Wednesday, June 17, 2009

A Model House on the Market in Bev Hills

SELLER: Estella Warren
LOCATION: Cielo Drive, Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $1,950,000
SIZE: 2,247 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Secluded Regency style contemporary tucked away on a cul de sac. 3 bedrooms, 2.75 baths plus office/maids. Dark wood floors, French doors, updated kitchen and baths, sun drenched pool and wrap around garden.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: One day not too long ago Your Mama was yakking with gal pal Glinda the Good Witch who let it slip that celebrated synchronized swimmer turned scantily clad cat walker turned wannabe ack-tress Estella Warren is selling her Beverly Hills hideaway.

Well children, having been three sheets to the wind at the time Your Mama forgot all about it until last night when we were sipping on a pre-bedtime gin and tonic through a straw, perusing the newest Los Angeles listings and trying to settle our frayed and frazzled nerves from the psychically destabilizing experience of watching the dee-voonly trashy dramatics on the season finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Oh lawhd have mercy children, the astoundingly bad behavior of those plastic-bubbied beehawtchas manage to make ALL the other Housewives look downright dignified. And that, lambs, ain't easy to do.

Anyhoo, as she always is, Glinda was correct and large lipped Estella Warren (Planet of the Apes, Pucked and small spots on a slew of tee-vee shows) has indeed listed her her house high in the hills above Beverly with an asking price of $1,950,000.

Property records reveal that Miss Warren forked over $1,780,000 for the 2,247 square foot residence on Cielo Drive which is, of course, the very same street where the infamous Manson murders occurred. The blood soaked Polanski/Tate house has since been razed and replaced with Villa Bella, a gigantic faux-Flemish/quasi Mediterranean style mansion owned by Jeff Franklin who, among other boob-toob endeavors, made a mountain of moo-lah producing and writing the sitcom Full House. But we digress...

Miss Warren's single story "Regency style" residence sits at the tail end of a winding private drive, was built in 1959 and according to listing information includes three bedrooms plus a staff room which we'd bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly is smaller than our damn walk-in closet. Listing information also indicates there are two and three-quarter poopers. Although we've gone over this about 14 million and two times before, Your Mama will once again school the children who do not already know that a three-quarter bathroom is one with a sink, terlit and stall shower...no bathtub.

Before y'all start tearing up Miss Warren's sense of decorative style, please note that his house has been staged for selling so it's quite unlikely that Miss Warren's house looked like this Pottery Barn catalog before Staging Ladee got her hands on it. The first clue that tipped Your Mama off that this house is staged to within an inch of its life is the white paint....white paint everywhere there can be paint. The second clue is all that snow white upholstered furniture with dark wood accents which we see in 80 or 90 percent of all the staged homes in LaLa Land. And the third clue, of course, is that stoopid lap blanket on the back of the sofa in the living room. Your Mama's decorating rule number 31 clearly states that real people do not, nor should they ever, sling a damn lap blanket over the back of sofa like that. Seriously, resist that urge.

The wood floors throughout the house have been stained a nice chocolate color and the open plan living area includes a step down living room with a bank of paned sliding doors that open to the rear terrace. It appears to Your mama that Staging Ladee intended for the dining area to be doing double duty as an office. Oh hell no. Unless you are so important that you can not be away from your damn email to take in a meal with your friends or family, you should keep the computers out of the dining room. The staff room or one of the secondary bedrooms would be a much better location for that contraption.

Listing information indicates the kitchen has been "updated" and if you call adding a brick red tile back splash, a few stainless steel appliances and a grey stain treatment to the cabinets updated, it is. We appreciate that some kitchen designer thought to add a work island to the small kitchen but it's a rather wacky location right up next to the paned sliding door and is visually awkward at best.

The Master suite includes a large bedroom with a wonky and ill-placed diamond shaped window and a paned slider that leads to the garden. The master bath appears to have been all did up with a new party sized shower with black glass tiles and one of those impractical and too-trendy rain shower heads. While no one loves a party sized shower more than Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter, we're a little disappointed that the glass enclosure does not reach the ceiling which means this is, unfortunately, not a steam shower.

The outdoor areas include some secluded gardens and a brick patio surrounds the swimming pool where Staging Ladee has used an batallian of white-cushioned chaise lounges that makes the back yard feel like a Marriott Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. The hillside property looks out at the scrubby hillside on the other side of Benedict Canyon and towards the treeline that surround the smashing house sold by Red Hot Chile Pepper Anthony Kiedis sold in April of 2007 to producer/screenwriter Akiva Goldsman who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind and subsequently wrote the Pope provoking film The Da Vinci Code and its sequel Angels & Demons.

Your Mama has not a clue why Miss Warren has chosen to sell her house in this lackluster real estate market but maybe, just maybe, she's making a mint as Belle in an upcoming film version of Beauty and the Beast and will be moving up to bigger and better digs. We shall see.

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