YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: With the unexpected news that Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt — legal documents cite irreconcilable differences but celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ reports she became “fed up” with his pot smoking, concerned with his “anger problem,” and unhappy with his parenting methods — we thought we’d have a quick poke around the couple’s impressive international property portfolio.
In three separate transactions during the mid- to late-1990s Mister Pitt paid a total of $2.55 million for three contiguous properties in an affluent and celeb-soaked pocket of Los Angeles’s Los Feliz area. Giovanni Ribisi owns one of the neighboring properties and Rooney Mara owns a nearby home she scooped up in early 2015 for $2.9 million from Alexander Skarsgard. Subsequent to the Jolie-Pitt’s coupling the almost freakishly attractive pair added two more adjoining properties that combined cost $2,387,500. All together, according to property records and other online resources, the gated and, no doubt, heavily secured compound cost a total of $4,942,500 and encompasses 1.9 acres with at least four structures including a 1915 Craftsman that clocks in at 6,692-square-feet with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms.
In the latter days of 2006, not too long after they hooked up but almost eight years before their August 2014 wedding, the Jolie-Pitts splashed out $3.5 million for a 1930s masonry mansion in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter. In May 2015 they put the mansion up for sale at $6.5 million and the price plummeted to $5.65 million before it was taken off the market in mid-December. Listing details from the time show that in addition to a “Magnificently renovated” main house with elevator, Venetian plastered walls and a “gourmet kitchen” with “top of the line appliances,” the property has a two-story guesthouse with one bedroom and 1.5 bathrooms, a private and spacious courtyard with swimming pool, and off-street parking for two cars.
In 2008 the now erstwhile pair rented Chateau Miraval, a sprawling, multi-residence estate near the village of Correns in the south of France and they purchased the approximately 1,200-acre spread in 2012 from American businessman Tom Bove for a reported $60 million. Just over an hour by car north of Toulon and roughly 1.5 hours by car west of Cannes, the village-like compound has numerous structures, some of which date to the 18th-century. In addition to a main house that some reports say has 35 or more rooms there are several smaller cottages for guests and/or staff, a Romanesque chapel where the couple wed, and a recording studio . The property, which they bought from American businessman was once owned by French jazz pianist Jacques Loussier — where Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Muse and Sting have all been reported to have recorded. The property is has pine forests, olive groves, a private pond, and extensive organic vineyards along with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, spa and gym facilities, a professional-grade screening room, a video game arcade, a dirt bike course, and a couple of helicopter landing pads.
Miz Jolie, nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for “Changeling” and an Oscar winner in 2000 for “Girl Interrupted,” has owned a 1,232-square-foot apartment on a high floor of the elegant and architecturally distinguished Ansonia building on New York City’s Upper West Side since December of 1997 and in 2003 she bought a traditional home on almost 100 acres in Cambodia’s Battambang Province where she later bought about 12,000 acres of land she turned into a wildlife preserve. And, finally, in late 2000, shortly after Mister Pitt married his first wife Jennifer Aniston, the six-time Oscar nominated and one-time Oscar-winning actor paid an unknown amount for an 11.5 acre ocean-front compound along a rugged and otherwise unspoiled stretch of beach just outside of Santa Barbara, California.
Of course, this property gossip doesn’t know an apple from and apple cart so we really can’t say what will come of the Jolie-Pitt’s numerous properties but we assume without any inside intel that each will keep what they brought to their ten-plus year union and that Chateau Miraval and their New Orleans pied-a-terre will be sold off. We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.
aerial image (Los Angeles): Google
street image (New Orleans): Latter & Blum via Zillow
aerial image (Correns, France): via ee23.com
street image (New York): Christopher Bride for Property Shark
coastline image (Santa Barbara): Copyright (C) 2002-2016 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.Californiacoastline.org
