OWNER: Brooke Shields
LOCATION: Pacific Palisades, Calif.
PRICE: $30,000 per month
SIZE: 5,345 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Once upon a time, sexually charged ad copy salaciously declared that nothing could get between a teenaged Brooke Shields and her skin-tight Calvin Klein jeans, but nowadays, some 35 years later — so we’ve now heard from several snitches including a PR gal at Trulia — $30,000 a month will get between the veteran actress and her longtime West Coast homestead in a particularly celeb-saturated section of Pacific Palisades. Property records and other online resources show the child model and child actor — she killed it as a teenage prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film “Pretty Baby” before she rocketed to international superstardom at age 14 in the all but universally panned 1980 adventure romance “The Blue Lagoon” — purchased the gated residence for $3.25 million in late 1997, while starring in the sitcom “Suddenly Susan.” More recently she’s guest starred on a bunch of television programs like “Army Wives,” “The Middle” and “The Michael J. Fox Show” and, among motherhood and other endeavors, she shills affordable home furnishings for La-Z-Boy. (Before any of y’all high and mighty Brooke Shields defenders get all up in our digital grill, recognize that we aren’t throwing shade. Your Mama would happily hawk footstools and man cave style recliners for La-Z-Boy, too, iffin they’d only ask.) Current listing details show the 5,345-square-foot residence — an architectural amalgamation we might describe as a Rocky Mountain ski lodge meets a Swiss chalet on a steeply sloped parcel in an exceptionally affluent coastal community in Southern California — sits on a thickly wooded 0.43-acre lot, was built in 1982 and stands three stories tall at the rear with five bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms and at least four fireplaces.
On the middle, entry level, a roomy formal living room with dark wood floors, big ol’ stone fireplace and a brick-tiled wraparound balcony with panoramic canyon views is joined by a formal dining room with built-in buffet and china storage. The neighboring, irregularly shaped center island kitchen has a fireplace warmed dining area with built-in desk area and bookshelves and is expensively fitted with slab marble countertops on simple Shaker-style cabinetry and contains a full compliment of commercial-style stainless steel appliances. The uppermost floor is given over entirely to the master suite that comprises a lofted library/office space where the books are shelved by color just as this property gossip’s are; a sprawling bedroom with television surmounted brick fireplace, vaulted ceiling and sitting area; a private balcony with long view over the canyons to the Getty Center; a fitted walk-in closet tucked up under the eaves; and an oversized bathroom with lounge area with wall-mounted television, a raised fireplace, free-standing soaking tub, steam shower and sauna. The house’s four guest and family bedrooms are located on the lowest level, according to online marketing materials, along with a commodious family room/media lounge with projection system and a kitchenette/bar. Besides the variety of balconies that cling to the canyon-side of the house additional outdoor entertainment spaces include a large deck nestled privately in the tree tops and, set way way waaaaay below the house down a series of switch back staircases and ramps that we imagine might easily cause a lazy person think twice or three times about taking a dip on even the most sweltering of summer days, a swimming pool set scenically next to a curved wall of river rocks.
A few of the other Tinseltown bigwigs who own homes in the immediate vicinity include Randy Newman, J.J. Abrams, recently deceased syndication king Michael King, Matt Damon, and maybe or maybe not divorcing A-listers Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck.
Miz Shields and her husband, television writer Chris Henchy, live primarily in New York City, where in April 2008 they dropped $5.5 million on a four-family Greek Revival-style townhouse in the West Village they had reworked into a single-family residence that was photographed for the March 2012 issue of Architectural Digest. In early 2012 they sold their previous Manhattan residence — a 2-3 bedroom loft with 27 windows on the border between SoHo and Chinatown — for $2.925 million, and over the summer of 2013, they shelled out $4.25 million for a six-bedroom shingled cottage just outside the bustling and swanky village of Southampton.
Listing photos: Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and Coldwell Banker (via Trulia)
