steel tile back splash against all the walnut wood but, in all honesty, Your Mama could have done with something else, something still brilliantly luminous but in a more organic color range.

Irresistibly caressable walnut paneling and banks of walnut-faced closets envelop both of the bedrooms. The smaller bedroom has a built in desk and the much larger master suite has a built-in entertainment center, glass doors that slide open to a private terrace perfect for a post-coital smoke, a dressing room lined with walnut cabinets and built in dresser, and a surprisingly well-scaled bathroom with double vanity, soaking tub for two, a separate marble-lined and glass-enclosed shower and, yes, even more walnut cabinetry.

Every room in the house opens through over-sized sliding glass doors to a variety of terraces and patios that surround the house. In addition to the aforementioned post-coital smoking terrace off the master bedroom that's shaded by mature trees and surrounded by ferns and other shade loving foliage, there's an an intimate courtyard-like area off the living room bordered by a towering wall of bamboo and at the front of the house large concrete pavers define an outdoor dining terrace that looks over the sloping and untamed front yard. A sliver of a patio–a path really–runs alongside the secondary bedroom and a concrete pad on the hillside high above the house takes advantage of a sunny clearing in the trees.

While we can appreciate and even swoon over a worked over garden, we rather love how the simple mass of the house works in both opposition and harmony with the rugged and mostly undomesticated landscaping. If this were Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's house we'd probably consider the installation of a simple swimming pool but otherwise we admit to a rare ache of real estate envy.

Since we don't really know a Easter egg from a Girl Scout cookie, we can only speculate why Mister and Missus O'Neill purchased a house very close to but not contiguous with their current residence. Perhaps it will be utilized as a guest house or maybe as office space for their personal staff. We like Mister O'Neill. Well, we like the characters he plays on the tee-vee. We do not, of course, know him personally. Therefore we have to hope and pray to to all the real estate and decorating gods out there that Mister O'Neill is not the sort of fella who will use this sensitively updated mid-century jewel box as a–gulp–man cave. Oh lowerd, somebody get Your Mama a nerve pill. It gives Your Mama the honest-to-goodness heebie-jeebies just to think about the word man-cave and we fall immediately into a catatonic state iffin we ever run across a description or picture of one of those places. That, hunnies, is a freaky modern-day decorative theme that Your Mama feels we are better off pretending just doesn't even exist. In fact, Rule No. 47 of Your Mama's Big Book of Decorating Dos and Don'ts declares that theme decorating of any kind–even in children's rooms–must be approached with extreme caution. These so-called man caves are all too often a perfect example of why themed decorating can be dangerous and disturbing in the wrong hands.

The O'Neill's nearby neighbors in Sullivan Canyon include Emmy-nominated actress Barbara Bosson who was married for nearly 30 years to prolific and successful writer/producer Steven Bochco and who records show paid $6,250,000 in September 2009 for her bucolic 8.5 acre spread. Next door to Miz Bosson is the the late Bea Arthur's Cliff May-designed house, currently available for lease at $32,500 per month.

listing photos: Michael Andrew McNamara for Sotheby's International Realty Beverly Hills

...that another big real estate deal has just gone down in Los Angeles that makes the $23,000,000 sale of tech entrepreneur turned art collector and philanthropist David Bohnett's sprawling mansion in the flats of Beverly Hills, CA look like child's play.

According to both Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air and another well-placed Platinum Triangle property yenta we know–let's call her Bernice Belairresident–Your Mama has learned that financial services widow and philanthropic powerhouse Iris Cantor has, finally, at long last sold her exceedingly opulent and profusely gilded Bel Air mega-mansion for $40,000,000.

In cash.

Brenda Belairresident snitched to Your Mama that the new owner of Miz Cantor's (approximately) 35,000 square foot pile she dubbed La Belle Vie is a filthy rich financier but she was unable (or unwilling) to name the buyer. Our Fairy godmother in Bel Air suggested that the buyer may be a certain athletic mergers and acquisitions specialist from Goldman Sachs who looked at the house and another well-connected informant–let's call this one Johnny Jabbermouth–told us that he heard Indonesians connected to the powerful and controversial Suharto family toured the property "several times."

Miz Cantor, a Brooklyn-born former model, was married and divorced twice before she became a stock broker, a lucrative gig through which she met and married Bernie Cantor, the now-deceased co-founder of the influential investment services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Mister and Missus purchased the gated 18th-century style pile in the early 1990s for an unknown price when it was only half completed. The well-heeled and lavish living pair dropped several more pretty pennies, dimes and millions to have architect Michael C.F. Chan and New York-based designer Bebe Winkler complete and decorate the civic-center-sized 9 bedroom and 21 bathroom behemoth that's crafted from Texas limestone, priceless marble, twenty-two carat gold leaf detail, carved paneling and elaborately crafted iron and gilt bronze fittings. This is a house so correct that even Marie Antoinette would wet her bloomers over it.

Miz Cantor first attempted to unload her elegant real estate white elephant in 2000 when she listed the humongous house squeezed on to a tight lot with a $45,000,000 price tage. After 2.5 years on the market, the property was de-listed only to appear on the open market years later, in early 2009, with a much higher asking price of $53,000,000.

Although Miz Cantor stuck to her real estate guns and never lowered the published asking price for her unrepentantly decadent digs, Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that, in the end, the (alleged) forty million dollar purchase price was roughly and substantially 25% less than the fifty-three million she wanted.

Neither property records nor online listing information reflect a transfer of ownershp. In fact, listing information currently available online shows the status of the property as "active." and available for showings. However, according to Miz Belairresidnet, the deal is done and all the necessary docs have been signed on the appropriate dotted lines.

If case any of the children wondered or were worried, the child-free Miz Cantor is far from homeless. In late 2009 the high-society doyenne traded in a nearly 4,000 square foot penthouse on New York's swank Central Park South that she never reportedly occupied for a recently rehabbed six story townhouse on East 74th Street (just off Fifth Avenue) that she'd acquired earlier in the year for $18,125,000. She also maintains a water front spread in Westhampton, NY–known in some snobby circles as the Wronghampton–that she picked up in November of 2000 for $2,650,000 and it appears that the wealthy widow also keeps a posh place in Palm Beach, FL where prop records show her name attached to a property with Intracoastal Waterway access that was bought in May of 2002 for $8,635,000.

No doubt this over-sized transaction will no doubt send electric ripples of glee up and down the spines of all the Real Estate and home owners in Tinseltown who deal and dwell in residences priced at the tippy-top of the market. Given Miz Cantor's real estate good fortune, maybe it doesn't seem so far-fetched then that Jennifer Aniston may get close to the $42,000,000 asking price for her Bev Hills mansion or that Ellen Degeneres could find a deep-pocketed buyer willing to edge up close to the $60,000,000 at which she's (allegedly and according to multiple sources) shopping her Bev Hills compound?

We shall see, puppies, we shall see.

photo: Bing

SELLERS: Olivia Wilde and Tao Ruspoli
LOCATION: Venice, CA
PRICE: $3,095,000
SIZE: 3,011 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In early February it was revealed in the tabs, blogs and gossip glossies that increasingly in-demand actress Olivia Wilde and her hubby Tao Ruspoli called off their marriage of nearly 10 years. By mid-March they'd listed their gated and recently renovated residence in nitty-gritty and arty-farty Venice, CA with an asking price of $3,095,000.

After just two days on the open market, the status of the listing on Redfin was changed from 'active' to 'pending.' That's right, hunnies, this house had a deal within days.

Miss Wilde, who currently stars on the self-consciously quirky Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated hospital drama House M.D., was born a Cockburn. The well-educated siren hails from a family thick with impressively accomplished, globally-concerned and socio-politically minded journalists who include Leslie, Andrew, Patrick and Alexander Cockburn. Look them up, people, they're every one the real damn stuff.

At the dewy age of 18, freshly graduated from the rigorous and exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, Miss Wilde ran off to rural Rappahonnock County, Virginia where she eloped with Tao Ruspoli, a documentary filmmaker, Flamenco gee-tarist and founder of The Los Angeles Filmmakers' Cooperative with aristocratic familial roots; He is an Italian count or a prince or something noble-sounding like that whose drug-addicted playboy father Allesandro "Dado" Ruspoli–the 9th Prince of Cerveteri–lived a famously hedonistic life and palled around with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Orson Welles.

The erstwhile couple, card-carrying members of both the blistering L.A. art scene and the bohemian demi-monde, called it quits, according to one inside source, "for the typical Hollywood reasons. Her career has exploded and she saw being married is not as much fun." The snitchy source went on to tell the folks at Us magazine that young Miz Wilde's career is on the upswing and being hitched "was weighing her down."

Records show that Miss Wilde and Mister Ruspoli only purchased there Venice digs in January of 2010 for $2,325,000. Current listing information shows the 3,011 square foot contemporized crib, located on one of Venice's super-charming walk streets and conveniently just walking distance to the funky Abbott Kinney shopping district, was originally built in 1920 with recent renovations by mcmansion-detesting Los Angeles architect Adam Wheeler.

The house itself has what Your Mama calls a "mullet thing" going on, all business up front and party at the back. Although partially shielded from view by thick foliage and a tall fence, from the front–the façade that faces the walk street–the house presents as a boxy and quotidian clapboard-sided Colonial. (Listing information called it Cape Cod but we're pretty sure it's a Colonial). However, around the back, the large for the area but unconventionally trapezoidal parcel required a significant chuck of the house be lopped off at an angle that in uninspired hands might have easily resulted in an architectural disaster.

A glassy extension off the side of the house, clad in what looks to Your Mama like reclaimed wood siding that's been installed vertically, introduces a visual tension between the original, horizontally clapboarded portion of the house and the more modern addition. At first, each of the conjoined masses appear defiantly dismissive of each other. A closer inspection of the listing photos reveals that Mister Wheeler the architect acted as a real damn justice of the architectural peace and married the two opposite-seeming sections with identically-pitched roof lines.

The addition contains the living room that unfortunately does not have a fireplace–which would be delicious for taking the edge of damp and misty sea side mornings–but does have a vaulted ceiling with exposed trusses, a bleached-out wood floor and at least one large panel of glass that disappears into the wall and unites the room with the grassy outdoor area that's completely fenced and tree-ringed for privacy.

The hexagonal Mexican paver tiles in the large sky lit dining room extend into a cozy library-nook lined with shelves chock-full of actual books and into the sleek but stylistically warm galley-style kitchen turned out with white oak cabinetry, mesquite counter tops, open shelving, discrete high-grade appliances–there's even a built-in microwave–and a sweet built in breakfast banquette. We do so love a banquette. In fact, Your Mama is at this very moment, as our pudgy fingers fly across the keyboard of our trusty laptop computer, sitting in the built in breakfast banquette in our kitchen.

A wooden staircase in the central hall leads up to the second floor master bedroom, a long room with coffee-colored distressed wood floors, crisp white walls and a vaulted ceiling. The attached bathroom, an odd triangular shaped space that might have bedeviled any number of architects and designers, has a vaulted wood ceiling with exposed beams and trusses, a floating mesquite wood vanity topped by a pair of simple white vessel sinks that look like cereal bowls and a free standing soaking tub for two. At one end of the room, where the walls converge in a narrowing space that a more prosaic architect may have relegated to a linen closet, Mister Wheeler the architect created a sexy open shower cubby with two shower heads.

The house opens up to the yard through a series of French doors and the aforementioned sliding glass panel in the living room. According to listing information the lush grounds were worked over by renowned Los Angeles landscape designer Jay Griffith. A deck runs long the front of the house and steps down to a tree-shaded dining and entertainment terrace where Christmas lights are hung wonderfully willy-nilly in the trees and a hodge-podge of gigantic decorative medallions cling to the fence. We understand that these medallion things provide visual texture and movement to the intimate eating area spot but, in all truth, we hate them.

While we find the three different floor coverings (tile, smooth bleached wood and dark distressed wood) a real disappoint and we're never thrilled with vessel sinks–or that silly orchid someone set next to them in the listing photos–overall Your Mama is rather covetous of this house and appreciative of Miss Wilde and Mister Ruspoli's particular brand of down-to-earth boho-chic day-core that's pretty specific to cultured and affluent hipsters with artistic bents.

We don't have any idea where either Miss Wilde or Mister Ruspoli will set up there bachelor and bachelorette pads but should Mister Ruspoli want to go back to Italy to lick his relationship wounds he has access to at least a couple of historical and deluxe family properties, the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome and the Castello Ruspoli north of Rome in rural Vignanello.

listing photos: Deasy Penner & Partners