A New House for Funnyman Kevin Nealon

BUYER: Kevin Nealon
LOCATION: Pacific Palisades, CA
PRICE: $3,450,000
SIZE: 5,600 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: If the children will put on their thinking caps they'll recall that in May of 2009 Your Mama discussed the Manhattan Beach, CA cottage of comedian and actor Ken Nealon (Weeds, Glenn Martin DDS, Saturday Night Live) that he'd hoisted on the market with an asking price of $3,295,000.

Property records now show that Mister Nealon and his bizzy bit-part actress wife Susan Yeagley (Parks and Recreation, Til Death, The Sarah Silverman Program)–who made a baby together in early 2007–finally sold their Manhattan Beach pad in March of 2010 for $2,725,000.

Thanks to the bizzy boys at Celebrity Address Aerial we've learned that just a few months later the comedic couple set down new roots a few miles up the coast in the upscale and family friendly enclave of Pacific Palisades where they shelled out $3,450,000 for a newly constructed mansion wedged onto a tight 6,857 square foot lot in the El Medio Bluffs neighborhood.

Listing information indicates the quasi-Georgian style three-story house measures approximately, 5,600 square feet and includes 7 bedrooms and 5.5 poopers, plenty of room for Baby Nealon and several shorties more iffin Mister and Missus Nealon are planning on more. On one side of the center hall entry way is the formal living room with coffered ceiling, fireplace, and and a cluster of narrow but tall windows that reach almost all the way up to the ceiling and all the way down to the white oak hardwood floors stained a walnut color.

On the other side, a formal dining room with heavy moldings, and simple painted wainscoting that runs around the room. A hallway that runs perpendicular to the entry leads to the less formal open-plan family quarters that include a family room with fireplace flanked by built in cabinetry and shelving, and large sliding glass door that open to a small back/side yard. There's also a big breakfast area and large chef friendly kitchen equipped with custom white cabinetry a few glass panel doors on the uppers, speckled granite counter tops, a 12-foot long center island, extra-large butler's pantry, and high-grade stainless steel appliances that include a warming drawer and wine fridge.

A stair hall with skylights sunk into the coffered ceiling leads to the second floor bedrooms that include a master suite with hardwood floors, tray ceiling, fireplace, private marble pooper with glass enclosed steam shower, and French doors that lead to an expansive roof deck with built-in seating that wraps around a fire pit. The deck is unquestionably the most scenic and interesting outdoor space on the tight lot but Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter would not care to spend three and a half million clams to have guests traipse through our boo-dwar into order to get to the most appealing outdoor entertaining space. No-siree-bob.

The lowest level, a basement sort of thing, includes the two car garage, windowless media room, and large laundry facilities. There's is also a dining nook with built-in cabinetry, massage room, and fitness room all with faux-windows backed by some sort of disturbing and perplexing mural of a tropical scene that has Your Mama gagging up our early morning Bloody Mary.

The small, almost claustrophobic lot includes a small ficus hedge surrounded backyard with a patch of lawn and dining terrace. The Nealon's new digs also include guest/staff quarters, large laundry facilities, a 2-car garage, state of the art electronics with built-in audio system, surround sound and iPod docking station which is nice since stereo equipment is quickly going the way of acid wash jeans.

listing photos: Everett Fenton Gidley for Keller Williams/Santa Monica

Cheryl Hines Lists Not Particularly Funny House

SELLER: Cheryl Hines
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $4,249,000
SIZE: 4,908 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It's always a breath of fresh air to come across a celebrity who recognizes that the bottom done fell out of the Los Angeles real estate market in 2008 and understnads that while there are signs of life and glimmers of hope the economy still sucks for most people and the days of buying a posh property and then quickly flipping it for a multi-million dollar profit is, for the most part, long gone.

One of those celebrities with a sensible real estate mind would seem to be Emmy nominated actress Cheryl Hines who a little birdie told Your Mama recently listed her house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles with an asking price of $4,249,000. That, puppies, is a modest gain over the $4,125,000 that property records show she and her man-mate Paul Young paid for the property in June of 2005. A few flicks of the well worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's a barely there 3% gain over five years, a picayune profit for a house in this price range and one that will be more than eaten up by the fat real estate that will be paid when the property sells.

Most of the children should recognize Miz Hines, who once upon a time was Oscar nominated actor Rob Reiner's personal assistant, as the actress who portrays Larry David's wife on the HBO's semi-scripted and soo-blimely executed sit-com Curb Your Enthusiasm, a program on which she's starred to critical acclaim for the last 10 years. In addition to her role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Miz Hines also worked her sometimes improvisational stuff in a fair number of films and television programs such as the animated series Father of the Pride, Herbie Fully Loaded, Goodnight Vagina, The Grand, and In the Motherhood. She even made a brief, 3-episode spin through the excruciating but magnetic family melodrama Brothers & Sisters.

A few minutes research on the interweb and Your Mama learns that Miz Hines is quite the bizzy beaver. In addition to her duties on Curb Your Enthusiasm, she'll be lending her voice to something called The Legend of Secret Pass, co-starring in a new one-camera sit-com called Wright vs. Wrong with Debra Messing (Will & Grace) and the a-may-zing Carrie Fisher, and she is the executive producer of an upcoming do good-feel good reality program call School Pride that follows the mawkish Extreme Makeover model. Instead of doing up houses that the financially less fortunate owners can no longer afford, Miz Hines' reality program will be about community members going in and improving busted up and broken down schools. Listen butter beans, Your Mama is all for fixing up schools, giving kids a clean and well equipped place to learn, and paying teachers a proper wage and all, but we are not interested in a program that mixes good ol' fashioned charity/volunteer work with the shameless manipulating of the heart strings of viewers. We find that sort of mawkish and obvious format tawdry, tacky, and more than just a little unseemly.

Anyhoo, according to listing information, Miz Hines' single story Cape Cod meets rambling California ranch meets a hay barn style residence located in the Mandeville Canyon area measures 4,908 square feet and includes a total of 6 bedrooms and 5.5 poopers. That breaks down, according to listing information, to 4 family bedrooms, a bedroom and pooper for Yorbalinda the live-in housekeeper, and a guest house above the garage with living room, bedroom, wee kitchen and private pooper.

A walled and electronically gated entrance shielded by tall trees and thick and mature foliage opens to a wide stone paved driveway and motor court that curls around a gnarled olive tree–that is an olive tree right?–and leads to a barn-like two car garage. A classic, farmhouse style front door with nine-glass panes opens into a generously sized entry with adjoining powder pooper. The formal living room–which really isn't very formal at all in large part to the massive flat screen tee-vee mounted onto the stone fireplace where an actual piece of art ought to be–has distressed oak hardwood floors, built in cabinetry tucked into a niche, beamed ceilings, and a wall of nine-over-nine sash windows that reach deliciously almost all the way to the floor. The formal dining room has an oddly located and narrow niche with shelves for displaying the china or whatever, a low but lovely wood ceiling and, much to Your Mama's delight, s Dutch door that opens into the backyard. Dutch doors are pefect for letting the breeze blow through but still keeping the kiddies and the pets from sneaking out and dumping themselves in the pool.

The wide, galley style kitchen has both granite and butcher block counter tops, Viking brand stainless steel appliances, and over-scaled, cream colored honey bee tile floors that Your Mama thinks need a'changing. The kitchen opens into a window wrapped breakfast room as well as a family room where someone left a horrid and oddly located 9-dollar Home Despot light fixture in the ceiling. Uhm, no. We just can't get past that in a four million dollar house. That's the same stoopid light fixture that Your Mama's lame and lazy landlord installed in our old two-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side of New York back in the early 1990s. Pleeze. People. No.

Anyhoo, the master suite includes a large and largely uninspired pooper with a giant step up soaking tub sunk into a marble surround and flanked by twin vanities. We're not even going to comment or reference our Big Book of Decorative Dos and Don'ts as to the cliché fuchsia colored orchid sitting in the far corner of the room. There are also dual master closets, according to listing information, and a fireplace shoved uncomfortably into the corner of the room in such a way as to make us feel edgy, off-kilter, and in dire need of a nerve pill to readjust our decoratively sensitive equilibrium.

The guest house above the garage has a slightly rustic, Upstate New York sort of thing going on with a pitched wood beamed ceiling, hardwood floors, multi-paned sash windows, wide wainscot cabinetry, and that dead damn fish up on the wall.

A wide, brick terrace, part of which is covered and part of which has a silly portable fire pit that's designed to look as if it's not portable, extends off the back of the house until it reaches a gently curving quarter wall that separates the terrace from the lawn and swimming pool areas. A myriad of mature trees and foliage ring the perimeter of the yard and ensure the outdoor spaces remain quiet and private should Miz Hines and Mr. Young want to have a romantical evening in the spa attached to the heated free-form swimming pool that's half-heartedly landscaped with river rock and ferns to look like a blue lagoon or something.

Although country casual is not in any manner, shape, or form Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's preferred decoratin' modality, it's always nice to peek into a celebrity home that's not been over-processed, over-blown, and over-styled into a sterile showplace that's sole purpose seems to scream and yell, "Look how rich and successful I am. No, seriously, look at me. I'm rich and my house is huge and there's not a hair out of place!" Miz Hines' house, on the other hand, actually looks like that of regular people–albeit it very wealthy people–largely unbuckled and untarnished from the plasticine glamour that infects Los Angeles and far to often substitutes for actual substance. Can you hear Your Mama Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian? Okaaaay?

Miz Hines and Mister Young's nearby neighbors include a number of other Hollywood types including Courtney Thorne Smith (Melrose Place), 3-time Oscar winning director Oliver Stone (Nixon, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon), actor Dennis Quaid, and twitchy comedian Gary Shandling.

listing photos: Architecture 8

Adam Carolla Lists Starter House In Los Angeles

SELLER: Adam Carolla
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,395,000
SIZE: 2,281 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: He may have rather stoopidly and controversially called Hawaiians "retarded" and "the world's dumbest people," but, children, comedian, ack-tor, and radio personality Adam Carolla is all kinds of rich anyways. Beehawtcha may have pissed off an entire state–not to mention an entire country–but he is none the less laugh, laugh, laughing all the way to the damn bank.

Back in 1996, not long after pairing up with publicity seeking celebrity rehabber Dr. Drew Pinsky on the long running Lovelines radio program, Mister Carolla took some of his earnings and purchased himself a starter located house high above Beachwood Canyon in Los Angeles, CA. While Mister Carolla and his family have long since moved on to bigger and better digs, the Beachwood Canyon crib remained the property in his portfolio. However, the talk radio titan* has, apparently, decided to lighten his real estate load because he recently put the property on the market with an asking price of $1,395,000.

*Okay, maybe Mister Carolla isn't really a "titan" of talk radio in like that poser Howard Stern who caters to the lowest of lowbrow taste but hobnobs with the hoity toity in the Hamptons, but he's still enormously successful.

Mister Carolla, a bizzy entertainment business beaver if there ever was one, got his big radio break on Jimmy Kimmel's erstwhile radio program Kevin and Bean. He went on to yakkety yak for 10 years on the radio with Dr. Pinsky, co-hosted a popular sketch comedy program called The Man Show with his new b.f.f. Jimmy Kimmel, and created and performed on the tee-vee program Crank Yankers on which scary looking puppets made crank calls to unsuspecting victims. In 2005, after leaving Lovelines, he started up his own eponymous radio program. In 2009 the show was converted to a wildly successful 5-day a week podcast that quickly became the most downloaded podcast on the iTunes. He's also done voice over work (Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Family Guy) and in 2008 he appeared on that way past its prime program Dancing With the Stars on which he mamboed and tangoed but was ultimately done in by the Paso Doble.

Property records show that Mister Carolla bought his Beachwood Canyon aerie in November of 1996 for $350,000. Lo-ward have mercy buttons, remember when y'all could buy a nice if modest house in a good part of Los Angeles for well under half a million smackers? Anyhoo, property records show the fully renovated French Normandy style residence was built in 1924 and listing information indicates it is an original Hollywoodland home.

Hollywoodland, for those not schooled on the history of the Los Angeles real estate world, is the architecturally diverse subdivision situated in the peaks and valleys in the rugged and scrubby hills above Hollywood. The now iconic Hollywood sign, which originally read "Hollywoodland" and was covered in flashing light bulbs, was erected in the 1920s as an advertisement to attract arty-farty and urbane home buyers to the development. While not nearly as posh or as expensive as Beverly Hills or Bel Air, Beachwood Canyon remains one of Los Angeles' most Los Angeles of neighborhoods, iffin that makes any sense.

Mister Carolla's crib, according to listing information, measures 2,281 square feet and contains 3 bedrooms and 3 poopers. The house sits atop a towering stone rampart and is accessed via a stone staircase that wraps around the rampart and leads up to a gated and hedged yard. Even more stair climbing is required to haul yer hiney up to the front door.

While it would most certainly be lovely to live on a private promontory high above the street, our imperious house gurl Svetlana would never permit Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter to live in a situation that would force her to perspire just from dragging the damn groceries up from the street to the kitchen. If there was some sort of dumbwaiter or funicular to carry the comestibles up to the house from the street she might relent. But even then probably not since she's still have to get her not interested in exercising at all for any reason self up the stairs.

Anyhoo, the interior spaces of Mister Carolla's former home include a step-down living room with a high-beamed ceiling, hardwood floors, fireplace, wet bar, and a tall arched window with views of the glittering lights of Tinseltown. There is also a den/family room with a second fireplace and built in entertainment center, and an eat-in kitchen all done over with a built in boo-fay and plate rack, white raised panel cabinetry, and high grade stainless steel appliances including a 4-burner baby Viking range. The master bedroom, according to listing information, has a third fireplace and, we presume, a private pooper.

Listing information indicates that the entire house was renovated and retrofitted in 1997 with a new HVAC system, foundation bolting, slate roof, electrical and plumbing upgrades and a beefed up security system.

The yard wraps around the house and offers a few small but flat lawn areas, a flagstone terrace with built in barbecue pit–or whatever that brick thing is–and an awning shaded patio that leads to a small deck with city views where the former traffic school instructor and staunch atheist sunk a hot tub and probably spent many-a-evening staring at the starry heavens. The children will note the gigantic flag pole prominently installed in the front yard. Although he may not believe in capital "G" god like most Americans still do, Mister Carolla is still a patriotic person. This is, after all, America, land of the free, and one need not believe in Jesus to be a good American.

Mister Carolla currently lives in a walled and gated property high atop the Hollywood Hills that he purchased in April of 2003 for $1,630,000. The Spanish style house measures 5,345 square foot house with 3 bedrooms and 6 poopers. Your Mama happens to know that, like at his former home in Beachwood Canyon, Mister Carolla flies the American–and the I-talian–flag at his current crib.

In March of 2007, according to property records, Mister and Missus Carolla paid $3,600,000 to purchase a contemporary ranch house in the Point Dume area of Malibu. As it turns out, the Carolla couple's beach house in the Bu, which has 4 bedroom and 3 poopers in the main house and another bedroom and pooper in the detached guest house, is currently for lease for July and/or August at $10,000 per month.

photos from Teles Properties listing