Babyface Looks to Produce $8 Million Sale of Longtime L.A. Home

Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds and Nicole Pantenburg released a joint statement last year in which announced they’d amicably split up after fifteen years of coupledom and seven years of marriage. It’s not too much of a surprise then that the Los Angeles home they shared, inside the guarded gates of the tony Bel Air Crest enclave, has come for sale with a price tag of $8 million. Tomer Fridman of The Fridman Group at Compass holds the listing.

The R&B impresario, who popularized the New Jack Swing genre, has written and/or produced dozens of number-one R&B hits, and raked in a dozen Grammy Awards, hopes to just about double his dough on the three-story pan-Mediterranean mansion that tax records indicate he acquired for $4.1 million in 2004, several years before he and Pantenburg began dating.

Antique carved wood front doors set into an asymmetrical columned portico open to a cavernous two-story foyer capped by a massive skylight. Twin staircases climb to a second-floor gallery that leads to several of the 7,500-square-foot home’s five bedrooms and six bathrooms. With a double-sided see-through fireplace that divides the bedroom from a sitting room, the primary suite includes a spacious bathroom and dual walk-in closets.

Formal living and dining rooms, along with a family room and an up-to-date gourmet kitchen, are complemented by a sprawling lower-level entertainment and leisure complex. In addition to two gyms and a climate-controlled wine cellar that showcases a barrel-vaulted ceiling lined in vintage brick, there’s a professional-grade 15-seat movie theater and a recording studio.

The not-quite-half-acre street-to-street parcel allows for a semi-circular driveway that curls around to a lower-level garage, while a large entertainment terrace with a built-in grill and bar overlooks the swimming pool and spa. Ringed in faux-stone boulders with waterfalls and a grotto, the lagoon-like pool is set against a tropical wall of trees and foliage.

The “I’m Your Baby Tonight” producer and “Not Gon Cry” writer/producer, who collaborated with Madonna on the 1994 album “Bedtime Stories,” and took home a Grammy for the 2014 duet album “Love, Marriage & Divorce” with Toni Braxton, is certainly no stranger to the real estate game. Last year he sold a fairly ordinary five-bedroom home in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, and he once owned a chateau-inspired Beverly Hills mansion that he bought from John Fogerty. That house was eventually deeded over to his first wife, Tracey Edmonds, who sold it last year for $7.5 million. His largest and most notable transaction, however, was in 2004, when he sold a multi-acre estate in Holmby Hills for $21.5 million to former Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt. The McCourts soon parted ways and the property was sold to English billionaire Ian Livingstone, who bought a neighboring estate a few years later and then sold the whole kit and kaboodle last year for about $100 million to Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr.