Buckle up, buttercups, because they’re at it again … officially. Last year rumors ran rampant in Platinum Triangle real estate circles that veteran daytime chat show host Ellen DeGeneres and “Arrested Development” actor Portia de Rossi, two of showbiz’s most prolific buyers and sellers of high-end homes, were willing to discreetly show their 1933 English Tudor mansion in Beverly Hills to prequalified buyers undeterred by an asking price widely whispered to have been in the neighborhood of $58 million.
Apparently there were no takers at that by-every-standard prodigious price because the elegantly proportioned and newly rehabbed manse is now on the open market with Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency with a considerably lower but still jaw-dropping $53.5 million price tag. Not counting carrying costs, improvement expenses and real estate fees, the house-flipping Hollywood power couple hopes to haul in an eight-figure profit on the deluxe estate they picked up not quite two years ago for $42.5 million from Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine and fashion model Behati Prinsloo.
Set behind gates on just over an acre of park-like grounds, the sprawling manse has had an illustrious string of owners over the last couple of decades. In 2008 tennis icon Pete Sampras sold the estate for not quite $17 million — more than twice the $8.3 million he paid in 2002 — to “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick and entertainment attorney Erik Hyman. The whole shebang was subjected to a sophisticated overhaul and photographed for Elle Décor before it was sold on to Levine and Prinsloo in a 2018 off-market deal valued at a tad more than $33.9 million. So the scuttlebutt goes, Levine and Prinsloo almost immediately caught an incurable case of real estate fickle. They quickly arranged a profitable off-market deal and sold to DeGeneres and de Rossi, for $42.5 million, in favor of an even more expansive compound in Pacific Palisades that they picked up for nearly $32 million from divorced Tinseltowners Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck.
Listings indicate the lavish house was comprehensively renovated by DeGeneres and de Rossi and unsurprisingly incorporates state-of-the-art security, lighting and A/V systems. Between the three-story main house and detached guesthouse that is nipped away behind the kitchen and service wing atop the three-car garage with a huge private terrace overlooking the park-like grounds, there are a total of five bedrooms and nine bathrooms throughout its more than 10,300 square feet.