BUYER: Yasiel Puig
LOCATION: Sherman Oaks, Calif.
PRICE: $1.8 million
SIZE: 4,663 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Anyone who knows a thing about Your Mama knows we don’t know a damn thing about professional baseball. So, when good ol’ Yolanda Yakketyyak got in touch to let us know that Dodger outfielder Yasiel Puig quietly (and via trust) dropped $1.8 million on a gated micro-mansion in Sherman Oaks, Calif., we said, “Ya-who?”
Turns out Mister Puig, just 24 years old, was a star player on Cuba’s junior and national teams and — so the scuttlebutt goes — an occasional state informant. After a handful of thwarted attempts, a clearly very determined Mister Puig — along with a boxer, a pinup girl and a Santeria priest — was successfully smuggled out of Cuba in June 2012 by some pretty nefarious-sounding characters and almost immediately signed by the L.A. Dodgers to a seven-year contract worth $42 million. By all accounts, the franchise, now owned by the high-powered investment consortium Guggenheim Partners, is getting its money’s worth from Mister Puig who was named to the 2014 Major League Baseball All-Star team.
According to a report in L.A. Magazine, once signed to the Dodgers and flush with his new-found wealth, young Mister Puig initially moved into a loft space in downtown Los Angeles but, so swears Yolanda, now has a big new house set behind elaborately scrolled iron gates in a leafy and affluent if nondescript Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Listing details call the 4,663-square-foot residence a “Grand Contemporary Mediterranean” — we’d call it a quintessential and architecturally challenged San Fernando Valley macmansion — with half a dozen bedrooms and as many bathrooms.
A stone-floored center hall entry has beige walls, beige inlaid stone tile floors and curved, wrought iron railed staircase that sweeps up to a circular second-floor gallery with domed sky light. The pretty much all-beige, open-plan living spaces at the rear include a built-in wet bar, a roomy dining area, formal sitting area and family room with bookshelf flanked and television-surmounted fireplace and a built-in aquarium. The (also very beige) adjoining kitchen has a sizable center island, room for a breakfast table next to a sizable center island, speckled granite countertops, completely average although probably custom-crafted raised panel cabinetry and medium-grade stainless steel appliances.
The second floor has an informal lounge area, four guest/family bedrooms — two with private balconies, and a spacious master suite with sitting area, fireplace, elevated bed platform, two walk-in closets, a slender wrought iron railed balcony, and an all-beige bathroom with jetted garden tub and separate-stall shower.
The main living spaces on the lower level open to a fairly compact backyard with stamped concrete terracing around a circular spa that spills in to a small freeform swimming pool and a built-in barbecue center with stone-countered bar, wine fridge and warming drawer.
Listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
