Your Mama had a catch-up chit-chat with one of our better informed sources the other day—let's call her Shanahnduh Rotahnda this time—and she casually asked if we knew how much Tamara Ecclestone paid to lease her temporary digs in L.A.'s ritzy Bel Air area.
We told Shanahnduh that we know what everyone knows, which is that the elder Ecclestone sister did not buy or lease Suzanne Saperstein's faux-Chateau, Fleur de Lys, as was widely reported by property gossips around the globe but rather a much smaller spread that backs up to the Bel-Air Country Club where the folks at the British tab Hello! already staged and published a big ol', high-heeled photo shoot.
"That's right," said Shanahnduh knowingly. "But do you know how much she pays?"
Well, hold on to your real estate horses, chick-a-diddles, because according to the always eerily well-informed Shanahnduh, Miss Ecclestone leased her temporary West Coast outpost for six months (or so) at a heart-stopping rate of $150,000 per month.
A few quick clicks of the battered beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that amounts to $900,000 for the six month term. By middle class and even average rich people standards that's a whole hell of a lot of money to drop on six months rent but for a spendy rich gal like Miss Ecclestone that's no dough than she probably forks over every year to to keep her fingers and toes slathered in a shimmery, custom-tinted shellac.*
Listing information we squirreled out of the internets shows the sprawling residence—let's just call it a new-fangled Euro-Regency style villa—sits on just over a gated acre and has nine bedrooms and ten bathrooms in about 19,000 square feet. That's huge by just about any real estate standard but it's definitely not on the proportional level with a house such as Fleur de Lys or her Petra's 56,000 square foot pile a few miles away.
Some of the interior spaces that were seen in the Hello! photo shoot include a center hall foyer with a glammy, Old School black and white checkerboard marble floor and grandly scaled public rooms that include a formal living room with adjoining conservatory and a double-height library/office. Less formal family quarters include an open-concept kitchen/breakfast/family room, a spacious fitness room and a temperature-controlled walk-in wine cellar.
The grounds include a spoke-patterned red brick driveway and motor court, a second side motor court for access to the three car garage, formal gardens, flat lawns and a vast bi-level slate terrace that surrounds a dark-bottoms swimming pool and overlooks the golf course at the fabled Bel-Air Country Club.
Ownership of the property is shielded behind a Houston, TX based corporate entity but several sources tell Your Mama that everybody in L.A.'s more uppity real estate circles knows that residence is owned by 30-something year old bank analyst turned junk jewelry fat cat Charlie Chanaratsopon who, it seems, sells enough cheap earrings and animal themed enamel bracelets via his 180-plus Charming Charlie shops in middle-brow malls around the country to afford to buy and maintain a high-maintenance estate in prime East Gate Bel Air that was purchased, as per property records, in late 2011 for $14,900,000.
A deeper drill down into the property records shows the property—if not the house itself which was recently (re-)built—has an interesting provenance. In the early 2000s it was owned by John J. Legere, the newly installed CEO of T-Mobile USA, who acquired the residence in late 2000 from theater legend Jerry Herman whose up for grabs West Hollywood condo-crib was discussed by Your Mama just last Friday and who bought the house from Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated film and television producer David L. Wolper (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory....the original one, Roots, The Thorn Birds, L.A. Confidential and etc.)
Now that the expansion and renovation of her 55-room mega-mansion on London's exceedingly well-secured Kensington Palace Gardens is complete—or nears completion, we're not sure—Miss Ecclestone recently hoisted her contemporary art-filled starter home in central London's Chelsea nabe on the market with a £19,750,000 asking price, an amount that Your Mama's currency conversion contraption shows converts to $31,193,700 at today's rates.
On a side note, iffin any of y'all think the young and unimaginably privileged Miss Ecclestone is paying an arm and a leg to lease her L.A. mansion you better swallow a nerve pill before we tell you that Shanahnduh Rotahnda also snitched to Your Mama that word on the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine is that Ritz-Carlton developer Mohamed Hadid recently leased his immoderately lavish 48,000 spec-built mega-monster manse directly across the street from the perennially posh Beverly Hills Hotel—you know the one, the one listed for sale with a stomach churning $58 million price tag—to a sick rich Russian for $300,000 per month.
*Oh, lowherd have mercy on Your Mama, we probably done really poked the hornet's nest now.
**Your Mama, of course, hasn't even the flimsiest notion how much money Miss Ecclestone spends every year having her fingernails clipped and painted. For all we know she and her baby sis Petra get together every Wednesday at eleven to paint each others' toenails and braid each others' hair.
listing photos (from Nov. 2011): Westside Estate Agency