Television personality and home improvement specialist Paige Hemmis, previously the host of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and for the last handful of years the DIY expert on Hallmark Channel’s feel-good morning chat fest “Home & Family,” has paid $2.55 million for a spacious home in an upscale guard-gated development in Calabasas, California. Arranged around a secured entrance courtyard dominated by a gigantic stone fireplace, the 5,145-square-foot, single-story residence has five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms.
Perfect for a crafty gal with an experienced penchant for handy-dandy home improvements and DIY decorating derring-do, white-walled and mostly beige tile floored interior spaces are relatively featureless and largely unadorned. There’s a room of unspecified purpose just inside the front door and the ample formal living room features a peaked ceiling, carved limestone fireplace and four sets of French doors to the backyard while the adjoining formal dining room opens into the entrance courtyard. Fitted with marble counter tops, multiple sinks and designer stainless steel appliances, the roomy center island kitchen opens to an informal dining area and family room with an angled gas fireplace, built-in entertainment unit and French doors to the backyard.
All guest bedrooms have private bathrooms, one of them with an exterior entrance that makes it suitable as a nanny suite, and, privately positioned at the rear of the residence where it opens to the backyard, the master bedroom offers a good-sized fitted walk-in closet and a bathroom done up in the all-but-exact sort of beige tumbled stone tile work and faux-distressed wood cabinetry that can be found in literally millions of medium- and up-market tract homes across the country.
A shallow, arched loggia outside the formal living room gives way to a rather fetching flagstone terrace that wraps around an infinity edged swimming pool. There’s a built-in barbecue to one side of the pool and a wee patch of grass and a circular, flagstone-trimmed spa under the shade of trees on the other.
Hemmis, married in a 2015 televised special on the set of “Home & Family” to musician Jason Short, one of the singers in the not so widely known Australian pop-opera group ARIA, has had a busy couple of years selling and buying prototypical suburban tract homes in some of the more far flung communities of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. In 2010 the die-hard do-it-herselfer paid $975,000 for a spacious if otherwise unremarkable six-bedroom and seven-bathroom house in a gated development in Northridge that was sold for $1.35 million in April 2017 and, right about the same time, she paid $1.073 million for a 4,830-square-foot, garden variety tract home in a gated development not so far from Magic Mountain near Santa Clarita that was lickety-split sold earlier this year for $1.15 million.
Listing photos: Keller Williams
