SELLERS: Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas
BUYERS: Ted Sarandos and Nicole Avant
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $15,947,000
SIZE: 15,110 square feet 7 bedrooms, 7 full and 3 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: After ten days on the open market and what appears to have been a 45-day escrow, Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas have sold the so-called Isidor Eisner estate in L.A.’s historic and historically very rich Hancock Park ‘hood for $15,947,000. While the sale price may be a bit shy of their $16.1 million asking price it utterly blows away the previous record for the highest price paid for a single family home in Hancock Park, which occurred in July 2014 when Tinseltown scion and budding director Breck Eisner unloaded his S. Hudson Avenue estate for $11 million to a financial services industry fat cat. (The children may recall Eisner only purchased the 1.02-acre estate two years earlier for $8.865 million from actor and director David Schwimmer.)
Though it’s just some juicy rumor and gossip at this point, a well-connected snitch we’ll call Charlie Chitchatter told this property gossip that word on the Hancock Park real estate street is that the new owner might be a Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings but another, equally well-connected informant subsequently told us it’s not Hastings but rather Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos and his wife Nicole Avant, the former ambassador to The Bahamas.
The Griffith-Banderases acquired the circa 1925, Gordon Kaufmann-designed Spanish meets Italian Revival-style mansion in 1999 for $4.2 million and the following year they scooped up the property next door for $1.3 million. They razed the existing house on the second property and brought the full size of the mid-city spread to 1.55 acres. Listing details show the double-gated 15,110-square mansion includes a grand entry, double-height banquet hall, formal dining room with coffered ceiling, paneled library and a two-story kitchen. The mansion’s seven bedrooms and seven full and three half bathrooms include a sprawling, celebrity-style master suite with two bathrooms and double dressing rooms. Additional features include a recording studio, fitness room, a guest/staff apartment, extensive security system and a swimming pool set privately in a central courtyard.
Mister Sarandos and Miz Avant own a much smaller, 6,138-square-foot Colonial house in the Flats of Beverly Hills they bought from fashion designer Max Azria in late 2010 for $5.41 million and they last appeared in all the property gossip columns a couple of years ago when they shelled out $10.2 million for a beachfront house in Malibu they bought from actor David Spade. The soon to be divorced Griffith/Banderases continue to own a semi-remote compound near Aspen, CO, that they purchased in two separate transactions in 2002 that totaled $5.05 million as well as a spacious, park-facing apartment on a lower floor in a distinguished building on New York City’s Central Park West.
NOTE: An earlier version incorrectly identified the aforementioned S. Hudson Avenue estate as being sold by Eric Eisner rather than his brother, Breck Eisner.
Listing photos: Hilton & Hyland
