J. Law buys star-status home in Beverly Hills
LOS ANGELES — YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Though she cleaves fiercely and admirably to her pre-fame sanguinity and candor it really doesn’t come as much surprise to this veteran celebrity property gossip that the honest to goodness if freshly anointed show business cynosure known as Jennifer Lawrence would select as her first Tinseltown real estate purchase a high-priced and celebrity pedigreed pad in a guard-gated Beverly Hills enclave jam-packed with a slew Hollywood big shots.
The property in question, which Your Mama has dissed and discussed on more occasions than our gin-soaked noggin could ever recall, was last listed for $7.85 million and Redfin shows the sale price at $8.225 million. The $375,000 differential suggests the internationally beloved “Hunger Games” protagonist and Academy Award winner (“Silver Linings Playbook”) may have faced down some deep-pocketed competition for the property. (For the professional record, 24-year-old Miss Lawrence can brag two additional Oscar nominations, for “American Hustle” and “Winter’s Bone,” one People’s Choice Award, two Golden Globes, and three MTV Movie Awards.)
According to Your Mama’s research and resources, the lucky seller who hauled in more than $1.8 million, less expenses, after just a year of ownership was Sydney Holland, a philanthropically minded neophyte film and television producer who also happens to be the much younger lady-friend of nonagenarian billionaire media mogul Sumner Redstone. Miz Holland picked up the celeb-approved property just a year ago for $6.4 million from Jessica Simpson and previous high-profile owners of the property include Paul Hogan, Ellen DeGeneres, Rick Yorn and Tom Freston.
The Bev Hills residence — technically, it’s in the Beverly Hills Post office area and marketing materials describe it as “French style — has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms in about 5,500-square-feet of decadently refurbished interiors that include newly installed wood and marble floors, a boat load of glitzy-glam light fixtures and French-style moldings. There’s a winding staircase in the foyer that leads in to the formal living room where we happen to know from no longer available digital marketing materials Miz Holland had a Marilyn Minter photograph that Your Mama would eat 70 pounds of glass to hang for just two days in our own living room but, anyways…. The adjoining formal dining room has a large window with verdant garden view and connects to the center island kitchen that’s expensively fitted and kitted with Carrara marble counter tops and top grade appliances. A sunny, window-lined breakfast room opens to the backyard.
Technically the house has five bedrooms but it was configured by the seller, as per listing details, with just three bedrooms: two guest/family bedrooms on the second floor along with a roomy master suite with custom-fitted walk-in closet and a marble lined bathroom. A fourth bedroom on the second floor was done up as a dressing room with salon-style hair and make-up facilities, which we imagine will come in right handy for the regular red-carpet walker, and the fifth bedroom, on the main floor, again per listing details, “serves as a sitting room.”
A variety of patios and terraces surround the house and include a walled entry courtyard with flagstone patio and koi-filled lily pond. Stone terraces off the back of the house step up a long and slender backyard thickly ringed by a tall wall of bamboo and other shrubbery that provides absolute privacy in and around the lap lane swimming pool and spa.
Some of the other entertainment industry A-list home owners in the security patrolled ‘hood include Guy Oseary; Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban; Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem; and Cameron Diaz, who bought her two residence compound in 2010 from Candice Bergen. Earlier this year, with their new baby then still on the way, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis coughed up $10.215 million in a hush-hush off-market deal for an approximately 7,300-square-foot abode that they bought from — you can’t make this stuff up, puppies — divorcing entertainment industry movers and shakers Tom and Kathy Freston.
As for Miz Holland, in case any of the children might be interested, she has a rather interesting and active real estate story liberally laced with celebrity connections and overlays. In June of 2013 she paid $5,495,000 for a muy bonita Spanish hacienda style casa in a prime section of the Flats of Beverly Hills that was previously leased by Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne who, everybody surely knows by now, off-loaded their multi-acre estate in Hidden Hills to Jessica Simpson and her retired professional tight end husband Eric Johnson. Miz Holland flipped the house in the Flats just three months later — right before she bought the house she just sold to Jennifer Lawrence — for $5.625 million.
Interestingly enough, back in August, real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak snitched to Your Mama that in July Miz Holland had quietly acquired a newly built, $2,835 million contemporary on a prime residential street in West Hollywood. Just a week or so later, we learned just today from the inestimable Lucy Spillerguts, the increasingly prolific property flipper dropped another $6.75 million on a much larger, 7,166-square foot mini-mansion in the guard-gated Mulholland Estates community where some of her neighbors include Charlie Sheen, Vanna White, Christina Aguilera and Judith Light who, apropos of absolutely nothing real estate related, this property gossip thinks did a terrific job on the first season of Amazon’s series “Transparent.”
