For some time now, this property gossip has heard that real estate-obsessed daytime chat-show host Ellen DeGeneres and “Scandal” actress Portia de Rossi are, as they nearly always seem to be, on the hunt for a new house and, according to scuttlebutt passed along by Platinum Triangle real estate mover and shaker Peter Propertyseller, the famously nomadic couple are rumored to have surreptitiously initiated the purchase of a 1960s contemporary in a particularly plummy pocket of Beverly Hills. The residence in question, down an extra-long driveway and invisible from the street, is not listed on the open market, but the asking price is whispered to be somewhere around $16 million. According to property records, the low-slung and glass-walled dwelling comes in at a tetch less than 5,300 square feet, with four bedrooms and eight bathrooms, and the nearly three-quarters-of-an-acre property is slightly elevated above the estates to the south, and includes a tight motor court at the front and a small, dark-bottomed swimming pool at the back. Some of the other plush pads in the immediate area are owned by Freddy DeMann — his John Elgin Woolf-designed house was once owned by Shirley MacLaine, and is currently listed at a hair under $13 million; and uber agent Kevin Huvane, whose fastidiously overhauled Tudor manse is available off-market at $50 million.
Over the past 10 or 12 years, the almost pathologically peripatetic DeGeneres and de Rossi have owned and sold more than a dozen mansions, estates and ranches across Southern California. They currently preside over an impressive portfolio that includes: a 13-acre estate in the moneyed seaside enclave of Montecito, acquired in 2013 for $26.5 million; two adjacent condos purchased in July 2014 for a combined $16 million in a swanky high-rise along the Wilshire Corridor near Westwood, and almost immediately put back on the market — last available over the summer for a total of $15 million; and a low-slung ranch house on a prominent promontory in the Hollywood Hills. That nugget was bought in 2005, sold in 2007 and, curiously enough, re-acquired late last year for $8.75 million
