LOCATION: Studio City, CA
PRICE: $2,720,000
SIZE: 5,075 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A couple of weeks ago Your Mama and all the other celebrity real estate watchers learned from the long-legged blond at Trulia Luxe Listings that race car driving actor/director Jason Priestley and his make-up artist wife Naomi Lowde-Priestley sold their Toluca Lake home to a not-famous couple for $2 million. The sale represents a $140,000 loss that does not account for carrying costs, any maintenance and/or improvement expenses the couple may have incurred or the real estate fees.*
This week, oddly enough, Your Mama heard word from a couple of snitchy informants, including the inestimable real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak, that the Priestley couple, who have two young children, bought a substantially bigger new house about four miles directly west in a leafy pocket of Studio City, CA for $2,720,000.**
Listing details show the freshly constructed and well appointed, two-story wannabe-Cap Cod sits on less than a quarter acre right on the border between Studio City and Sherman Oaks and has a total of five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 5,075 square feet. A prominent, full-frontal two car garage has direct entry to the main house and a detached cabana adds additional living space . (By Your Mama's quick and rudimentary calculations the Priestley's new digs in Studio City is just over 1,800 square feet larger than their former home in Toluca Lake.)
We don't love the exact tone of ashy medium brown as appears in listing photographs but otherwise we live, children, for the seven inch wide floorboards that run throughout the main floor living areas. A medium-width but exceptionally long center hall entry extends clear through to the back of the house with wide openings into adjoining formal living and dining rooms, both with scads of custom mill work and the former with a marble-faced fireplace. Not that it matters more than a damn pickle what this moody property gossip thinks but we could happily have done without the showboat-y glass display cases built in to the columns that support the shallow archway between the living and dining room.
A luxuriously fitted butler's pantry with marble back splash and warming drawer links the dining room to the expensively outfitted family-sized kitchen. Along the long back wall of the kitchen dark counter tops (of unknown material) sit on snow white Shaker-style counter tops while the generously proportioned center island has steel grey Shaker-style cabinetry topped with an impressively thick single slab of marble. In addition to the four-stool center island snack counter there's a small informal dining area in front of a picture window with backyard view and all the appliances are top-grade, as should be expected in a house at this price point in this location. The kitchen opens to the family room where there's a deeply coffered ceiling, a bookcase flanked marble-faced fireplace, and a wall of wood-framed glass doors that fold open to a concrete-floored veranda that overlooks the backyard.
Also on the main floor is a powder pooper for guest, an en suite guest bedroom, and a home theater with a projection system, milk chocolate brown fabric wall panels set off by lipstick red columns, lily gilding nightclub lighting, and tiered seating for (about) 11 in puffy black leather recliners with built-in cup holders. (We know they are a pearl clutching sight for sore eyes, children, but Your Mama would bet our long-bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, and our mean ol' pussycat Sugar those recliners are as comfortable as they are hidjeous.)
Upstairs, three guest/family bedrooms have private bathrooms and a second family room might easily be put to use as a children's play room, arts and crafts nook, yoga lounge or Pilates parlor. The spacious master suite has a (third) marble-faced fireplace, built-in bookshelves, something called "separate entry closets," and a wee private balcony with backyard overlook. Slathered in marble—floors, counters, shower—the master bathroom has two sinks on either side of a built-in hair and make-up vanity, a soaking tub for two set into a bay window, and a separate, glass-enclosed steam shower.
Back downstairs, the veranda off the family room and kitchen area—which Your Mama would like so much better if it were more comfortably half again as deep—gives way to newly sodded lawn. Off to the side, there's a built-in barbecue situation and, in the far western corner, what we imagine may (or may not) have once been a detached garage was converted to a pool side cabana with kitchenette and convenient half bathroom. A wide set of French doors and a long wall of folding glass doors expose the cabana to the terrace that runs along the smallish saltwater swimming pool with picayune suntanning shelf and inset spa.
*Mister and Missus Priestly paid $2,140,000 for their 3,266 square foot Toluca Lake home in May 2007. They first listed the property in the fall 2011 for $2.1 million. It did not sell and was taken off the market and re-listed in February 2014 for $2,099,000, a figure that might as well be $2.1 million.
**We were able to confirm the purchase with property records—it was purchased through the same trust as their former home in Toluca Lake—and as far as this property gossip can tell the Priestleys paid nearly a million dollars more than any other property sold in the immediate vicinity in more than a year.
listing photos: Keller Williams Realty
0 comments:
Post a Comment