YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Your Mama hears from Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air — and from Peter Propertyseller — that sitcom superstar turned rom-com staple Jennifer Aniston allows a couple of the Platinum Triangle’s most prominent real estate agents to present her recently and expensively remodeled Bel Air estate on the down low to pre-qualified buyers with an asking price of around $40 million.
Your Mama can’t confirm this juicy nugget of celebrity real estate rumor but as Kenny Kissintell — a fella with a-list connections and a huge house in the Platinum Triangle — has told us a thousand times, “Every rich and greedy ho with a good house in L.A. will sell it to another rich moron for the right price. Why the hell not?” Case in point: So the scuttlebutt goes, the so-called Brody House in Holmby Hills that Ellen De Generes scooped up six months ago for $39.88 million wasn’t really for sale but it was enough for sale that someone was able to persuade her and/or her advisors that it was wise to let billionaire digital media tycoon Sean Parker have a look around. And a good decision it was for Miz De G. because, as every property gossip on the planet has now reported, he just paid her about $55 million for property.
Honestly, children, after Ellen’s fortune-making flip, the Miz Aniston’s unconfirmed 40-ish million dollar asking price seems almost, well, reasonable. (“Reasonable,” of course, depends entirely on the size of one’s bank account.)
Anyhoodles, poodles, Miz Aniston, who despite a ceaseless onslaught of tabloid speculations appears to be happily attached to and cohabitating with screenwriter Justin Theroux, purchased the 3.25-acre estate with its boxy, glassy and sprawling single-story A. Quincy Jones-designed abode in January 2012 for $20,970,000. The seller, in case y’all can’t recall, was property developer Robert Maguire III. There are reports that say she planned to spend about $6 million on renovations although we’re not exactly sure where that figure came from.
We’re not sure off all the changes and/or alterations that were made to the property but we do know she removed a hillside mini-vineyard and installed a swellegant chicken coop and a raised-bed kitchen garden. At the time she acquired the estate, according to listing details and reports from the time, the mid-‘60s house weighed in at about 8,500 square feet with 4 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms. Set well below the house so as not to interfere with the honest-to-goodness panoramic views there was — and still is — a poolside pavilion and, over between the kitchen garden and the chicken coop, a detached guesthouse.
If any of y’all think Miz Aniston is nine kinds of real estate crazy to think she can get $40 million, close to or even more for her house in Bel Air you might want to take a deep breath and come again. Not only are the super-high end sales in Los Angeles going gang busters — Do we need to bring up Ellen’s big deal again? —Miz Aniston has ridden the buy-low-renovate-and-sell-high pony before.
In 2006 she shelled out $13.5 million for a meandering, single story mansion of more than 9,000 square feet on a private view lot in the eastern foothills of Beverly Hills. She spent who-knows-how-many millions on an extensive over haul overseen by widely lauded and frequently published architect and designer Stephen Shadley, had it published in “Architectural Digest,” officially put it on the open market it in March 2011 for $42 million and sold it two months later, in June 2011, for $35 million to mutual fund fat cat Bill Gross.
Miz Aniston also owns a home at the tippy-top of the Bird Streets nabe above the Sunset Strip that she bought in early 1993 for $751,000. In 2012 she sold a cluster of small apartments on two floors atop a much-coveted pre-war building in New York’s West Village for $6.5 million and although there are loads of reports in late 2011 she bought a $9 million dollar apartment in the Gramercy Park area this property gossip has yet to find any real evidence of alleged acquisition.
