Two-time Olympic freestyle skier, budding actor and LGBTQ+ activist Gus Kenworthy, one of the first openly gay American athletes to compete at the Olympics, and the winner of a silver medal at the 2014 games in Sochi, is ready to part with his celebrity-tinged penthouse in the heart of West Hollywood, Calif., that has come up for grabs at $2.25 million.
Kenworthy, who was cast a few years ago as Chet Clancy on the ninth season of “American Horror Story” and popped up last year as Slutty Steve on the final season of “Will & Grace,” hopes to realize a tidy profit on the house-sized penthouse pad he picked up not quite three years ago for $1.6 million from “Desperate Housewives” and “Chesapeake Shores” beau hunk Jesse Metcalfe. (Metcalfe had bought the unit less than a year earlier for $830,000 as a fixer-upper project.)
Though the duplex unit had been extensively overhauled by Metcalfe, Kenworthy nonetheless quickly engaged the services of designer (and HGTV home makeover host) Orlando Soria to freshen and customize the almost 1,800-square-foot two-story unit with built-in window benches and bespoke bookcases. Kenworthy’s ex-boyfriend, actor Matthew Wilkas, whose credits include RuPaul’s short-lived Netflix dramedy “AJ and the Queen,” applied the hand-scraped plaster to the walls and, at great effort and numerous hoops, the unit’s roughly 1,500 square feet of private outdoor spaces were transformed into comfortable alfresco dining, grilling, lounging and sunbathing areas.
Listings held by Justin Alexander and Jeremy Lingvall of Compass describe the duplex aerie a “celebrity retreat” with showroom quality finishes and a glossy spread in a recent issue of Architectural Digest.