LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA (Bel Air)
PRICE: $4,150,000
SIZE: 5,168 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Earlier this week Your Mama and just about every other celebrity property gossip dissed and discussed the Los Angeles, CA residence comedic sitcom stars Megan Mullally (Will & Grace, Children's Hospital) and Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, Children's Hospital) recently pushed on the (open) market with a tumescent (and possibly sanguine) $12,650,000 price tag.
Naturally, being the nosy beotch we are, Your Mama wondered where the child-free couple planned to decamp. Well, dontcha know, before we could have a proper scour though the various property records databases we make us of to facilitate our—ahem—reportage, we heard from a beaver busy real estate lady we know, let's call her Della Catesen, who managed to balance a Brobdingnagian bowl of borscht and a petite Limoges platter stacked with deep fried cheese blintzes while she laboriously dialed her Old School Princess phone and conspiratorially snitched to Your Mama that Miz Mullally and Mister Offerman already purchased another, less expensive property in the Bel Air area.
Property records for the Bel Air residence in question are, we confess, a smidgen vague; Ownership of the new home is through an eccentrically-named trust managed, it's worth nothing, by the same fella whose name appears on the deeds and documents for the couple's up-for-sale nest in the celebrity-packed Bird Streets area high above L.A.'s world-famous Sunset Strip. Howevuh, butter beans, Missus Catesen swore to Your Mama on her ever-present Boar's Head ham chub that she has it on unimpeachable authority that the new owners of a very contemporary house tucked privately into the tail end of a quiet cul-de-sac above the Stone Canyon Reservoir and bought in late days of 2011 for $4,150,000 are none other than Miz Mullally and Mister Offerman.
Listing information easily teased up out of the murky depths of the interweb, shows the two story contemporary residence—a sort of post-modern meets minimalist sort of pastiche—was built in 1992 and has 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in an undeniably spacious but hardly huge 5,168 square feet.
The boxy, mostly grey massing at the front of the house strikes hard with a formidable and—from some angles—unfriendly and even forbidding street presence. While some of the children will surely whine about how this house looks like a parking garage or an architect-designed prison facility—and it sort of does—Your Mama happens to be unapologetically fond of residential buildings that present a private and sometimes unfriendly face to the world.
The front doors give way to an unexpectedly long and voluminous foyer that cuts a wide, traffic-managing swath through the middle of the multi-winged mini-mansion. The open tread floating staircase that (melo)dramatically bisects the space and injects the room with a goose-pimply soupçon of possible peril, and the barely there frame-less glass wall that opens to the reflecting pool-sized swimming pool, are absolutely impressive architectural conceits but alas it also looks to Your Mama a tetch too much like the lobby of a self-important talent agency.
The elevated, mountain-side siting of the house reveals itself in the roomy, just-about-square living room where vast panels of glass that flank the monolithic concrete chimney breast serve up far-reaching views over the jagged, mansion-dotted canyons and sparkling reservoir to the (mostly) untamed mountain tops that stand between the blinged-out Platinum Triangle from her mousier—and some might say one-eyed—real estate cousin, the San Fernando Valley.
We can't confirm it but Della Catesen told us her people told her Miz Mullally and Mister Offerman have embarked on some renovations to their newly scooped residence in Bel Air. If true—and why wouldn't it be?—there's really no telling what the place looks like now, but at the time of their acquisition the eat-in kitchen orbited around a large, L-shaped center island and was outfitted with snow white, hardware-less cabinetry, high-gloss jet black counter tops and the expected collection of top-grade stainless steel appliances frequently found in multi-million dollar contemporary homes around the globe. A long wall of floor-to-ceiling glass connects to a dining and entertaining terrace with sweeping views over the surrounding roof tops to the the reservoir and mountains beyond.
A family room/den (with what appears to be polished concrete floors) has a towering wall of glass next to which curls a spiral staircase that leads up to a clerestory-windowed loft area with more long and spectacular views over the canyons, mountains and reservoir. The by-now-proverbial vistas get even more panoramic in the second floor master bedroom where two complete walls of glass provide the thrilling illusion that the room hovers recklessly over the tree tops towards the reservoir.
Some of the downstairs rooms have entire walls of glass that look into an interior courtyard planted with a small stand of bamboo and other rooms on the lower level have long expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows, some with glass doors that conveniently connect to the numerous patios and terraces that surround the house. The children may recall that the backyard swimming pool at Miz Mullally and Mister Offerman's home in The Birds is confoundedly puny even for Your Mama who can really get behind the notion of plunge pool. Maybe the Mullally-Offermans just don't like to swim much? As it turns out the swimming pool at their new house in Bel Air is also on the too-small side, a situation somewhat mitigated, maybe, by it's interesting if unnecessary and rather intimate co-mingling with the house.
Given that Miz Mullally and Mister Offerman paid just under four million bucks for their house in The Birds, should they get anywhere even in the ballpark of their $12,650,000 asking price they ought to have plenty of Benjamin Franklins left over to cover the entire purchase price of their new nest in Bel Air as well as any improvements or renovations they may choose to undertake.
listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty