Married TV Producers Hang $5.95 Million Price on Secluded Home Above Beverly Hills

Married TV writer/producers Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil, she the creator of the series “Girlfriends” (2000-2008) and its spin-off “The Game” (2006-2015), parlayed their two-plus decades of showbiz success into the $13.8 million acquisition of a grand Italian Revival mansion in L.A.’s tony Hancock Park earlier this year, and now the couple has hoisted their longtime family home high in the mountains above Beverly Hills on the market at $5.95 million.

The Akils, who met while both worked on the 1990s sitcom “Moesha,” and later co-created, developed, wrote, directed and/or produced the successful series “Being Mary Jane” (2013-2019) and the superhero series “Black Lightening” (2018-2021), stand to realize an enviable $2.5 million windfall on the secluded spread they purchased about seven and a half years ago for a tetch above $3.4 million.

Hidden behind stylish opaque glass and black steel driveway gates in a quiet, leafy glade at the end of a discreet and snaking private lane off famed Mulholland Drive, the almost 3,500-square-foot residence was built in 1960 but has since been extensively revamped and updated to modern standards. (The house was re-built by the Stewart-Gulrajani design team prior to the Akils’ purchase.) There are, according to listings held by Stephen Sweeney at Oak Brook Realty, a total of four bedrooms and five bathrooms across the nearly an acre of supremely private property.

Finished with warm wide-plank oak floorboards and free of fussy architectural flourishes, the clean-lined and contemporary open-plan interior spaces include a library/office just inside the front door and a living room anchored by a minimalist concrete fireplace. The adjoining dining space is completely exposed to the up-to-date high-end kitchen and, beyond the kitchen, there’s a family room that, like the rest of the main floor living spaces, has accordion fold glass doors that allow for an easy-breezy back and forth between indoor and outdoor living spaces.

There are two bedrooms that could easily serve as the primary suite, one on the main floor and a larger one upstairs. A multiroom space with radiant heated floors, the upper suite incorporates a separate sitting room, a small balcony with tree-framed city-lights view, a spacious walk-in closet, and a sleek, all-white bath where a picture window over the tub frames a leafy, abstract view of the surrounding foliage.

Once a two-car garage, a detached structure alongside the house includes a bathroom and kitchen that makes it suitable as a guest or staff space. Marketing photos show the self-contained space decked out as a media lounge with built-in surround sound.

Sculpted plantings, several patios and a built-in barbecue surround the pool that sits atop a planted slope above a grassy plateau, hemmed in by high hedged and towering trees, with a graveled patio and a half-court basketball court .

The Akils may be seeking to thin their property portfolio with the sale of their Beverly Hills home, which has been cleared of personal effects and staged for the selling process, but tax records indicate they’re still sitting on a small, bi-coastal collection of homes. In addition to their recently acquired Hancock Park mansion, they own a vintage 1920s bungalow in the Hancock Park area they’ve held on to since 1996, when they scooped it up for just $255,000, and in New York’s trendy Lower East Side they keep a 1,200-square-foot two-bedroom pied-a-terre they picked up over the summer of 2019 for a tad more than $2.5 million.