Ever notice how those crazy celebs live in their own little bubbles? They need business managers to handle their finances. Personal glam squads to pluck their nose hairs and preen their faces into the red-carpet-ready mannequins we know and love. Security teams and stacks of NDAs to make sure that their exploits remain shielded from the curious hoi polloi (pssssh, as if!). To be fair, these delusions of grandeur are sometimes necessary. But usually not. Anyways, we digress.
One of the ways high-profile entertainers are not so different from their non-celeb financial peers is when it comes to real estate. Who, if they had the money, wouldn’t fancy a good private residential compound? Not Yolanda Yakketyyak, that’s for certain. Believe it or not, y’all, big-name celebrities and other very rich folks who own two or more separate homes on the very same street has become a common phenomenon. Some of the famous people who do or have done so include Elon Musk, Ellen DeGeneres, Ryan Seacrest, Barbra Streisand, Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie, Richard Edlund, John McEntire, Felicity Huffman, and numerous others. It’s become so common, in fact, that our cynical response to finding out a celeb bought a neighboring property is no longer “Why?” but “What the bloody hell took them so long?”
Solidly in the realm of the latter phrase is famously-private Tinseltown veteran Julia Roberts’ recent undercover purchase of a house that happens to be directly across the street from her much larger main residence. In this case, the actual timeline and circumstances of the sale are far more interesting to Yolanda than the sale itself.
Way back in January 2014, more than two years ago, a doctor and his wife put their 1+ acre land-locked Point Dume, Malibu property on the market for $7,850,000. The house languished on the market for over 6 months with no offers until a not-so-mysterious blind trust offered to pay $6,840,000 for the house. An agreement was reached and escrow was set to close in October 2014.
Unfortunately, sometimes plans go awry and the doctor and his wife – who were in the midst of a personal bankruptcy proceeding at the time – refused or neglected to close the deal by the agreed-upon date. It wasn’t long before Roberts’ trust sued the sellers and then all hell broke loose, with the sellers throwing down a whole list of complaints about why they would not close the sale, including that the house was really worth $8 million instead of $6.8 million and that their high-powered real estate agent, Chris Cortazzo, had hidden the buyers’ identity from them. Knowing who she was, so they claimed, would have significantly impacted the sale price.
Yolanda skimmed through the case notes and with all due respect, bitches please. Sounds to your gurl that the sellers were mad they weren’t able to squeeze more money out of Miz Roberts. Yolanda’s got no sympathy for them. It only would take about 30 seconds worth of Googling to discover that the trust purchasing the house is the exact same one – with the same trustees, no less – as the one that owns the house occupied by their celebrity longtime neighbor. Come on now. Y’all better not be coming around Yolanda’s house with all that hot mess.
Anywho, snarkiness aside, after a long and bitter legal battle that dragged on for more than a year, Miz Roberts finally succeeded in getting the property transferred to her trust. Yolanda poked around the internets and one database shows that the property transferred in December (2015) for $6,840,000 but another shows it was actually in January (2016) for $7,450,000. We don’t understand this curious discrepancy but suffice to say that Roberts took ownership of the property around the beginning of 2016 and she paid somewhere around $7 million.
While definitely not a mansion and nothing architecturally special, the property still possesses plenty of charms. The house itself is completely invisible from the street thanks to a thick blanket of well-watered high hedges. The unexpectedly-commodious motorcourt gives way to the 1,770-square-foot bungalow that’s charmingly-overgrown by some flowering bougainvillea vines and such.
There doesn’t appear to be a traditional front door – or maybe there is and we just don’t see it in the listing photos – but the property’s main entrance seems to be a sliding door that opens somewhat awkwardly directly into a combo informal dining/sitting room accented by stone-white walls and medium-brown hardwood floors.
The kitchen has medium-grade stainless appliances, white tile countertops and white wooden cabinetry, a cherry-red wall, and a big window overlooking a shady backyard patio area.
Scattered throughout the house are three beachy bedrooms and two bathrooms. No word on if the kitties adorning the red bed were thrown in with the sale. Would they have been a discount or a charge? Meow!
Can you imagine getting Geoffrey’s divine Crab Cake Benedict as takeout on a sunny Saturday morning and enjoying it back here? Yaaaaasssssss.
There’s no pool or sport court but the backyard is huge, fully-landscaped, and undeniably gorgeous.
Point Dume has long been the most celeb-saturated neighborhood in Malibu and Miz Roberts’ street is perhaps the most fame-heavy in the ‘hood. Some of her nearest neighbors include fellow Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, comedian Don Rickles, actor John C. McGinley, musicians Kenny G and Chad Smith, uber-rich investment banker Sean Fahey and his wife Robin Luce, fashion designer James Perse, and internet entrepreneur Erik Swan, the co-founder of Splunk (He recently paid more than $13.3 million for a house at the end of the street sold by maybe-retired supermodel Cindy Crawford and her entrepreneur husband Rande Gerber).
“This little old thing? Oh, that’s just my other Malibu pad, beotches.”
In addition to her much larger two-parcel main residence directly across the street, which sports direct ocean views and was custom-built by Roberts after she purchased the estate in 2003 for $9.5 million, the world’s once-highest-paid actress owns a host of other properties, including a couple mind-blowingly scenic estates on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, a humble house near downtown Pacific Palisades (probably occupied by a less-financially-fortunate family member), a penthouse in NYC’s Greenwich Village and at least three apartments in nearby Gramercy Park, and a big-ass New Mexico ranch. How’s that for a bubble?
(Disclaimer: Smiley Roberts may have sold one or more of the above properties in the past year, but we don’t know and frankly, Scarlett, we don’t really give a damn. Not trying to throw shade. Ms. Roberts is a talented actress but we’ve just personally never found her the least bit interesting. Wait, why are we even writing about her in the first place? Whatever.)
