Pop cynosure Joe Jonas and “Games of Thrones” actor Sophie Turner have celebrated their two 2019 weddings, first in Las Vegas and then again in Paris, France, with the $14.1 million purchase of a snazzy, brand-new mansion tucked into a hilly Encino, Calif., neighborhood in L.A.’s ur-suburban San Fernando Valley that closely resembles the tony, mansion-thick foothills above Beverly Hills.
The sky-high sale price is not only a tad above the not-quite $14 million asking price, which suggests the newlyweds faced some competition, but also, as first noted by the property gossips at The Wall Street Journal, the second highest amount ever paid for a single family residence in Encino, just behind the somewhere near $20 million sale of another brand-new, ultra-modern mansion about three miles away recently scooped up by Jonas’s equally famous younger brother Nick Jonas and his new wife, Indian beauty queen turned international film and television star Priyanka Chopra.
Shielded behind trees, fortified behind gates and protected by a state-of-the-art security system, the not-quite symmetrical but carefully balanced white brick and wood-clad mansion presides over close to an acre of lushly landscaped grounds with a total of ten bedrooms and eleven full and three half bathrooms in about 15,000 square feet of crisply tailored interior space. Wood floors run throughout the bounteous main floor living and entertaining spaces that feature tall, wood-trimmed doorways, unusually high ceilings and sugar-white walls free of even an inch of fussy moldings. A conspicuously grand double-height entrance gallery acts as a central spine off of which open formal living and dining rooms, the former with a fireplace and adjoining library lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the latter with a highly stylized, climate-controlled walk-in wine cellar behind a wall of metal-trimmed glass.
With a TV-surmounted, book-matched black marble fireplace set between firewood storage cubbies that extend somewhat impractically if attractively all the way to the ceiling, a family room at the back of the house sports vast expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows that disappear into the walls at the touch of a button to unite the low-key but high-style space with the backyard’s leisure and recreation areas. The sleek, high-end kitchen is completely open to the family room over a long island with a seven-stool breakfast bar and expensively outfitted with custom-crafted walnut cabinets and dark-grey honed-stone countertops. There are also a catering kitchen and a spacious informal dining area that spills out to the backyard through disappearing walls of glass.
Upstairs, a handful of ample, en suite guest bedrooms are joined by a second family room with fireplace along with an expansive master suite where an airy bedroom and sitting area evocative of an ultra-luxe tree house offers a towering fireplace and convenient morning bar. Under a vaulted ceiling clad in aged clear cedar wood planks, the voluminous room opens to small, private courtyard and additionally spills out through vanishing walls of glass to a wrap-around balcony with a dreamy, secluded view into the surrounding treetops. There are two custom-fitted walk-in closets plus a lavish bathroom with another wall of windows that open to the balcony. Eight of the estate’s ten bedrooms are in the main house and the semi-detached, two-story guesthouse contains another two bedrooms plus a couple of additional bathrooms, a full kitchen and a lounge that opens to the backyard.
The organic-modern mansion and guesthouse wrap themselves partly around a flat, grassy backyard with an ancient oak tree at its center. Just outside the kitchen and family room area, there are a sheltered dining loggia sheathed in wood planks, a built-in grilling area and an unsheltered deck for lounging around a fire pit carved from a huge stone block. Surrounded by lawn in the sun-dappled shade of the central oak tree and set against a forest of trees and privatizing foliage is a long and slender, tile-accented swimming pool and spa.
The property was jointly listed with Adi Livyatan at Rodeo Realty and Dennis Chernov at Keller Williams in Studio City; Jonas and Turner were repped by Carl Gambino at Westside Estate Agency.
Jonas and bother Nick previously co-owned a modern farmhouse on a leafy, suburban street in the Sherman Oaks area of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, snapped up in early 2016 for $3.7 million and sold in late 2018 for the exact same price, while Turner and Jonas, coupled since sometime in 2016, keep a discreet bolthole in the trendy Nolita area of lower Manhattan.