Though one could easily argue they need another house about as much as a bumblebee needs a bus pass, acclaimed film and television director-producer David Fincher and movie producer Ceán Chaffin have nonetheless added a pristine, Palm Springs-style midcentury home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles to their growing portfolio of residential properties in both L.A. and New York City. The showbiz power players, who make their primary home in a stunning and very nearby Roland E. Coate-designed 1927 Spanish villa, paid the full $2.799 million asking price for the low-slung and newly rehabbed three-bedroom and three-bath residence.
Chaffin and Fincher, a famously demanding and exacting director known to make actors shoot a scene dozens of times in order to strip out the artifice of acting, are both nominated for an Oscar this year for the much ballyhooed biopic “Mank,” he in the Best Achievement in Directing category and she as a producer in the Best Motion Picture of the Year category. They have both been nominated twice previously, first in 2009 for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and then again following year for “The Social Network.”
Completed in 1963, the unusual and eye-catching folded roofline — a signature flourish of innovative desert architect Donald Wexler, who does not appear to have had a hand in the original design of this home — is beautifully showcased along the rear of the almost 2,800-square-foot house as well as in the living room where hefty wood beams allow the zigzagging ceiling to look as if it’s floating atop pentagonal clerestory windows.
