As recently as last year, actress Ellen Pompeo and music producer Chris Ivery maintained at least five multi-million dollar homes on both the East and West Coasts. Over the last year they’ve sought to considerably lighten their real estate load and, having sold a groovily decorated house in L.A. and set a snazzy spread out for sale in the Hamptons, they’ve now listed a conscientiously restored and stylishly updated 1920s Spanish Villa in the historic Whitley Heights neighborhood in the foothills above Hollywood for $2.795 million. Pompeo, one of the highest paid actresses on television who now hauls in more than $20 million a year for her titular role on the long-running hospital drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” purchased the property in 2005 for $1.295 million. Tucked into a tight hairpin curve and prominently sited atop a street level single car garage and a vine-encrusted rampart on an elevated double lot with panoramic city and mountain views, the two-story, red-tile roofed residence has just two bedrooms and two bathrooms in 2,456-square feet.
At the end of a long, zigzagging exterior staircase protected at the street behind a secured wrought iron gate, a stained glass accented carved wood front door opens to a cozily proportioned foyer with lustrous hardwoods that run into a grandly double-height living room that features a massive fireplace, a towering trio of arched windows and gilt-trimmed wood beams across the ceiling. Behind the living room there’s a media room and the sunny, southwest-facing dining room has been opened up to the neighboring kitchen that’s finished with hexagonal terra-cotta floor tiles and fitted with chef-accommodating amenities like a commercial-style six-burner range. Both bedrooms are upstairs and less than ideally share a single Jack ‘n’ Jill style bathroom that mixes a minimalist aesthetic with authentic architectural details.
Planted with curvaceously sculpted hedges, a small fruit orchard, numerous olive trees and four ridiculously tall palms, the fully landscaped grounds offer a variety of balustraded terraces for outdoor lounging and dining and an alluringly simple rectangular swimming pool surrounded by a lush, liberally irrigated lawn.
Late last year the architecture and design savvy couple sold an “adult playhouse” style 1960s contemporary tucked up into the thickly wooded slopes above the Cahuenga Pass in Los Angeles for $2.075 million to a boutique hotel executive — the Ivery-Pompeos bought the property in 2008 for $1.226 million — and their photogenic, custom-built barn-meets-luxury-loft-style getaway on 8.3 mostly wooded acres near the historic Hamptons village of Sag Harbor, featured last year in Architectural Digest, is currently available on the open market with a $3.795 million price tag.
For now at least, the couple continues to own a stately, 8,000-plus-square-foot Mediterranean mansion in the gated and celebrity-favored Laughlin Park enclave in L.A.’s Los Feliz area they bought in October of 2009 for $3.475 million and had redone in high-style buy famously flamboyant decorator Martyn Lawrence Bullard before it was photographed for Architectural Digest as well as a low-slung Buff and Hensman-designed pavilion on a low bluff at the semi-remote, far western end of Malibu, Calif., they picked up in the spring of 2014 for $6.365 million from situation comedy super-producer Marta Kauffman.
Listing photos: Hilton & Hyland
