In December (2015), TV actress Jessica Capshaw announced she was pregnant with her fourth child. As our gurl Your Mama at Variety frequently reminds us, a new baby very often means a new house. And with only four bedrooms in her current home in Santa Monica (more on that one in a bit) Ms. Capshaw unsurprisingly quickly commenced a frantic house hunt.
Ms. Capshaw, in case y’all didn’t know, is an Ivy League-educated lady whose first role on the small screen appears to have been an episode on the long-ago-cancelled medical drama ER. She then became a regular cast member on the also-long-ago-cancelled legal dramedy The Practice, portraying Jamie Stringer for a couple seasons in the early aughts. However, the role for which she is probably best-known is as lesbian doctor Arizona Robbins on the shockingly-successful medical melodrama Grey’s Anatomy. She’s portrayed the character for seven straight years and as such has most assuredly amassed a mountain of moolah from that plum role. Anyone out there feeling a bit salty?
In addition to her aforementioned highly-lucrative TV roles, Ms. Capshaw is, of course, a Tinseltown scion by way of being the stepdaughter of billionaire luminary Steven Spielberg. And her entrepreneurial husband Christopher Gavigan is also the co-founder of The Honest Company, an extremely successful if controversial consumer products company perhaps best known for their bath and baby products.
Side note: Yolanda has never met Mr. Gavigan or Ms. Capshaw, but we’re sure they’re nice enough people. However, Mr. Gavigan’s company has been much in the news lately for (allegedly!) doing some rather not-nice and downright deceptive things. We’ve never tried an Honest Company product – blessedly, Yolanda isn’t planning to pop a baby anytime soon – so we can’t vouch for how good/bad the thangs are. But accusations include that the company has profited handsomely by using fear and paranoia to market their products. Some outspoken critics even dare to say that perhaps a more suitable name for the firm would be “The Dishonest Company”! Well, we never!
Anyway, with that brief ugliness out of the way, let’s focus on the matter at hand. Like a lot of rich, family-oriented couples on the Westside, the Capshaw-Gavigans were drawn to Pacific Palisades, specifically the low-key but fearsomely pricey “Riviera” section. Property records reveal the couple quietly shelled out a brutal $10,000,000 in an off-market deal for a not-yet-completed Cape Cod/shingle-style mansion on a prime corner lot.
Since the deal was totally off-market, there are no photos available online (or if there are, we weren’t able to locate them), but your gurl did get in possession of a few snaps showing the home in its current state, a very-typical-for-the-neighborhood looking manse with a front-facing two-car garage and views of the Riviera Country Club (where the initiation fee is reported to be $250,000!) from the second floor.
Some of Ms. Capshaw’s and Mr. Gavigan’s new neighbors in the high-priced Riviera ‘hood include Larry David, Dennis Quaid, Kate Hudson, Sam Raimi, Kevin Feige, and Molly Sims – who with her producer hubby Scott Stuber recently shelled out more than $13 million for their own big unfinished new manse.
Of course, this is hardly Ms. Capshaw’s first house in LA. Way back in 1999, when she was just a wee lass of 23 years old and long before she hitched her wagon to Mr. Gavigan, she shelled out $965,000 for a small and privately-situated house (above) in that celebrity-stocked “Bird Streets” area of the Hollywood Hills. She sold the property in 2007, right about the time she popped her first bundle of joy, for something like $2,350,000 to Aimee Osbourne, the eldest and the only publicity-eschewing child of those crazy Osbournes (Miss Osbourne, incidentally, or her parents just sold the house a few months ago at a slight loss). That same year the couple shelled out $3,050,000 for their current more family-friendly abode in a good north-of-Montana area of Santa Monica.
The couple extensively renovated their Spanish-style Santa Monica residence over a number of years and had it photographed in all its eco-friendly glory. That property contains 4 beds and 4 baths in just under 3,000 square feet of living space in the main house, plus a pool, spa, and firepit out back. There’s also a 950-square-foot guesthouse that Gavigan and Capshaw completely rebuilt and kitted out with three large skylights, four sets of French doors, a small kitchen, and a 60-inch flatscreen projector. There’s also – somewhat unconventionally – an outdoor copper shower with rainfall showerhead attached to a wall of the guest house.
