SELLER: Jeff KwatinetzLOCATION: Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA
PRICE: $7,299,000
SIZE: 3,896 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Gorgeous Tri-level Contemporary with 30 ft on the sand of Topanga Beach. Perfect location very close to the City. Expansive decks off every level with commanding panoramic views from Palos Verdes to Pt. Dume. Huge gourmet eat-in kitch with center isle that flows into the Great Room with walls of glass and a large deck, just steps to the beach, Unbelievable master suite you won't want to leave. 2 additonal view bdrms plus office. Gated secure grounds with off highway parking and a 2 car garage.
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: With summer days waning and the too low in the damn sky winter sun blasting blinding bullets of sunshine at our tender retinas, Your Mama thought it might be fun to head on out to Malee-boo and see what we could see. There are, natch, a hundred rich people trying to sell their lavishly expensive ocean front homes, but the one we're gonna discuss today belongs to Tinseltown power player Jeff Kwatinetz who recently listed his house with an asking price of $7,299,000.
Mister Kwatinetz is known in some gossip glossy reading circles as actress Brittany Murphy's ex-lover and fiancé. In other circles, among the celebrity king makers and film producers who crowd the lunchtime tables at Barney Greengrass and Craft, the Harvard educated attorney is the sometimes controversial co-founder and former CEO of The Firm, a talent management that once claimed clients like Marty Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Benicio Del Toro, Natalie Portman, Orlando Bloom, Freddie Prinze Jr., the Dixie Chicks and Clay Aiken, just to name a few. In 2005, The Firm began to bleed principal players who took their a-list artists with them and in late 2008, Mister Kwatinetz too left the company he started. He quickly founded another artist management/record company called Prospect Park that manages a less lustrous stable of clients that include Backstreet Boys, Korn, Like a Storm, 311, Jane's Addiction, Ice Cube and R. Kelley. According to the IMDB, Mister Kwatinetz currently executive produces a tee-vee show called Royal Pains, which Your Mama has never seen nor heard of.
Property records show that Mister Kwatinetz bought his oceanfront manse in Malee-boo in June of 2006 for $5,950,059. According to property records and listing information, the walled and gated three story contemporary with rounded corners measures 3,896 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms–one of which is currently being used as an office–and 3.5 poopers. The house sits just north of Santa Monica on Topanga Beach which is an excellent location iffin you prefer not to deal with too much of the wall to wall traffic that frequently clogs up the Pacific Coast Highway from Pacific Palisades to Point Dume.
The drive gates open to a grassy motor court with a few palm trees and cacti, two off-highway parking spots and two additional parking spots in the garage. The courtyard entrance gives way to the entrance hall where stairs lead one flight up to what listing information calls a "great room," comprised of the living and dining areas and a commodious kitchen. Listen chickens, Your Mama knows we're prolly gonna be outnumbered here by real estate people and builders and people with families, but we loathe the term "great room." We're not entirely sure why, but it might have something to do with the–quite possibly incorrect–notion that the term came into wide usage by developers of seemingly infinite numbers of architecturally uninspired tract homes who gave streets dee-pressing and deeply disturbing names like Grassy Knob. Believe it or not children, that is indeed the name of a very real street in Bakersfield, CA where every third faux-Mediterranean looks exactly the same with the exact same floor plan that prominently features a "great room." But we digress...
The living/dining area appears to have stone floors of some sort–which would be amazing if they have radiant heating, not so much if they don't–as well as a fireplace with a flat screen mounted above it and a wall of floor to ceiling windows that open to of the three terraces that project from the back of the house, hang over the surf below and provide exquisitely long views up and down the coast from Palos Verdes to Point Dume. The large, cook friendly kitchen is open to the dining area and has white cabinetry with dark, possibly granite counter tops, the expected suite of high-grade stainless steel appliances, a large work island and an even larger window over the sink where one can wash dishes and simultaneous watch the cars whiz by, or more likely sit in a traffic jam on the Pacific Coast Highway.
The rather large master bedroom spans the entire width of the house and opens through a wall of floor to ceiling glass to a terrace that practically hangs over the beach. Mister Kwatinetz and his team of nice, gay decorators have continued the sophisticated and pale palette of white and beige with dark wood accents from the living area into the bedroom.
Your Mama thinks, but does not know for sure because we don't rally know a floor lamp from a bowl of cereal, that the long, narrow pooper pictured is the guest terlit with stone floor, stone counter top and a big of picture of some man eyeballing the people in there doing their dirty bizness. Ordinarily Your Mama does not care for the decorative artifice of table lamps on kitchen and/or bathroom counters. This bulbous table lamp, however, seems to work in the guest terlit if only because of the rather long length of the counter and the pale, pale, pale powder blue base blends perfectly with the barely there palette of white and putty.
Said white and putty palette in the powder pooper has also been applied by Mister Kwatinetz and his team of nice gay decorators to the rest of the house. Ordinarily Your Mama furrows our brow and balks big time at all beige/white/putty day-core. But children, what's fair is fair and we have to admit that despite the ridiculous exterior massing, Mister Kwatinetz's beach house day-core is thoughtful, well considered and–yes–very nicely done. Not only do we find stiff, modern shapes (i.e. the white sectional sofa) well mixed with warm and organic pieces (i.e. the dining room table) there is a very, very subtle use of color (i.e. a rusty red in the bedroom and powder blue in the bathroom) that perfectly compliments, balances and sets off the bee-yoo-tee-full blue of the ocean which is, if you think about it, the most dominant element in the house. It is Your Mama's humble and entirely meaningless opinion that the house was successfully furnished, and a serene palette properly picked, in conscious juxtaposition of the constant tumult of the very blue of the ocean that becomes white as it crashed onto the shoreline. Does that make sense to anyone besides Your Mama?
On the ocean side of the residence, a trio of identically sized and shaped balconies stack one on top of the other and have the sort of views people regularly pay many millions of dollars for in Malee-boo. We're sure some of you will whine and moan about how close together the houses that line the Pacific Ocean in Malee-boo are, but that don't really matter because there are many more who are more than willing to spend a good sized fortune to be able to sits staring at the Pacific while also being able to watch their neighbor barbecue hot dots. A shorts set of stairs tacked on to the bulkhead leads down to the 30 feet of "beach" out back that, unfortunately, is all kinds of rocky in this part of the Boo and has just a sliver of sand even even at low tide.
A peep and a poke around property records would indicate that this is the only house in Los Angeles that Mister Kwatinetz currently owns. He did have a house on Beverly Grove Place in the Bev Hills that he sold in 2003 for $2,750,000 to music mogul Damon Dash who in turn sold it in 2007 for $3,600,000. That said, it would not surprise Your Mama to learn that Mister Kwatinetz also maintains an in-town home or condo for those times he doesn't feel like schlepping out to Malee-boo after a long night of wining and dining celebrities.
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