BUYER: Julianne Hough
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,943,575
SIZE: 2,101 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: While on an extended vacation retreat last week, in a semi-remote corner of the high desert where our nearest neighbors were a pack of coyotes and colony of jittery jackrabbits, Your Mama heard word via carrier pigeon from tireless real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak that she was now 100% sure that way back in late January, “Dancing with the Stars” alum Julianne Hough surreptitiously spent nearly two million bucks on a notably private property high in the Hollywood Hills. Upon our return to civilization we immediately consulted with our unofficial but nearly omniscient aide de camp Lucy Spillerguts who quickly seconded Miz Yakketyyak’s celebrity real estate assertion.*
Listing details and other digitally available resources show the three story, partly clapboard sided quasi-Colonial in question was originally built in 1936 and is well situated for celebrity-style privacy a generous .45 acre hillside parcel at the tail-end of barely-there dead-end lane high in the Hollywood Hills. Listing details indicate the humbly-sized home packs in four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in just 2,101 square feet. A compact, red brick motor court and attached two-car garage provide secured off-street parking for upward of four cars, a much coveted commodity in a Hollywood Hills property. An obtusely angled, detached accessory structure across the motor court from the house is of unknown size and functionality. (Potting shed? Garage? Cute as a button guest cottage? Bare bones live-in staff suite?)
Listing photographs show the front facade has two nearly identical, diamond-paned doors that sit almost side by side. Clear as it may be to even the least intelligent amongst us that the door the left, the one with the red brick accent work, is the house’s primary entrance, we dislike for the admittedly brief but entirely inelegant psychic confusion created by having a second, service entrance door located so prominently and immediately next do the front door.
Inside, dark wood floors that look in listing photos like they might be painted rather than stained — we can’t quite tell — run throughout the step-down living room and adjoining dining room. A fireplace on the back wall of the living room faces four wonderfully oversized, nine-pane corner windows on three walls plus French doors that access a small deck with big canyon, mountain and city lights views.
Louvered shutters in the dining room — they feel to Your Mama both depressingly dated and a little cocktail party camp in all the right ways — fold back to a step-down, red brick floored sun room with two long and slender skylights. Floor to ceiling windows and French doors open to a tree-shaded and picket-fenced flag stone entertainment terrace and a bit of flat lawn space where the shorties can play and/or the pooches can piddle.
Beyond the dining room, the kitchen is fitted and kitted with a chunky center island, antique white beadboard-accented cabinetry, thickly veined white marble counter tops, white subway tile back splashes, and high-grade stainless steel appliances. Y’all can be sure we could beef and gripe for days about how the ceiling looks a mite low and the wood floors a tetch too worn but the real problem we have here in the kitchen is with that gawdawful microwave shoved up in the corner on the counter top next to the range. This just peeves Your Mama to no end, children. Why? Can somebody please explain why a person would spend fifty or sixty thousand dollars to install in a custom-designed kitchen and not provide a built-in situation for the microwave? At the very least, stick it up above the stove. That’s not an ideal scenario either but it’s so much better than the damn thing cluttering up the counter top. But, anyways…
One of the bedrooms on the uppermost floor has French doors that open to a wrought iron railed Juliet balcony that overlooks the courtyard-like motor court and the modestly-sized master bedroom has an well-windowed if otherwise humdrum and also modestly sized bathroom with marble-topped double sink vanity and marble-lined combination tub/shower.
Surrounded by mature trees and set well below the house where its accessible by exterior stairs from the motor court at the front of the house and the flagstone terrace off the sun room at the rear, there’s another picket fence-girdled flagstone terrace. The simple rectilinear swimming pool is impractically anchored on one of the short ends by a massive, free-standing fireplace. Is there a reason that Your Mama can’t fathom to erect a big ol’ outdoor fireplace right up next to the swimming pool where you can’t even sit in front of it or is it simply a folly intended to provide night time skinny dippers with a bit of romantic ambiance?
Although just a whippersnapper, this isn’t Miss Hough’s first time at the real estate rodeo. In 2008 or ’09, then just in her late teens, she traded in her bedazzled ballroom dancing outfits, bought a bunch of designer boots and cowboy hats and hightailed it to Nashville in order to jumpstart a country music career on the back of her skyrocketing DWTS fame and success. She’s since put her country music career on ice in order to concentrate on a still-nascent movie career — hence the house in the Hollywood Hills — and is currently touring the nation in a singing and dancing extravaganza with her professional dancer brother, Derek Hough.
In June 2009 she coughed up $649,000 for a two bedroom and two bathroom city-view condo on the eighth floor of the same downtown Nashville building where crossover pop-country queen Taylor Swift owns a duplex penthouse. In early 2013, not long before her breakup with painstakingly groomed showbiz mogul Ryan Seacrest — she’s since hooked up with a professional ice hockey player, Brooks Laich, Miss Hough sold her Nashville condo for $900,000. (As of today, in case anyone might care, Miss Hough’s former condo is back on the open market with a $1.25 million asking price.)
SIBLING-RELATED TIDBIT: According to this property gossip’s research, Miss Hough’s beau-hunky blond dancer/singer/actor brother Derek — himself an Emmy-winning choreographer with five DWTS wins — owns a two bedroom condo in an very contemporary, architect-designed complex that he picked up in late 2010 for $650,000. He also co-owns a 3,200-plus square foot ranch house in Studio City, Calif. that he and fellow DWTS man-dancer Mark Ballas bought earlier this year for $1.275 million. Your Mama will let the peanut gallery speculate about why these two bought a house together because we’re not touching it with a ten foot pole, thank you very much.
*Technically, the house in question was purchased with a blind trust and, hence, Your Mama can’t directly link Miss Hough to the property but all the children know by now that good ol’ Yolanda and the ever-reliable Miz Spillerguts rarely get it wrong so…
For photos of the property, click here.
listing photos: Coldwell Banker (via Redfin)
