It’s been a disastrous, reputation shattering couple of years for once top-of-the-heap TV writer, director and producer Jeff Franklin, who has somewhat surprisingly made his lavish longtime mansion in the prestigious lower Benedict Canyon area of Beverly Hills, Calif., available as a fully furnished ultra-luxe rental at a spine-stiffening quarter million dollars per month. Available through Cindy Ambuehl at Compass, potential tenants will need to pony up a heavy-duty security deposit of $500,000.
Creator of the iconic and lucratively syndicated 1980s and ‘90s mega-hit sitcom “Full House” and, later, “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper,” the veteran sitcom specialist has in recent years been the focus of corporate probes and damning reports of verbal abuse, vulgar language, racial insensitivity and misogyny in the workplace. He was, in fact, axed in 2018 as showrunner on the “Fuller House” series, the long anticipated (but since canceled) reboot of “Full House.”
Notoriously known as the site of the gruesome Manson murders in 1969, Franklin picked up the internationally infamous property in 1994 for an unrecorded amount. He lickety-split tore down the existing home and replaced it with a gargantuan, vaguely Asian influenced (and arguably somewhat Disney-fied) version of an Andalusian palace designed by renowned mega-mansion architect Richard Landry.
With a total of nine bedrooms and 18 bathrooms, every inch of the roughly 21,000-square-foot mansion was worked over by Italian craftsman turned interior designer Franco Vecchio with a multitude of fanciful architectural flourishes and a laundry list of lavish materials that include a variety of slate, granite and limestone as well as an array of exotic woods, rosewood, teak and walnut among them.