A Los Angeles residence tax records show is owned by Scotsman Gerard Butler has come available as a fully furnished rental at $17,500 per month. Veteran celebrity real estate watchers may recall this is not the first time the rugged, oft-bearded actor and producer has made his handsome, Spanish Revival-style residence in the foothills of the low-key and high-cost Los Feliz area available as a high-end rental: In 2016 it popped up at $15,000 per month and at the same time was floated for sale as on off-market listing at not quite $4.4 million.
Set to appear in the upcoming action movie “Remote Control,” the “300” and “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise star has owned the property for almost a dozen years, spending $3.25 million to purchase the carefully restored and thoroughly updated 1930s hillside villa in mid-2008. Listings held by Ari Afshar and Jeremy Tuite at Compass show the characteristically whitewashed and interestingly turreted villa sits on a quiet cul-de-sac behind a high, vine-encrusted wall and a carved wood entry gate. Stone steps descend through lush plantings into a serene, tree-shaded courtyard garden with a massive river-rock fireplace. There are four bedrooms and four bathrooms in just under 4,500 square feet of living space that manages to be both effortlessly comfortable and unabashedly opulent.
Renovations were mindful of vintage architectural details and, just inside the front door, the foyer features original, lustrously polished floor tiles. In the step-down formal living room, where arched French doors open one side of the room to the entry courtyard and a bank of French doors on the opposite wall lead to a sun-drenched terrace with open sunset views, old-world splendor reigns with slim wood beams across the ceiling, hand-treated plaster walls and down-cushioned furniture swathed in jewel-toned brocades and velvets. The wood-beamed ceiling in the formal dining room is a-swirl with a hand-painted floral mural and French doors frame a head on view of the downtown skyline, while the high-end kitchen is fitted with thick, poured concrete countertops on dark wood cabinets set off by gleaming, commercial-style stainless steel designer appliances. Beyond the kitchen, a family room/games room offers a video game console, an old-school pinball machine and a floridly carved, crimson-felted and gilt-trimmed billiards table Louis IVX would surely adore.
A tightly curved staircase enhanced with multi-colored stained glass windows leads to the second floor bedrooms that include a spacious, city-view master suite replete with fireplace, sitting room or dressing area, slender balcony and a fully up-to-date vintage-style bathroom. A wrought-iron corkscrew staircase just outside the master suite twirls up to the turret where a dozen or more wood-trimmed arched windows provide 360-degree views that on a clear day extend to the Pacific Ocean. Other creature comforts include a well-equipped en suite fitness room and a sumptuously soignée, black-walled home theater with a carved stone fireplace and a state-of-the-art surround sound system.
With a bougainvillea-draped open-air pavilion, plunge-sized swimming pool and semi-circular spa, the decidedly petite backyard includes wee patch of lawn that slopes down from the pool to a tangled hedgerow that effectively obscures the neighboring home but still allows for a glitzy, open view over the city.
Butler, involved a near fatal motorcycle accident in 2017, maintains an international portfolio of residences said to include a three-bedroom flat in Glasgow, Scotland, purchased a handful of years ago for about $850,000, as well as an “idiosyncratically opulent” duplex loft in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood that Butler himself described in Architectural Digest as a “bohemian old-world rustic chateau with a taste of baroque.” The nearly 3,200- square-foot penthouse loft was acquired in 2004 for almost $2.6 million and unsuccessfully set out for sale in 2017 at almost $6 million. And, in 2016, the “Angel Has Fallen” star considerably beefed up his Los Angeles area holdings with the clandestine, $6.45 million purchase of a two-residence compound on Malibu’s star-packed Point Dume. The secluded property was partially destroyed by the Woolsey Fire in 2018 and though he intends to rebuild, as of August 2019, more than a year after the fire, reconstruction had yet to begin.
