Amaury Nolasco Settles Down Up in the Hills

BUYER: Amaury Nolasco and Jennifer Morrison
LOCATION: Laurel View Drive, Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $2,550,000
SIZE: 2,946 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: ...Custom built for Richard Denning (Hawaii Five O) & Evelyn Ankers (Hollywood's Scream Queen)! Located on a quiet cul-de-sac, this remodeled 4 bed + 3.5 ba is situated on a larger flat lot with amazing views! South facing backyard with indoor/outdoor entertainer's flow and outdoor living and dining areas, a pool and spa, a grassy yard ad an additional side dog run. Master bedroom with walk-in closet, 2-car garage with direct access & storage.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A day or two ago, as we sat on the back deck, flicked falling leaves off our trusty laptop computer and nursed our second late afternoon gin and tonic, we chit chatted with one of our better informed informants–a lovely ladee we call Linda Letterrip–who whispered in Your Mama's big ear that an actor named Amaury Nolasco recently scooped up a new house in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles.

Your Mama squinted our eyes at Linda and shrieked, "Amoré, who? What kind of damn name is Amoré?" Linda, always so patient when Your Mama has tumbler of gin in our hand, quietly corrected us in the most motherly of fashions. "No dear, it's Amaury, Amaury Nolasco, and if you don't know what a delicious piece of man candy he is you better get on the internet right quick."

Turns out the chisel chinned and well built Mister Nolasco has spent the last five seasons strutting his fetching Puerto Rican born Dominican descendant stuff on Prison Break, a program on the Fox network Your Mama has never seen. We also discovered he's been in a dozen or so mostly not very good films including Max Payne, Transformers, Mr. 3000, The Benchwarmers, and 2 Fast 2 Furious. A little more peeping and poking around the interweb reveals that Mister Nolasco must be getting paid well on Prison Break because prop records show in early August of 2009 he forked over $2,550,000 for a 2,946 square foot house on a private driveway off Laurel View Drive. It probably doesn't hurt that records show Mister Nolasco purchased the property with his ladee-friend, actress Jennifer Morrison. Miss Morrison currently plays on a doctor on the hit program House M.D. which is another show Your Mama has never tuned in to if only because we don't care for hospital dramas. We do not want to know that the surgeon is having marital problems with his alcoholic wife and his nurse mistress is stalking him. Besides, we live with a doctor. We have more than enough of the doctor drama right at home so it's unnecessarily redundant to watch doctors on the damn tee-vee.

With the assistance of Babbling Babette we managed to scare up a listing for the property which indicates the house was originally custom built in 1954 for actor Richard Denning and his ladee-wife Evelyn Ankers. Mister Denning is perhaps best known for his regular roll on Hawaii Five O and Miz Ankers is widely revered as the "First Lady of the Scream Queens" and the "Queen of the Screamers" due to her many roles as the well-bred leading lady in a slew of 1940s horror films. Since Mister Denning and Miz Ankers, the house has had several owners the last of which appear to be a couple of, ahem, gentlemens who remodeled the house to within an inch of its ranch house life.

Listing information shows the two-story house has 4 bedrooms and 3.5 poopers. The living/dining room combination opens through an entire wall of sliding glass doors to a covered terrace overlooking the swimming pool and beyond that the glittering lights of Hollywood. The beamed but low-ceiling living room's focal point is a fireplace flanked built in shelving units. Your Mama regrets to inform, that horror of horrors, the living and dining room is currently being punished with the lightest of beige wall to wall carpeting. We know some of the children probably like wall to wall carpeting, but have any of y'all ever seen what it looks like under the wall to wall when it's removed? Let Your Mama tell you, it's unspeakably nasty. At least with hard surface floors the house gurl can take up the area rugs once or twice a year and give the floors a proper clean. Our gurl Svetlana hates to do that because it means moving all the furniture around but a wee gift certificate to Versace usually clams her up.

Anyhoo, the kitchen is open to the dining room through once of those breakfast bar pass through thingamabobs that make our palms sweat but not in a good way and has been kitted out with caramel colored cabinetry with frosted glass fronts, a full complement of high grade stainless steel appliances, travertine (or some other stone) floor, and a granite counter top that appears to be a reddish brown. Your Mama appreciates that the folks responsible for the kitchen design were adventurous enough to go with a counter top color that is not an over-used and unoffensive black granite but we're not sure this reddish-brown is the direction we would have gone either. Also, we would have liked to see the granite run all the way up to the bottom of the cabinets. We do, however, l.o.v.e. that the kitchen conveniently opens through French doors to a covered dining patio with an adjacent built-in bbq and bar.

The master bedroom also opens to the back yard through dark framed French doors. It disturbs Your Mama's decorative equilibrium that there are so many different window styles on the interior. In our non-existant perfect design world we prefer more unity to window styles. The master bedroom is also and unfortunately fully carpeted and includes a walk-in closet and what is usually classified as a "designer" bathroom due to the glassed in shower and a double vanity with a couple of stainless steel counter top mounted sinks that look more like dog bowls bathroom sinks.

Other amenities, according to listing information, are a electronically gated motor court, a two car garage with direct access to the house (nice for hauling groceries), large lawn areas for exercising the pooches, an additional dog run for containing the pooches.

Honestly chickens, we really want to like this house. It's well located on a flat lot in the fabled hills of Laurel Canyon, is just minutes to the legendary Chateau Marmont where we'll be having drinky-poos with our pal Flower this weekend, has a pair of inviting covered terraces for escaping the scorching southern California sunshine, is blessed with a solar powered, classic kidney shaped swimming pool and attached spa, and offers far and wide views of Los Angeles all the way to the damn Pacific Ocean. But we don't like it. Or rather, we don't like the interior "design." We think this house a classic case of a full renovation trying too hard to turn an architecturally ordinary house from the 1950s into something sophisticated and contemporary with a soupçon of sexy but instead comes of as being cliche, over processed and ultimately not something that will withstand the harsh test of design time. Stainless steel dog bowls for sinks in the master? Uh, please, no. Those things are going to look dated before Kate Hudson can move on to her next man catch. Oh hell, who are we kidding? They already look impossibly and irretrievably dated.

However and be that as it may, Your Mama is under no illusion that our opinion about the wall to wall carpeting to the too small chandelier over the dining room table is of any matter or merit, particularly since it's Mister Nolasco and Miss Morrison who have to like the house and apparently they liked it well enough to fork over more than two and a half million smackers for the place.