BUYER: Catherine Bell
LOCATION: Hidden Hills, CA
PRICE: $2,050,000
SIZE: 3,380 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Though the deal went down last year, it’s only this week we learned from tireless celebrity real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak that “JAG” and “Army Wives” actress Catherine Bell, who will star this year in a TV series (“Good Witch”) based on a made-for-TV movie franchise she starred in for Hallmark Channel and that The New York Times last year described as “competently assembled, utterly disposable family fair,” dropped $2.05 million on a micro-estate inside the guarded gates of the equestrian oriented and family friendly Hidden Hills community in L.A.’s affluent and fully celebrified far western suburbs.
Listing details Your Mama dug up on the internets shows the fairly recently remodeled single-story ranch house was originally built in 1956 and sits on 1.2 flat acres that manages to accommodate a sweeping circular drive, a secondary motor court with detached three-car garage and a three-stall stable with tack and feed room and an adjacent riding ring.
The 3,380-square-foot house has a generously proportioned although hardly gargantuan main living space with vaulted and beamed ceiling, formal sitting area, white brick fireplace, numerous French doors that open to the backyard and a full wall of bookshelves and built-ins. The deep brown wood floors and vaulted ceilings in the living area continue into a roomy kitchen with marble counter tops and back splashes, a butcher block-topped center island and an adjoining, sky-lit breakfast nook with a built-in white brick barbecue.
An indoor lap pool located in a voluminous, barn like space entirely paneled — walls and ceiling — with what looks like reclaimed wood is in addition to the essentially oval swimming pool and attached spa in the grassy, tree-sprinkled backyard. Your Mama notes that somebody made the unexpected and arguably ill-advised decision to plunk down a freestanding outdoor fireplace all by itself, right in the middle of the lawn between the swimming pool, the detached garage and the micro-estate’s equestrian facilities.
The easy-going if decidedly hoity-toity Hidden Hills development, nestled into the rolling foothills just west of Woodland Hills and north of Calabasas where it butts up against the rugged Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve, has long been home to a slews of celebs and other showbiz industry movers and shakers. Current homeowners include Jennifer Lopez, Drake, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West — her momager, Kris Jenner also lives in the ‘hood — and singer/reality star turned apparel and fragrance mogul Jessica Simpson and her retired tight end husband Eric Johnson who own a multi-acre canyon-view spread they bought a few years ago from Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne.
In the early days of 2010 Miz Bell and her ex-husband, Adam Beason, sold an an almost 5,700-square-foot faux-Tuscan-style mini-mansion in an itty-bitty gated enclave in Calabasas — the same one where 22-year-old Selena Gomez now owns an even bigger, 7,200-square-foot-plus mansion she picked up in March 2014 for $3.69 million — to professional baseball player Jason Kubel for $1.945 million and — fun extra tidbit — good ol’ Yolanda swears on the tender fontanelles of newborn babies around the world that prior to buying her house in Hidden Hills Miz Bell leased the very same Hidden Hills property previously leased by freshly minted reality show cancelees LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian.
Listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
