SELLER: Patrick Moran
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $7,880,000
SIZE: 5 bedrooms, 4 full and 3 half bathrooms between 7,401-square-foot main house, pool house and guesthouse
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: A 1920s-era Tudor estate in the historic and historically hoity-toity Hancock Park area of Los Angeles was sold by ABC Studios president Patrick Moran for $7.88 million. The sale price, a sliver above the asking price of $7.849 million, suggests there was more than one interested party in the quietly dignified property that was acquired by the veteran entertainment exec in early 2014 for $3.555 million from heavy metal musician and horror film maker Rob Zombie.
Shortly after Mister Moran bought the property, which he shared with his writer/producer partner Jordan Budde whose credits include “Mistresses,” and “The Client List,” he embarked on a comprehensive, year long and no-doubt hair-raisingly pricey upgrade and renovation spearheaded by interior designer Rick Pirro. The sophisticated and comfortably soignée result was featured in Architectural Digest and described in marketing materials as incorporating “Modern refinements [that] seamlessly join classic 1920s dynamism with finely appointed style and contemporary amenities.”
Tucked behind a thick hedge on a subtle knoll and obscured from the street by mature specimen trees, the stately brick and faux-timbered residence anchors a lushly landscaped, trapezoidal corner parcel of just over half of acre. Listing details indicate there are a total of five bedrooms and four full and three half bathrooms spread throughout a 7,401-square-foot main house, roomy pool house, and self-contained guesthouse atop a detached two-car garage.
Graciously proportioned public entertaining spaces, furnished in an elegant, modern-minded masculine manner reinforced by a dark neutral palette and invigorated by contemporary artwork, include a reception gallery with wood floors, elaborate wood-trimmed doorways and wood beams on the ceiling. The vast, step-down living room has a marble-hearth fireplace and several transom-topped sets of French doors that are original to the house and an immense, grid-paneled formal dining room opens to the backyard. There’s also a pub room with painted brick fireplace and custom bar that with brass inlay, an office sheathed in an intricately patterned abstract wallpaper, and a custom wine room. The chef-friendly, double-island kitchen sports trendy brass fittings, a mix of dark-stained butcher block and black limestone countertops, and a plethora of deluxe appliances including a $10,000 range imported from France. The kitchen opens at one end to an intimately scaled den room with French doors to the backyard.
As best as we can tell, there are two en suite guest/family bedrooms on the upper floor, one of them furnished as a den/TV lounge, plus a sprawling master suite that incorporates a sitting room with fireplace, capacious bedroom with vaulted ceiling and another fireplace, fitted walk-in closet, and luxuriously ample bathroom with downright decadent and stylistically pitch-perfect black and white checkerboard floor.
The hedge-ringed and desirably private backyard features extensive stone terracing along the back of the house and around the kidney shaped swimming pool as well as rolling, tree-shaded lawns bordered by verdant, carefully groomed shrubbery.
Late last year Mister Moran, a serial buyer and rehabber of luxury homes, shelled out $5.75 million for his next project, a palatial neoclassical fixer-upper villa, also in Hancock Park, that was designed by celebrated architect Wallace Neff for Ralph J. Chandler, nephew of late and legendary Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler.
Listing photos: Teles Properties
