Amid a flurry of real estate deals on the East Coast — more on those in a minute — New York-based Broadway superstar and TV actress Sutton Foster and screenwriter/producer Ted Griffin — his credits include “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Pretend It’s a City,” have put their eclectic West Coast pied-à-terre on the market at $1.5 million.
Property records indicate the triple-threat musical theater icon purchased the quirky late-1960s A-frame residence in the foothills of Studio City almost nine years ago, not too long after she won her second Tony Award, for her lead role in “Anything Goes,” and around the time she landed a co-starring role on the short-lived ABC Family series “Bunheads.” More recently Foster starred in Darren Star’s TV Land series “Younger,” and she’s scheduled to make a much-anticipated return to Broadway next year opposite Hugh Jackman in the David Geffen and Barry Diller-produced revival of “The Music Man.”
Not much to look at from the street — it’s little more than a gaping car port and a bunch of solar panels affixed to a hodgepodge of steeply pitched roofs — the otherwise charmingly funky and light-filled Studio City home wraps itself around a meandering and lushly planted stone-paved courtyard. Listed with Arvin Haddad at The Agency, the 2,300-square-foot home has three bedrooms and three and a half baths.
Highlights of the cheerful pastel-filled interiors include a large living room with sky lights and a wood stove set into a vintage brick surround, a dining room beneath a 20-foot cathedral ceiling, and an up-to-date galley kitchen jazzed up with kelly-green tile work. A lofted space above the dining room includes an updated vintage bath, while the main-floor primary bedroom is dressed up with custom-crafted built-in wardrobes and a blindingly white bathroom.
An carefree blend of Palm Springs and Fire Island, the swimming pool area is surrounded by decking and enveloped in clouds of trees and foliage. A flaming hot pink big bougainvillea tree adds a spicy jolt of color, and overhead strands of light lend romantic charm to late night skinny dips.
Foster and Griffin have been on quite a real estate spree the last few months. The bi-coastal showbiz couple’s home base has long been the Upper West Side of Manhattan where, for the moment, they own two apartments in the same full-service building along Riverside Drive. In 2014 they plunked down almost $2.1 million for a colorfully appointed 1,200-square-foot penthouse, which was features some years ago in People magazine, and in 2017 they ponied up another $750,000 for an studio apartment on a lower floor that is currently in contract to be sold with an asking price of $760,000.
Like many New Yorkers with the ability to do so, the Foster-Griffins have long kept a getaway just outside Manhattan. In their case, they’ve escaped to unsung and gorgeous Greenwood Lake, N.Y., about an hour and a half’s drive out of Midtown Manhattan, near New Jersey’s northern border, where they recently sold their lake-front house for almost $1.1 million, a nice chunk more than the $889,000 they paid three years ago. At the same time they sold up in Greenwood Lake, they shelled out $1.6 million for a handsome seven-bedroom late-19th-century Dutch Gambrel home in nearby Tuxedo Park, a posh gated enclave prized for its Gilded Age mansions and famous as the place that gave the tuxedo dinner suit its name.