Thursday, February 24, 2011
Col. Gaddafi's Second Son Lets London Pad
OWNER: Saif al-Islam GaddafiLOCATION: London, U.K.
PRICE: £9,750/week
SIZE: 7,757 square feet, 7-8 bedrooms, 8 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Anyone who's even remotely conscious ought to know by now that things are really gettin' down and goin' plum nutty in northern Africa and the Middle East. An angry but peaceful grass roots revolution have already sent Egypt's long-time president Hosni Mubarak packing and in Yemen anti-government protests going on right this very second have the government shaking in their beaded slippers. Even though he's publicly declared he'll die a martyr before leaving, Libya's despotic dictator Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi may not have a choice. A brave and roiling revolt that rages in Libya wants him gone and an obviously rattled Gaddafi has already lost control of much of the eastern part of the country he's ruled since taking over in a 1969 coup. If things continue the way they're already going Mister al-Gaddafi may soon be on the lam.
Many recent reports suggest that Misters Mubarak and al-Gaddafi siphoned and squirreled away vast sums of ill-gotten gains. Well, duh! Some reports suggest Mister Mubarak's riches may add up to between forty and seventy billion bucks and additional news stories suggest that Mister al-Gaddafi may have amassed a slightly smaller but still obscenely monumental fortune of around $60,000,000,000. So, you know, children, neither Evita Perón nor Argentina itself will cry for these two tyrants or their families as they sadly whittle away the rest of their lives in lavishly-appointed exile in whatever country (or countries) will harbor them.
Quirky and unpredictable Mister al-Gaddafi has a long-standing and complicated but quite cozy relationship with, among others, the government of the United Kingdom. Over the years Mister al-Gaddafi invested large sums of money into British concerns and real estate. These lucrative investments include a substantial stake in Pearson Group, the company that owns the venerable and influential U.K.-based newspaper the Financial Times. On a smaller scale, a business entity registered in the British Virgin Islands reportedly paid £10,000,000 for a mansion in the upscale Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London in December of 2009. The company and the house are believed and reported to be owned by The Colonel's son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi.
Despite having a despot for a father, young Saif managed to live an open and glamorous life in London and other chic and sophisticated cities around the world. He's legend among the global glitterati for hosting parties in glitzy locales like St. Tropez and Monaco. In 2009 he celebrated his 37th birthday in Montenegro at a party reportedly attended by international movers and shakers such as Albert II–that would be the Prince of Monaco, natch–London-based steel tycoon Laskmi Mittal, Canadian gold-mining magnate Peter Munk, Austrian billionaire businessman Martin Schlaff and Russian uber-billionaire Oleg Derispaska.
Like the rich and famous who live in relative peace and freedom in democratic countries, the children of north African autocrats also have a propensity to catching a case of The Real Estate Fickle. Apparently and despite a very recent gut-renovation of the four-floor house, Mister al-Gaddafi the Younger has decided he no longer wants to live there and–we learned from the always informative London property blog The Rat and Mouse–has put it up for lease at a pricey £9,750 per week. A quick consult with our trusty currency conversion contraption shows that works out to a very high-fallutin' $15,792 per week for all us Americanos.
Listing information for the Hampstead Garden Suburb house generously provided to us by a fine informant we'll call LaToya Lettin'yaknow shows the house spans 7,757 square feet and includes 7 or 8 bedrooms and 8 full and 2 half bathrooms.
The stately and traditional brick-built exterior belies the minimalist modern architecture and day-core on the inside. The glam grips you right inside the front door that opens into a triple-height sky-lit reception hall where a glass-railed stair wraps dramatically around the room. To one side a small sitting room and straight ahead a giant drawing room with white stone floors (that may or may not be marble), contempo fireplace and a semi-circular bay window lined floor to ceiling with glass. Frosted glass panels fold back and join the drawing room to an L-shaped dining room/family room/kitchen combo. French doors in the dining area open out to a terrace that overlooks the substantial landscaped rear garden.
Upstairs, three bedrooms, each with en suite facilities, surround a master suite complete with dressing area, built in entertainment systems and private bath that includes two sinks, a terlit and a bidet, a soaking tub for two and, somewhat oddly, two glass enclosed shower stalls. The top floor contains two more bathrooms and a jumble of flexi-use rooms that could easily accommodate two to four more bedrooms.
In addition to a staff room with attached bath, storage space and utility room, the lower ground floor–which marketing materials calls the "leisure level" and Americans call a finished basement–includes a chocolate-colored suede-lined cinema room and a mirrored exercise/yoga/massage/relax room flanked by a bathroom, steam room and sauna. Floor to ceiling glass panels separate the room from the blue Bizazza-tiled indoor swimming pool and spa.
Naturally, young and flashy Mister al-Gaddafi's sybaritic residence comes fully equipped with a state-of-the-art home automation system that control the fireplaces and curtains as well as the the lighting, heating and cooling, audio-visual and hardcore security apparatus that includes cameras that record on to a hard drive.
As luxe and impressive as a house like this may be to whomever can afford the fifteen grand a week rent, what sort of person would feel comfortable with the all-but-unhinged and kinda freaky Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi for a landlord? Especially right now when he's probably in a very sour and bombastic mood.
Anyone? Hello? Is anyone there?
listing photos and floor plan: Glentree International
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
...More Nic Cage Foreclosure News
Over the last few years real estate gossips around the world spent (too) many hours and ten tons of ink dutifully documenting the spectacular, painful and byzantine financial fall from grace experienced by Oscar-winning actor Nice Cage. Although Mister Cage was paid $20,000,000 for at least three of the dozens of movies in which he's starred he still somehow managed to find himself in a serious financial pickle. Mister Cage claims he was led down the financial garden path by a business manager who mismanaged his money. Be that as it may or may not be, Mister Cage was a notoriously prolific spender who all but tossed his money out the window on a myriad of non-necessities such as a collection of 30-50 cars, a couple big boats, a Gulfstream jet, a dinosaur skull, a zoo's worth of exotic pets and lavish residences around the world.At one time in the not so distant past Mister Cage's property portfolio bulged with at least a dozen posh and pricey properties across the globe including (but not limited to) a Bavarian schloss, a 14th-century English castle, a private island in the Bahamas, a multi-unit combo condo in Midtown Manhattan, a ranch in Malibu, an historic estate in Middletown, RI, a turn of the century mansion in San Francisco, a bloated mansion in a gated enclave in Las Vegas, NV, and a harbor front mansion down behind the Orange (County) Curtain in Newport Beach, CA.
The bottom falling out of Mister Cage's finances resulted several of his properties falling into foreclosure, including (but not limited to) a pair of historic mansions in New Orleans, LA as well as his primary residence on Copa De Oro Road in prime West Gate Bel Air, a fabled and stately Gerard Colcord-designed sprawler previously owned by boozy Rat Packer Dean Martin and hairy-chested cheese ball crooner Tom Jones.
Now brace yourselves, pussy willows, because just when the children thought they'd never have to hear another damn word about Nic Cage's deep and wide real estate woes Your Mama gets a covert communique from our trusted informant The Rolling Stone who provided us with information that shows yet another of Mister Cage's many properties was recently lost into the gaping maw of foreclosure.
Property records show that in May of 2001 Mister Cage's well-known and famously-embattled Hancock Park Real Estate Trust paid $2,695,000 for a 6,312 square foot house with 5 bedrooms and 7 poopers on the busy northeast corner of S. Rossmore Avenue and West 6th Street in Los Angeles's upscale Hancock Park 'hood.
We don't actually know a lamp post from a post office, but it's Your Mama's understanding that the four-building compound in Hancock Park was purchased for use by Mister Cage's baby momma Christina Fulton. In late 2009, after receiving an order to vacate the property due Mister Cage's increasingly precarious financial issue, Miz Fulton sued Mister Cage for $13,000,000 and ownership of the Hancock Park house in which she was living.
We're not sure of the status of Miz Fulton's lawsuit or if some agreement was reached outside the courtroom but we do know that Miz Fulton had to pack her bags and get out of Dodge. Property records reveal that on the 15th of September 2010 a third and final Notice of Default was filed and recorded and, according to foreclosure database RealtyTrac, on the 10th of February 2011 the Hancock Park property was officially snatched back by Cage's creditors with about $2,900,000 owed on the spread.
Fortunately for Mister Cage and his beleaguered bank accounts he has at least four films coming out in 2001 (including The Hungry Rabbit Jumps with January Jones) and a trio of films scheduled to be completed in 2012.
photo: Bing
Evolving pages...
Journal pages evolve and take on a new life from what you'd originally envisioned. This was going to be a very rough, quick sketch of the pods I found in a couple of square yards behind my shed, but I got fascinated by shapes and textures and ended up doing much more detail than I'd planned. I thought it would be fun to do the shadows, though...and then, of course, some lettering for the date, and the notes and block of color to the right, and a border, and spatters, and.....................
Then I kept looking at that rich maroon of the vinca leaf--it had twined up the tree and made berries for the first time I'd noticed...
And it just seemed to need that touch of color. So...I added the maroon leaves and raw sienna berry husks, and then a little warm spatter to pick up the maroon, and punched up the lettering, and....
I THINK I'm done, but who knows. Yesterday I went back and tweaked a page I did weeks ago!
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
A Rash of Recent Sales in Beverly Park Reveals Real Estate Pattern
Buckle up butter beans, grab yourself a beverage and a candy snack and settle in for an extended ride because we're feeling long-winded and scatter-brained this morning.
Up in the staid but still flashy guard-gated community of Beverly Park, the palatial piles that line the empty tree-lined streets make all those five- and six-thousand square foot mansions in the flats of Beverly Hills, CA look like the staff quarters. We might describe Beverly Park as a real slap you across the face sort of place that screams and pleads, "I have so much money. Can't you see how much money I have?" This isn't keeping up with the Jones's, hunnies, it's more like keeping up with Russian oligarchs and the damn Queen of England.
Beverly Park was developed in the 1990s in two sections on over 250 acres nestled into the mountains high above Beverly Hills in what's called the "Post Office." That means, in short, the homes have a Beverly Hills zip code but Los Angeles city services. If you live in the Beverly Hills Post Office, the legendarily fast-responding Beverly Hills po-po don't race their cars up to your house in an event of an emergency. Instead you get the slower moving L.A.P.D. Each section of Beverly Park has its own 24/7 (wo)manned gatehouse. The over-sized residences in South Beverly Park are insanely huge in comparison to the average American home but the really turgid Tuscan-inspired mega-mansions are up in North Beverly Park where some of the homes are positively steroidal. The development was originally designed with 16 lots in South Beverly Park and 64 in North Beverly Park. According to our repeated but confused counting, the actual number of home sites in the northern section is 56. That's because several of the first super-rich residents purchased multiple lots in the northern section and combined them to create super-sized estates.
The hyper-manicured and absurdly pristine community, obviously only accessible to the extraordinarily well-heeled, claims residents like big business barons Haim Saban and Eric Smidt, a Saudi royal or two and a surprising number financially fortunate celebs who include Sylvester Stallone, comedians Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy, actors Jami Gertz and Paul Reiser, country queen Reba McEntire and the $20,000,000 man himself, Denzel Washington. Two of the cast members of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–that would be Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof-Nassif–are also current residents of the exclusive enclave. In fact, these two businesswomen live directly across the street from each other. That cozy neighborly set-up may not last long as Miz Vanderpump and her easy-going restaurateur husband Ken Todd would like to downsize and currently have their 7 bedroom an 10 bathroom monster mansion listed off-market with an asking price of $29,000,000.
We're not particularly proud of our embarrassing interest in Beverly Park. We're really not. However, out of dog crap flowers sometimes grow and our near fetish with the showy and hoity-toity 'hood where architectural and decorative excessive is to be expected has turned up a surprisingly consistent real estate pattern in which homeowners heave and ho their plus-size palaces on the market with astronomical asking prices only to wait years to sell for a significantly and in some cases monumentally lower amount.
Take for instance the titanic 27,000 square foot Tuscan-inspired mega-mansion snatched up in the fall of 2008 by L.A.-based billionaire Ron Tutor for a mind-melding $32,200,000. That's an alarming and vast amount of money by any real estate standard but, according to our calculations, the purchase price was actually an ego-bruising 34% less than the searing original asking price of $49,000,0000. Mister Tutor's name has been much in the news lately because he's part of the consortium that includes actor Rob Lowe that recently acquired Miramax Films for a whopping $660,000,000. The unrepentant real estate size queen has also been a fixture in the gossip columns the last week or so because he reportedly leased his sprawling 19,000+ square foot Tudor-style estate in the star-packed equestrian enclave of Hidden Hills, CA for somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month to pop star Britney Spears.
Married country music king and queen Tim McGraw and Faith Hill ran into some pricing problems while attempting to sell their former West Coast abode in South Beverly Park. Our records show the superstar couple first listed their 4.85-acre Bev Park homestead in October of 2008 at $14,800,000 but, alas, did not manage to rid themselves of their unwanted residence until June of 2010 when they sold it for $9,500,000 to a couple of high-powered Beverly Hills attorneys. According to some rudimentary calculations on our bejeweled abacus, that's a hefty-hefty-hefty 36% less than the McGraw-Hills had hoped to get.
Hollywood heavyweight Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena first attempted to unload their 10,769 square foot East Coast-style Bev Park spread in October of 1999. For whatever and probably a variety of reasons it took the Medavoys almost ten years to unload their Beverly Park real estate albatross, which finally sold in September of 2009 for $12,500,000. A little fooling with the weary beads on our bejeweled abacus shows that's an punishing 53% less than the home's highest asking price of $23,500,000. Mister and Missus Medavoy are without question rolling in the do-re-mi but that kind of discount would be a big bruise to any one's real estate ego.
There are, of course, always exceptions to the rules. One of the Beverly Park real estate anomalies would be philandering actor Kelsey Grammer who with his former wife Camille–she-devil of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–briefly owned an 8 bedroom and 12 bathroom beast of a house in Beverly Park that they acquired in early 2004 for $17,500,000, flipped back on the market in 2005 for $25,000,000 and sold in January of 2006 for $22,000,000. As best as we can sort out the 17,000-plus square foot mansion was purchased by a Norwegian mobile communications mogul.
Four of the most recent sales in Beverly Park continue to illustrate our above-mentioned and wholly unscientifically researched real estate pattern–or maybe it's a curse–that suggests a Beverly Park homeowner is likely to throw their ritzy residence up on the market with a sky-high asking price and then wait a long time, sometimes years, only to sell at a number bewilderingly and vastly less than the original asking price.
In May of 2009 underwear model turned rapper turned actor turned super-producer Mark Walhberg spent eight and a quarter million clams on a 6+ acre vacant parcel tucked up into the northern section of North Beverly Park. The seller was financially embattled property developer Robert Bisno who, as it turns out, lost his Beverly Park mansion into the angry and hungry jaws of foreclosure in 2009. Whatever Mister Wahlberg's plan for his Beverly Park property may be, the estate-sized lot sits right up next door to the former home of mathematician turned porn purveyor Norm Zada who, among other lucrative endeavors, earned a substantial fortune as the founder and publisher of Perfect 10, a publication devoted to buck-nekkid ladees who claim not to have had any cosmetic surgery. Apropos of nothing relevant to this real estate discussion but fascinating still, a couple of years ago it was widely reported that Mister Zada was gettin' up on cosmetic surgery cyclone and comedienne Joan Rivers. Now that, puppies, is an odd couple.
A few months prior to Mister Wahlberg's purchase of an undeveloped Beverly Park parcel, the pasha of porno pushed his colossal contemporary crib next door (above) on to the open market with a price tag of $24,500,000. Mid-summer in 2009 Your Mama heard through the Beverly Hills real estate gossip grapevine that supermodel cum media mogul Heidi Klum and her musician husband Seal made an unsuccessful low ball offer on Mister Zada's monstrous modern mansion that looks to us like a regional airport in an upscale zip code. True story: Your Mama was once inside Mister Zada's house when all of the sudden an elderly Asian man dropped to the floor with a bloodied forehead after running himself face-first into a giant panel of glass in the airplane hanger-sized living room.
But we digress. The previous year, in July of 2008, septuagenarian Italian movie siren Luciana Paluzzi and her media mogul/theme park honcho husband Michael Solomon listed their 13,638 square foot mansion in South Beverly Park at $19,995,000. The asking price quickly and inexplicably jumped to $23,995,000. According to our always informative friend Babbling Babette, British pop star Robbie Williams, who has long owned a home in the gated Mulholland Estates community, took a shine to the property in the fall of 2008 and actually entered into a contract to purchase Signora Paluzzi's mock-Med manse for close to the asking price. As it turns out, the singer had a real estate change of heart, backed out at the last minute, lost his sizable deposit and decided to move back to England.
Thanks to Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills, we were recently made aware that after two long years on the market Signora Paluzzi's 7 bedroom and 7 bathroom Bev Park estate (above) was scooped up in early February of 2011 by Alex von Furstenburg. In case y'all don't read Vanity Fair–a publication we think of as terlit reading for the quasi-sophisticated–Mister von Furstenberg happens to be the son of impossibly chic sartorial power-player Diane von Furstenberg and the step-son of her (alleged) Lavender Mafia member and multi-billionaire husband Barry Diller. Verified information provided to Your Mama by Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills shows that Mister von Furstenberg–who works in equities and finance or something like that–secured the Spanish Hacienda-style house for the exasperatingly complicated price of $12,999,999. A few quick calculations on our bejeweled abacus shows that's a gut-wrenching 45% discount off the highest asking price. Good for Mister von Furstenberg; Not so good for Signora Paluzzi.
In mid-November of 2010, several month before the von Furstenbergs closed on their new Beverly Park pad, porno king Norm Zada's arduous Beverly Park real estate journey finally came to an end when he unloaded his white elephant for $16,500,000 to an unnamed buyer. The sale price is considerably more then the von Furstenbergs paid for their (smaller) spread in South Beverly Park and a whopping 33% less than the original asking price of $24,500,000. Now children, here's the icing on this slice of juicy Beverly Park pie: The unnamed buyer–wealthy Saudis according to a trusted informant we'll Beverly Park–quickly caught an acute case of The Real Estate Fickle and just 2.5 months after purchasing the property flipped the beehawtcha back on the market with an astonishing asking price of–wait for it, wait for it–$25,000,000. We're not sure what makes the (alleged) Saudi owner think the house has gained $8,500,000 in value in just a couple of months but if we've said it once we've said it 8.5 million times: Who are we to question or comprehend the weird real estate ways of the wildly wealthy? These things simply make no sense to us mere financial mortals.
Two weeks after the Saudis closed on Mister Zada's contemporary crib in mid-November, the so-called Great 78 estate (above)–on the market since before Eve (allegedly) tempted Adam with an apple–was snapped up by an as yet unnamed buyer in late November for $21,000,000. That's an impressive ass-load of money to be sure but, chickens, true to pattern, it's also notably lower than the $29,000,000 asking price and even less than the original $34,000,000 price tag.
The 3-ish-acre estate, directly across the street from Kelsey Grammer's former Bev Park residence, has a 17,826 square foot main mansion with 7 bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms plus a three bedroom guest house. The seller was health supplement guru Bill Phillips and the buyer–again as per our well-connected tattle-tale Beverly Park–is Los Angeles-based self-made billionaire Tom Gores. All the other Beverly Park fiends out there will already know that Tom Gores' billionaire brother Alec Gores also owns a ginormous village-like mansion inside the gates of Beverly Park. They would be walking distance from each other if anyone were to actually walked on the sidewalks in Beverly Park. But they don't. Well, okay, the staff people do, but not the homeowners. We'd bet the pinky toe on our left foot that Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof probably drive across the street to each other's house when they meet up for a tipple or two of wine.
Anyhoodles poodles, we don't know a rock from a refrigerator so we really can't say if Tom Gores has already moved into or even plans to move into The Great 78. What we do know is that since the late '90s, Mister Gores and his family have bedded down in a 10,479 square foot mansion in the upscale Mulholland Estates, the very same guard-gated community that's home to British pop star Robbie Williams, hotel heiress Paris Hilton and prostie-loving actor Charlie Sheen among other high-profile Tinseltown types.
Another outrageously palatial Beverly Park behemoth that sat on the market for quite a few years and at long last recently sold for less than half than its original asking price is a strangely squat-looking Italian villa built on spec by a gentleman named George San Pietro, a real estate developer, long-time Beverly Park resident and the ex-husband and baby daddy of Wheel of Fortune letter turner Vanna White. Miz White–it may amuse some of the children to know–now lives in the celebrity-stocked Mulholland Estates community along with Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, Robbie Williams, Beverly Park and Mulholland Estates homeowner Tom Gores and former Beverly Park homeowners Mike and Irena Medavoy who, as it turns out, recently and brazenly flipped their giant house in the Mulholland Estates back on the market for nearly a million and half more than they paid just 4.5 months after buying the damn thing.
As best as we can surmise from our peep and poke through the property records and online listing information, Mister San Pietro first put his 24,595 square foot real estate hope and prayer in Beverly Park (above) on the open market in August of 2007 with a staggering (and publicity generating) asking price of $50,000,000. While waiting to sell, Mister San Pietro wisely and famously leased his Bev Park spec-built mansion to P. Diddy–or Piddle Patty or Daddy Diddler or whatever damn name Sean Combs calls himself nowadays. The entrepreneurial mogul hosted one of his star-studded (and depressingly cliché) white parties on the property. Mister San Pietro made a few more pennies when he leased the department store-sized house to the itty-bitty purple one Prince for a reported $200,000 per month.
After three long years on (and off) the market, the price of Mister San Pietro's Beverly Park ball-and-chain had plummeted to $27,900,000 and, huzzah!, six short weeks later the boutique hotel-sized house was sold for an even lower $23,500,000. That a truly tongue-twisting 47% less than the original and–let's be honest cinnamon sticks–never realistic fifty million buck asking price.
We recently queried a Beverly Hills real estate über-insider with whom we're acquainted–let's call him Lee O. Tard–as to the identity of the as yet unnamed new owners of the 9 bedroom and 15 bathroom behemoth. The sometimes frighteningly knowledgeable Lee O. Tard snitched to Your Mama that the baronial Bev Park beast's new owners are husband and wife handbag designers Bruce Makowsky and Kathy Van Zeeland, an energetic pair who have made a killing hawking their hobo bags and clutches on the home shopping juggernaut QVC.
While we would certainly not be surprised to learn there are more–every mansion is for sale for the right price–as far as we know there are only five Beverly Park properties currently available. The Real Housewives of Bevelry Hills cast member Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd have a $29,000,000 price tag on their house and the unfortunately-named Rockstar Energy Drink founder Russ Weiner has had his Bev Park mansion on and off the market for nearly two years with an unchanged asking price of $28,000,000. Both properties are listed off-market with Mauricio Umansky, Beverly Park ur-agent, husband of Beverly Hills housewife Kyle Richards and soon-to-be star of the upcoming Selling Los Angeles reality program.
Norm Zada's former home, (allegedly) bought by wealthy Saudis in late 2010, is back on the market for $25,000,000 and real estate reality television junkies will recognize the listing agent as toothy and dapper Matthew Altman who appears on the current season of Million Dollar Listing. Weighing in at 29,069 square foot, the duplex palace with 18 bedrooms and a flabbergasting 28 bathrooms is listed at $19,999,000 and owned–we've been told by a number of those in the know–by some Saudi royal or another.
Only time will tell if our little pattern-theory about the real estate habits of Beverly Park homeowners will hold up in regards to the quintet of properties currently for sale. Word to the wise: If history does indeed repeat itself, at least a few of the owners of the five available properties should prepare themselves for a very long real estate haul that will end with them selling their mansion for considerably under their original asking price. Such are the real estate ways of the famous and freakishly rich.
listing photos (Zada): Hilton & Hyland; listing photos (Paluzzi/von Furstenberg house, Phillips/Gores and San Pietro/Makowsky-Van Zeeland): Hilton & Hyland
Up in the staid but still flashy guard-gated community of Beverly Park, the palatial piles that line the empty tree-lined streets make all those five- and six-thousand square foot mansions in the flats of Beverly Hills, CA look like the staff quarters. We might describe Beverly Park as a real slap you across the face sort of place that screams and pleads, "I have so much money. Can't you see how much money I have?" This isn't keeping up with the Jones's, hunnies, it's more like keeping up with Russian oligarchs and the damn Queen of England.
Beverly Park was developed in the 1990s in two sections on over 250 acres nestled into the mountains high above Beverly Hills in what's called the "Post Office." That means, in short, the homes have a Beverly Hills zip code but Los Angeles city services. If you live in the Beverly Hills Post Office, the legendarily fast-responding Beverly Hills po-po don't race their cars up to your house in an event of an emergency. Instead you get the slower moving L.A.P.D. Each section of Beverly Park has its own 24/7 (wo)manned gatehouse. The over-sized residences in South Beverly Park are insanely huge in comparison to the average American home but the really turgid Tuscan-inspired mega-mansions are up in North Beverly Park where some of the homes are positively steroidal. The development was originally designed with 16 lots in South Beverly Park and 64 in North Beverly Park. According to our repeated but confused counting, the actual number of home sites in the northern section is 56. That's because several of the first super-rich residents purchased multiple lots in the northern section and combined them to create super-sized estates.
The hyper-manicured and absurdly pristine community, obviously only accessible to the extraordinarily well-heeled, claims residents like big business barons Haim Saban and Eric Smidt, a Saudi royal or two and a surprising number financially fortunate celebs who include Sylvester Stallone, comedians Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy, actors Jami Gertz and Paul Reiser, country queen Reba McEntire and the $20,000,000 man himself, Denzel Washington. Two of the cast members of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–that would be Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof-Nassif–are also current residents of the exclusive enclave. In fact, these two businesswomen live directly across the street from each other. That cozy neighborly set-up may not last long as Miz Vanderpump and her easy-going restaurateur husband Ken Todd would like to downsize and currently have their 7 bedroom an 10 bathroom monster mansion listed off-market with an asking price of $29,000,000.
We're not particularly proud of our embarrassing interest in Beverly Park. We're really not. However, out of dog crap flowers sometimes grow and our near fetish with the showy and hoity-toity 'hood where architectural and decorative excessive is to be expected has turned up a surprisingly consistent real estate pattern in which homeowners heave and ho their plus-size palaces on the market with astronomical asking prices only to wait years to sell for a significantly and in some cases monumentally lower amount.
Take for instance the titanic 27,000 square foot Tuscan-inspired mega-mansion snatched up in the fall of 2008 by L.A.-based billionaire Ron Tutor for a mind-melding $32,200,000. That's an alarming and vast amount of money by any real estate standard but, according to our calculations, the purchase price was actually an ego-bruising 34% less than the searing original asking price of $49,000,0000. Mister Tutor's name has been much in the news lately because he's part of the consortium that includes actor Rob Lowe that recently acquired Miramax Films for a whopping $660,000,000. The unrepentant real estate size queen has also been a fixture in the gossip columns the last week or so because he reportedly leased his sprawling 19,000+ square foot Tudor-style estate in the star-packed equestrian enclave of Hidden Hills, CA for somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month to pop star Britney Spears.
Married country music king and queen Tim McGraw and Faith Hill ran into some pricing problems while attempting to sell their former West Coast abode in South Beverly Park. Our records show the superstar couple first listed their 4.85-acre Bev Park homestead in October of 2008 at $14,800,000 but, alas, did not manage to rid themselves of their unwanted residence until June of 2010 when they sold it for $9,500,000 to a couple of high-powered Beverly Hills attorneys. According to some rudimentary calculations on our bejeweled abacus, that's a hefty-hefty-hefty 36% less than the McGraw-Hills had hoped to get.
Hollywood heavyweight Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena first attempted to unload their 10,769 square foot East Coast-style Bev Park spread in October of 1999. For whatever and probably a variety of reasons it took the Medavoys almost ten years to unload their Beverly Park real estate albatross, which finally sold in September of 2009 for $12,500,000. A little fooling with the weary beads on our bejeweled abacus shows that's an punishing 53% less than the home's highest asking price of $23,500,000. Mister and Missus Medavoy are without question rolling in the do-re-mi but that kind of discount would be a big bruise to any one's real estate ego.
There are, of course, always exceptions to the rules. One of the Beverly Park real estate anomalies would be philandering actor Kelsey Grammer who with his former wife Camille–she-devil of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–briefly owned an 8 bedroom and 12 bathroom beast of a house in Beverly Park that they acquired in early 2004 for $17,500,000, flipped back on the market in 2005 for $25,000,000 and sold in January of 2006 for $22,000,000. As best as we can sort out the 17,000-plus square foot mansion was purchased by a Norwegian mobile communications mogul.
Four of the most recent sales in Beverly Park continue to illustrate our above-mentioned and wholly unscientifically researched real estate pattern–or maybe it's a curse–that suggests a Beverly Park homeowner is likely to throw their ritzy residence up on the market with a sky-high asking price and then wait a long time, sometimes years, only to sell at a number bewilderingly and vastly less than the original asking price.
In May of 2009 underwear model turned rapper turned actor turned super-producer Mark Walhberg spent eight and a quarter million clams on a 6+ acre vacant parcel tucked up into the northern section of North Beverly Park. The seller was financially embattled property developer Robert Bisno who, as it turns out, lost his Beverly Park mansion into the angry and hungry jaws of foreclosure in 2009. Whatever Mister Wahlberg's plan for his Beverly Park property may be, the estate-sized lot sits right up next door to the former home of mathematician turned porn purveyor Norm Zada who, among other lucrative endeavors, earned a substantial fortune as the founder and publisher of Perfect 10, a publication devoted to buck-nekkid ladees who claim not to have had any cosmetic surgery. Apropos of nothing relevant to this real estate discussion but fascinating still, a couple of years ago it was widely reported that Mister Zada was gettin' up on cosmetic surgery cyclone and comedienne Joan Rivers. Now that, puppies, is an odd couple.
A few months prior to Mister Wahlberg's purchase of an undeveloped Beverly Park parcel, the pasha of porno pushed his colossal contemporary crib next door (above) on to the open market with a price tag of $24,500,000. Mid-summer in 2009 Your Mama heard through the Beverly Hills real estate gossip grapevine that supermodel cum media mogul Heidi Klum and her musician husband Seal made an unsuccessful low ball offer on Mister Zada's monstrous modern mansion that looks to us like a regional airport in an upscale zip code. True story: Your Mama was once inside Mister Zada's house when all of the sudden an elderly Asian man dropped to the floor with a bloodied forehead after running himself face-first into a giant panel of glass in the airplane hanger-sized living room.But we digress. The previous year, in July of 2008, septuagenarian Italian movie siren Luciana Paluzzi and her media mogul/theme park honcho husband Michael Solomon listed their 13,638 square foot mansion in South Beverly Park at $19,995,000. The asking price quickly and inexplicably jumped to $23,995,000. According to our always informative friend Babbling Babette, British pop star Robbie Williams, who has long owned a home in the gated Mulholland Estates community, took a shine to the property in the fall of 2008 and actually entered into a contract to purchase Signora Paluzzi's mock-Med manse for close to the asking price. As it turns out, the singer had a real estate change of heart, backed out at the last minute, lost his sizable deposit and decided to move back to England.
Thanks to Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills, we were recently made aware that after two long years on the market Signora Paluzzi's 7 bedroom and 7 bathroom Bev Park estate (above) was scooped up in early February of 2011 by Alex von Furstenburg. In case y'all don't read Vanity Fair–a publication we think of as terlit reading for the quasi-sophisticated–Mister von Furstenberg happens to be the son of impossibly chic sartorial power-player Diane von Furstenberg and the step-son of her (alleged) Lavender Mafia member and multi-billionaire husband Barry Diller. Verified information provided to Your Mama by Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills shows that Mister von Furstenberg–who works in equities and finance or something like that–secured the Spanish Hacienda-style house for the exasperatingly complicated price of $12,999,999. A few quick calculations on our bejeweled abacus shows that's a gut-wrenching 45% discount off the highest asking price. Good for Mister von Furstenberg; Not so good for Signora Paluzzi.In mid-November of 2010, several month before the von Furstenbergs closed on their new Beverly Park pad, porno king Norm Zada's arduous Beverly Park real estate journey finally came to an end when he unloaded his white elephant for $16,500,000 to an unnamed buyer. The sale price is considerably more then the von Furstenbergs paid for their (smaller) spread in South Beverly Park and a whopping 33% less than the original asking price of $24,500,000. Now children, here's the icing on this slice of juicy Beverly Park pie: The unnamed buyer–wealthy Saudis according to a trusted informant we'll Beverly Park–quickly caught an acute case of The Real Estate Fickle and just 2.5 months after purchasing the property flipped the beehawtcha back on the market with an astonishing asking price of–wait for it, wait for it–$25,000,000. We're not sure what makes the (alleged) Saudi owner think the house has gained $8,500,000 in value in just a couple of months but if we've said it once we've said it 8.5 million times: Who are we to question or comprehend the weird real estate ways of the wildly wealthy? These things simply make no sense to us mere financial mortals.
Two weeks after the Saudis closed on Mister Zada's contemporary crib in mid-November, the so-called Great 78 estate (above)–on the market since before Eve (allegedly) tempted Adam with an apple–was snapped up by an as yet unnamed buyer in late November for $21,000,000. That's an impressive ass-load of money to be sure but, chickens, true to pattern, it's also notably lower than the $29,000,000 asking price and even less than the original $34,000,000 price tag.The 3-ish-acre estate, directly across the street from Kelsey Grammer's former Bev Park residence, has a 17,826 square foot main mansion with 7 bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms plus a three bedroom guest house. The seller was health supplement guru Bill Phillips and the buyer–again as per our well-connected tattle-tale Beverly Park–is Los Angeles-based self-made billionaire Tom Gores. All the other Beverly Park fiends out there will already know that Tom Gores' billionaire brother Alec Gores also owns a ginormous village-like mansion inside the gates of Beverly Park. They would be walking distance from each other if anyone were to actually walked on the sidewalks in Beverly Park. But they don't. Well, okay, the staff people do, but not the homeowners. We'd bet the pinky toe on our left foot that Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof probably drive across the street to each other's house when they meet up for a tipple or two of wine.
Anyhoodles poodles, we don't know a rock from a refrigerator so we really can't say if Tom Gores has already moved into or even plans to move into The Great 78. What we do know is that since the late '90s, Mister Gores and his family have bedded down in a 10,479 square foot mansion in the upscale Mulholland Estates, the very same guard-gated community that's home to British pop star Robbie Williams, hotel heiress Paris Hilton and prostie-loving actor Charlie Sheen among other high-profile Tinseltown types.
Another outrageously palatial Beverly Park behemoth that sat on the market for quite a few years and at long last recently sold for less than half than its original asking price is a strangely squat-looking Italian villa built on spec by a gentleman named George San Pietro, a real estate developer, long-time Beverly Park resident and the ex-husband and baby daddy of Wheel of Fortune letter turner Vanna White. Miz White–it may amuse some of the children to know–now lives in the celebrity-stocked Mulholland Estates community along with Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, Robbie Williams, Beverly Park and Mulholland Estates homeowner Tom Gores and former Beverly Park homeowners Mike and Irena Medavoy who, as it turns out, recently and brazenly flipped their giant house in the Mulholland Estates back on the market for nearly a million and half more than they paid just 4.5 months after buying the damn thing.
As best as we can surmise from our peep and poke through the property records and online listing information, Mister San Pietro first put his 24,595 square foot real estate hope and prayer in Beverly Park (above) on the open market in August of 2007 with a staggering (and publicity generating) asking price of $50,000,000. While waiting to sell, Mister San Pietro wisely and famously leased his Bev Park spec-built mansion to P. Diddy–or Piddle Patty or Daddy Diddler or whatever damn name Sean Combs calls himself nowadays. The entrepreneurial mogul hosted one of his star-studded (and depressingly cliché) white parties on the property. Mister San Pietro made a few more pennies when he leased the department store-sized house to the itty-bitty purple one Prince for a reported $200,000 per month.After three long years on (and off) the market, the price of Mister San Pietro's Beverly Park ball-and-chain had plummeted to $27,900,000 and, huzzah!, six short weeks later the boutique hotel-sized house was sold for an even lower $23,500,000. That a truly tongue-twisting 47% less than the original and–let's be honest cinnamon sticks–never realistic fifty million buck asking price.
We recently queried a Beverly Hills real estate über-insider with whom we're acquainted–let's call him Lee O. Tard–as to the identity of the as yet unnamed new owners of the 9 bedroom and 15 bathroom behemoth. The sometimes frighteningly knowledgeable Lee O. Tard snitched to Your Mama that the baronial Bev Park beast's new owners are husband and wife handbag designers Bruce Makowsky and Kathy Van Zeeland, an energetic pair who have made a killing hawking their hobo bags and clutches on the home shopping juggernaut QVC.
While we would certainly not be surprised to learn there are more–every mansion is for sale for the right price–as far as we know there are only five Beverly Park properties currently available. The Real Housewives of Bevelry Hills cast member Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd have a $29,000,000 price tag on their house and the unfortunately-named Rockstar Energy Drink founder Russ Weiner has had his Bev Park mansion on and off the market for nearly two years with an unchanged asking price of $28,000,000. Both properties are listed off-market with Mauricio Umansky, Beverly Park ur-agent, husband of Beverly Hills housewife Kyle Richards and soon-to-be star of the upcoming Selling Los Angeles reality program.
Norm Zada's former home, (allegedly) bought by wealthy Saudis in late 2010, is back on the market for $25,000,000 and real estate reality television junkies will recognize the listing agent as toothy and dapper Matthew Altman who appears on the current season of Million Dollar Listing. Weighing in at 29,069 square foot, the duplex palace with 18 bedrooms and a flabbergasting 28 bathrooms is listed at $19,999,000 and owned–we've been told by a number of those in the know–by some Saudi royal or another.
Only time will tell if our little pattern-theory about the real estate habits of Beverly Park homeowners will hold up in regards to the quintet of properties currently for sale. Word to the wise: If history does indeed repeat itself, at least a few of the owners of the five available properties should prepare themselves for a very long real estate haul that will end with them selling their mansion for considerably under their original asking price. Such are the real estate ways of the famous and freakishly rich.
listing photos (Zada): Hilton & Hyland; listing photos (Paluzzi/von Furstenberg house, Phillips/Gores and San Pietro/Makowsky-Van Zeeland): Hilton & Hyland
Weaving a pencil box
Pencil boxes, made by students of grade 3
You need:
- coffee cups
- pencil
- ruler
- scissors
- yarn
- weaving needle or stir stick with a whole
Begin by cutting a cup from top to bottom in an uneven amount of vertical strips. We used paper cups, because these won't tear so fast. Place the other cup inside of the cup with the cuts to hold its shape. This will allow the cup to hold its shape. Tie a piece of yarn around one of the vertical cup pieces. This will hold the yarn in place. Then begin weaving, by placing the yarn over one piece of cup and under the next.
Continue weaving all the way up the cup. Use your fingers to push the yarn down. When you get to the end, tie the yarn around the final piece of cup.
Woven key chain
You need:
- piece of cardboard 8 by 12 cm
- key chain
- pencil
- ruler
- scissors
- cotton
- wool
- needle or stir stick with a hole in it
- coloured beads
Weaving is fun and should be learned, but what to do with all those little patches? Our students made a nice key chain of them! The local grocery store delivered us 50 key chains for free! Unfortunately my students already took their key chains home before I could photograph them. So, I had to take the one above!
Mark the middle of the two small sides of the cardboard. Draw 5 little stripes on both sides of the middle, every half centimeter. Cut into the cardboard at each mark. Wrap cotton thread around the cardboard tabs and make sure it runs right.
Take a weaving needle or a stir stick (see picture) and weave threads through the cotton. Use one or several colours. Weave until 2/3 part of the cardboard is covered.
When the weaving is done, thread the tails onto a needle and pass it under the block of weaving. Then cut the end close to the block.
Remove the weaving from the loom by bending the cardboard tabs and pulling off the loops. Pull the loops through the ring of the keychain.
Cut the threads below and thread some beads on them.
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