LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,399,000
SIZE: 2,396 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Every now and again The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial query Your Mama about a property they believe to be owned or have been purchased by a famous person. Such was the case this week with a 1930s Spanish-style villa nestled inon a steep hillside on a quiet and little known cul-de-sac just above the Sunset Strip that sold last April (2012) for $1,399,000.
We didn't know who bought the house and property records show ownership is obscured behind a generically named trust. So, natch, we gave our exceedingly reliable friend and informant Lucy Spillerguts a ringy-dingy. Your Mama can't prove it but our Miss Spillerguts swears the city-view residence was purchased by the newly engaged actor Aaron Paul of the hard-edged AMC series Breaking Bad. Mister Paul, the youngest of five kids born to an Idaho preacher man, may or may not share the house with his documentary filmmaker/"girl-against-girl 'crime'" activist fiancée Lauren Parsekian.
Although Mister Paul (née Sturtevant) didn't get his big Showbiz break until 2007 when he was cast as a recurring character on Big Love he's been floating around Hollywood since the the early 2000s when he appeared as a contestant on The Price is Right, popped up in a couple of music videos and was seen on a number of commercials for products like chewing gum and breakfast cereal. His resume also includes a handful of mostly forgettable films (Help! I'm a Fish, Bad Girls from Valley High, Mission Impossible III) and a smattering of boob-toob appearances (CSI and CSI: Miami, X-Files, 3rd Rock from the Sun). But it is, of course, his plum lead role as the likable but screwed up drug addict and meth cooker Jesse Pinkman on the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad series that made him famous and earned him not just one but two Emmy statuettes.
Anyhoo, listing information we dug up on the internets shows the two-story house sits high above the street atop a tight two-car garage, measures 2,396 square feet and contains a total of four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.
At the street level, a curving retaining wall is painted in with graphic ochre and brick red horizontal stripes that are not only very reminiscent but very nearly identical to the horizontally striped retaining walls of Castillo del Lago, the fabled, 1920s Mediterranean compound perched privately high above Lake Hollywood and was once the L.A. hideaway of Bugsy Siegel. The 8 bedroom spread and was owned for a few years in the mid-1990s by Madonna Herself who sold it in 1996 for about $5.3 million to commercial director Joe Pytka who, in turn, sold it in the summer of 2010 for $7 million to fashion designer Leon Max. Fascinating as the history of Castillo del Lago may be, it is not the property we're here to discuss today.
The rustic wood front door of the Sunset Strip Spanish Mister Paul (allegedly) purchased opens into a stone tile floored central stair hall off of which is a opens a combination living/dining room with dark brown wood floors, wood beams across the ceiling, a hulking stone fireplace that almost but not quite looks like something ripped out of a French chateau and a dead on head on view of the perennially chic Chateau Marmont. We're just gonna look past the yellowish, sponge-painted (or faux finished or whatever) walls and assume that Mister Paul and Miss Parsekian had the decorative good sense to re-paint them.
On the other side of the central stair hall there's a compact but expensively equipped eat-in kitchen outfitted with high-quality commercial style appliances including a pair of side-by-side fridge/freezers. That adjoining breakfast room has a pitched and beamed ceiling and four wood-framed corner windows that allow for sweeping city and sky views.
The main portion of the house has three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms including a spacious master suite with a window-lined sitting area and a very beige, suburban-looking attached bathroom. Once again Your Mama hopes Mister Paul and Miss Parsekian had the good sense to rip all that banal nonsense out and replace it with something more stylistically authentic to the 1930s Spanish style of the house.
The lower level of the house can, according to listing details, be accessed from inside the house or by way of its own exterior entrance and includes a living room area, wet bar, bedroom and bathroom. Obviously it's the perfect spot for a live-in domestic, home office or a surly teenager.
As far as we know this is the first and only home Mister Paul owns. Then again, what does Your Mama really know about anything.
listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty