BUYER: Miley Cyrus
LOCATION: Malibu, Calif.
PRICE: $2.525 million
SIZE: 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Last week there were loads of whispers and gossip glossy reports that Miley Cyrus had packed up her belongings in a U-Haul truck, high-tailed it from the San Fernando Valley to Malibu, and moved in with her former fiancé Liam Hemsworth, to whom she is engaged for the second time. And maybe she did. But, children, as it turns out the real story is a mite more complicated, at least real estate wise, because the proudly provocative, 23-year-old pop culture phenom — she just signed on to be an adviser on the next season of “The Voice” — actually shelled out 2.525 million of her own dollars to snatch up a 2.06 acre spread in an exclusive if little-known gated enclave tucked up into the mountains just above Malibu’s Paradise Point area. The tabloid confusion might have come about because Miss Cyrus’ bucolically sited new spread is not only in the exact same, gated enclave where in June 2014 her beau-hunky “Hunger Games” starring husband-to-be dropped $6.814 million for a multi-acre mini-compound he bought from songwriter Matthew Wilder, it’s right next door. Presumably the newly reaffianced lovebirds will occupy one of the residences and use the other for, well, who knows what? A recording studio, perhaps? Maybe, but we digress…. The seller of the property, per property records, was German-born radio and television host and longtime Haribo confectionary spokesperson Thomas Gottschalk, and online marketing materials show the residence offers four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in an undisclosed amount of square footage.
A long, gated drive bobs and weaves its way through the woods and passes over a wooden bridge crossed seasonal stream before it arrives at the front of a boxy and clean-lined, split-level contemporary partly faced with stone the color of wet sand and partly painted an unusual and rather gutsy turquoise. It’s a half of a flight of exterior steps up to the main floor where radiant heated stone tile floors warm the tootsies in the combination living/dining room that also features a vaulted ceiling and bank of glass doors that accordion fold open to a partly sheltered dining terrace that overlooks an emerald expanse of well-irrigated lawn. The adjoining kitchen is modern in an almost cliché sort of way but clearly custom finished with pale plum walls, bull-nosed and grey-speckled granite countertops on cabinets faced with some sort of horizontally applied paneling, and an L-shaped breakfast bar that hovers above the countertop by way of a series of angled tube supports. Just beyond the kitchen, a family room has unwisely selected but easily and inexpensively changed emerald-green wall-to-wall carpeting and lets out through a glass door to a terrace where a molded plastic hot tub is not very successfully hidden in a square gazebo. The master bedroom has — let’s be honest, butter beans — decidedly déclassé mirrored closet doors and a pebble stone tiled tub and shower space in the attached bathroom that is at best a bold choice and at worst an unspeakable one. But the suite redeems itself with a private veranda that provides a meditative view into a dense canopy of mature trees. There isn’t a swimming pool — fortunately Hemsworth’s place has a particularly spectacular one — but the two-car garage does have a new-fangled and increasingly trendy electric car charging station.
Though she continues to own the classically low-slung and generously glassed California ranch-style residence in the hills above Studio City she scooped up in 2011 for $3.9 million, the gender-fluid vegetarian, well-known weed aficionado, and unapologetically raunchy 2015 Grammy nominee has been much in the property gossip columns over the past year. In mid-April 2015 she sold the Cyrus family mansion in Toluca Lake for $6 million — her folks moved to an estate around the corner — and just a few weeks later she sealed the deal for a $5 million purchase of a seven-bedroom and six-bathroom residence in the guard-gated, equestrian-oriented, and heavily celebrified Hidden Hills enclave in L.A.’s far western suburbs where some of her showbizzy neighbors include Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, and uni-named Canadian rapper Drake.
Listing photos: Coldwell Banker
