BUYER: Omar Sy
LOCATION: Hidden Hills, CA
SIZE: (approx.) 8,000 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Good ol’ real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak swears on her Swarovski crystal-encrusted toenails that it was celebrated French actor and comedian Omar Sy who, via otherwise inscrutable blind trust, crossed the pond and plunked down around $3.5 million for a Stateside estate in the guard-gated and popularly celebrified Hidden Hills community in L.A’s moneyed far western suburbs. Handsome and tall Monsieur Sy, one half of the comedy duo Omar et Fred and the star of scads of French films, has become an increasing presence in American-made movies over the last five or so years. His big, proverbial Hollywood break came in 2011 with a role in “The Intouchables,” which led to more roles in “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “Jurassic World” and last year’s Bradley Cooper box office turkey “Burnt.” This year he’ll appear with Tom Hanks in the Ron Howard directed “Inferno,” and he’s slated to lend his voice to the star-studded animated feature “Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad.”
Listing details and other online resources indicate the approximately 8,000-square-foot residence, a vaguely Colonial-style white clapboard sided and red brick accented structure, sits on two parcels that together encompass more than an acres and provides five bedrooms and six bathrooms. The central foyer has a de-rigueur-for-the-neighborhood double-height ceiling and steps down to a roomy, wall-to-wall carpeted formal living room with vaulted ceiling, fireplace surmounted by an oddball trio of mirrors, and a bay window laden with elaborately swagged floral print window treatments. There’s another bay window with more swagged floral print window treatments in the amply oversized and wood-floored formal dining room, a third one in the library/office — this one fitted with plantation shutters — and a fourth in the girlishly pink-walled family room. The kitchen, well maintained if not exactly dernier cri, is also built into a windowed bay, benefits from a walk-in pantry, and opens to breakfast nook that — surprise! — features a bay window with sliding glass door to the backyard. The second floor master suite accommodates a sitting area set in to — you got it, Buckaroos! — a bay window and also includes a fireplace, walk-in closet, private balcony, and a completely carpeted bathroom with unfashionably shiny brass fixtures and a jetted tub set in to — ugh! — yet another windowed bay. Seriously, children, what is it with carpeted bathrooms? Isn’t that just an automatic recipe for mold? What happens if the toilet overflows? But we digress. The back of the house opens to a deep, wide and partly trellis-shaded red brick patio that over looks and gives way to a pebble finish pool and spa, built-in barbecue area, fire pit with brick bench seating, and a verdant expanse of lawn ringed by manicured shrubbery and a towering screen of mature trees.
Other high-profile homeowners in the equestrian-oriented Hidden Hills enclave include but are hardly limited to clean-cut Canadian rapper Drake and sometimes raunchy American pop star Miley Cyrus. Jennifer Lopez recently chopped two million bucks off the price of her 17,000-square-foot sprawler — it’s now priced at $12.5 million — and we hear through the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine that pop culture cynosures Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are having their stately, French Country manor house decoratively done up by internationally influential Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoordt.
Listing photos: Ewing Sotheby’s International Realty
