Actor, DJ and oil heir Balthazar Getty, great-grandson of oil baron J. Paul Getty — The Getty Museum is named after his family, of course — and fashion designer Rosetta Millington Getty have, after more than half a decade on and off the market, sold their longtime contemporary compound perched on a high, flat ridge near the top of L.A.’s Nichols Canyon. The sale price, per online records, is $8.4 million, a small fortune below the wildly optimistic $10.5 million wanted when they first set it out for sale in 2015 but still almost four times the $2.15 million paid for the property in 2003.
Best known for his roles in the 1990s films “Lord of the Flies” and “Lost Highway,” as well as the mid- to late-Aughts primetime series “Brothers and Sisters,” Getty retired from acting in 2016. He became a full-time DJ, released his debut album (“Solardrive”) in 2016, and opened Purplehaus Productions, a multimedia operation that creates fashion, art and music content. Using the name Balt Getty, he’s released a few tracks with rappers Chino XL and DeVanté and, though he hasn’t appeared on TV or in movie since 2017 when he popped up in a few episodes of the acclaimed limited series reprise of the early 1990s cult favorite series “Twin Peaks,” he is set to return to the silver screen in the upcoming indie thrillers “La Flamme Rouge” and “Down by the Water.”
The not-quite-three-quarter-acre property originally had a single-story 1950s contemporary home that some years later was re-imagined and expanded into a boxy and flat-roofed bright-white modern villa with sweeping canyon, mountain and city views walls through walls of sliding glass panels that disappear into the walls. Between the two-story main house and the over-sized detached guesthouse, the gated property has eight all-en-suite bedrooms and a total of eight full and three half bathrooms in a total of about 6,600 square feet.
The couple occasionally leased the sky-high property out to deep-pocketed short-term tenants, most recently in 2019 with a $40,000 per month asking price. One of the home’s more well-known tenants was Joe Jonas, who briefly stayed there in 2015 at a reported rate of about $2,600 per night.
The property was jointly listed with Brett Lawyer of Hilton & Hyland and Branden Williams of The Beverly Hills Estates, while the buyer was represented in the transaction by Hilton & Hyland’s Jonah Wilson.
