Back in 2009, Hollywood power couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski shelled out almost $1.9 million for a late-1950s house tucked down a long driveway and nestled up against a steep slope in the hilly and perennially fashionable neighborhood behind L.A.’s famed Chateau Marmont Hotel. The simple residence was radically transformed into a boxy three-story glass, concrete and white brick contemporary villa before it was set out for sale in early 2016 at $8 million.
It wasn’t long before the price dropped to $6.95 million and then-just-20-year-old media personality and exceedingly well-compensated fashion model Kendall Jenner, daughter of Kris Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner, swooped in and scooped the place up for $6.5 million. Alas, Jenner’s residency was brief. After a stalking incident, and a burglary in which $200,000 worth of jewelry and other items was pilfered, Jenner sold the house over the summer of 2017 for $6.85 million.
The buyers, per tax records, were Hollywood make-up artist turned cosmetics entrepreneur and infomercial pioneer Victoria Jackson and trailblazing direct marketing mogul Bill Guthy. Long before complex algorithms served custom curated slates of ads to personal social media accounts, Guthy co-founded Guthy-Renker, a billion-dollar infomercial/e-commerce powerhouse that initially hawked self-help products such as Napoleon Hill’s self-improvement book “Think and Grow Rich,” and nowadays focuses primarily on promoting celebrity-endorsed beauty products.
The philanthropic couple presides over a much more grand (and also celeb-pedigreed) Beverly Hills estate — more on that in a minute — and the Sunset Strip residence is actually occupied by Jackson’s 25-year-old son Jackson Guthy, a not-especially-well-known singer/songwriter who is perhaps better known among tabloid readers as the paramour of social media influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli, whose parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, recently served some time in federal prison for their roles in the college admissions scandal.
Now, after numerous landscaping upgrades and cosmetic updates, including most of the exterior getting painted a trendy shade of charcoal, the celeb-pedigreed pad above the Sunset Strip is back up for sale at a nicely profitable $8.5 million with Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency.
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Image Credit: Redfin A fancifully wood-paneled gate provides stylish privacy and security for the roughly 4,800-square-foot contemporary that has six bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms over three floors.
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Image Credit: Redfin A jukebox makes a festive statement in the step-down living room where a floor-to-ceiling bank of glass vanishes into the wall. Set into a white-brick column, the double-sided fireplace is shared with the casually appointed formal dining room.
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Image Credit: Redfin Private enough to skinny dip in broad daylight, the swimming pool is engulfed in mature trees and sculpted foliage.
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Image Credit: Redfin Meal prep is a luxurious snap in the gourmet kitchen, while the adjoining den has a floor-to-ceiling picture window with a cinematic view of the driveway.
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Image Credit: Redfin A soothingly and plushly minimalist screening room in nipped away behind the garage on the ground floor, and one of the four bedrooms on the second level has been converted to a fitness room in which mirrored walls infinitely reflect the bright red gym equipment and the trees outside.
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Image Credit: Redfin Like the other five bedrooms, the homeowner suite features a full wall of glass, plus a walk-in closet and a marble-sheathed bathroom.
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Image Credit: Redfin Two more bedrooms on the uppermost floor are dedicated to the younger Guthy’s musical pursuits: One bedroom is furnished as a leather-sofa-ed listening lounge complete with black baby grand piano, and the other is decked out as a recording studio with a sound booth fitted into the walk-in closet.
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Image Credit: Redfin Lined with a kaleidoscope collection of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, the third-floor hall opens to a spacious roof terrace with a twinkling, through-the-trees city lights view.
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Image Credit: Redfin Commensurate with the piles of money they rake in promoting, among a plethora of products, Cindy Crawford and Jennifer Lopez’s respective skincare lines, the Jackson-Guthys are mid-level real estate ballers with a bit of a propensity for homes previously owned by famous people.
The crown jewel in the Jackson-Guthy’s impressive portfolio is unquestionably their Beverly Hills home, a grand Italian mansion built in the 1920s for Hollywood legend Buster Keaton and acquired in 2002 for $17 million. (About five years ago they plunked down another $16.2 million for a neighboring property that had originally been part of the Keaton estate.)
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Image Credit: Redfin Clearly keen to the beach life, they also maintain a bluntly modern bluff-top home in Malibu, which they bought in 2012 for $13 million from Ellen DeGeneres, who had bought it only six months earlier for $12 million from then married Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, as well as two beachfront homes just about an hour’s drive up the coast, in sleepy but expensive Carpinteria, the larger a traditional, many-gabled affair custom designed by architect Marc Appleton.
Tax records show that back in 2014 the property-collecting couple paid NBA player turned coach Doc Rivers $6.4 million for a two-bedroom condo along L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard — it is also newly on the market, but with an asking price pushing up on $7.3 million, and for more than a decade they’ve maintained a park-like five-plus-acre compound on the shore of North Carolina’s Lake Toxaway.