Though it’s been home to at least three entertainment industry denizens who have faced allegations of emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse, that taint didn’t seem to matter much when it came to the $6.2 million sale of a celeb-pedigreed estate in L.A.’s quiet Bronson Canyon.
In the foothills just above Hollywood, the estate was owned for decades by “My Ding-A-Ling” singer Chuck Berry, who faced an onslaught of sexual harassment and assault allegations in the 1980s and ‘90s. Berry sold it in 2000, for $570,000, and it was acquired in 2007 for almost $3 million by legally beleaguered former TV star Danny Masterson and music industry scion and former actress Bijou Phillips.
Masterson, who has not appeared on TV for several years and is rumored to be holed up north of Santa Barbara, in semi-remote Santa Ynez, is awaiting a criminal trial on four charges of rape that could send him to prison for almost half a century or more, while actor Heather Matarazzo has publicly claimed that Phillips, daughter of late the Mamas & the Papas lead singer John Phillips, choked her prior to the filming of the 2007 horror film “Hostel: Part II.”
Masterson and Philips, who put up a $3.3 million bond after his June 2020 arrest, which records show was secured by the property, listed the 1920s residence in August with an asking price pushing up on $7 million. It was later withdrawn from the open market, and tax records now reveal the estate has been sold to another Hollywood mover and shaker, Will Ward.
Ward, a Brit who serves as a partner and co-head of Endeavor’s Commercials Department, which handles deals for A-listers like Liam Hemsworth, Rooney Mara, Robert Pattinson, and Charlize Theron, is not to be confused with the Will Ward that co-founded the diversified management, production, and investment company Fourward and whose clients also include a bunch a A-listers including, just to make things complicated, Liam Hemsworth. (The confusion between the Will Wards is so deep and comical in the industry that The Hollywood Reporter wrote up an entire article about it several years ago.)
Secured behind spiked gates and obscured by high hedging and dense foliage, the unconventionally circular estate, an island parcel with no immediate neighbors, spans two-thirds of an acre and includes a sprawling, four-bedroom, three-bathroom Spanish Revival-style main house of close to 4,600 square feet.
Original architectural details abound across the property and include a colonnaded front porch, a carved wood front door set into a pointed archway, well preserved woodwork, antique fireplaces, and semicircular transom windows. Guest bedrooms are ample, and the primary bedroom pampers with a private sitting/dressing room, a sun-flooded bedroom, an updated vintage-style bath, and access to a massive terrace.
Lush landscaping surrounds serene gardens, an ozone-sanitized swimming pool, and a tennis court. A separate gated driveway divides the main house from a detached garage converted to a studio-style guest/staff apartment, with kitchenette and bath, along with a sound-proofed two-room recording studio.
Tax records indicate Ward and his wife, Alana Perkins, don’t have far to schlepp their belongings; their current home, a pretty Spanish bungalow they acquired in 2015 for about $3 million, is just over a mile to the east, as the crow flies.
