SELLER: Rachel Leigh Cook and Daniel Gillies
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,295,000
SIZE: 3,050 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Pint-sized actress Rachel Leigh Cook, who last year wrapped up a three-season run on the now defunct crime-drama “Perception” and will next appear on the silver screen in a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” her steadfastly traditional Los Angeles residence available at $3,295,000. Property records we perused are a mite muddled but it could be the 5’2” 30-something-year-old vegetarian and busy voice-over actress, a Minneapolis-bred former child model now married and making babies with Canadian-born and New Zealand-reared actor Daniel Gillies (“The Originals, “Saving Hope” and “The Vampire Diaries”), acquired the property in 1999 for $1.075 million as has been reported elsewhere or possibly in April 2003 for an unrecorded amount.
Built in 1936 and, according to online marketing materials, designed by celebrated Hollywood Golden Age architect Paul Williams, the modestly proportioned but still stately brick-built Colonial — dubbed Vila das Flores according to tile plaque at the front of the property — sits behind a wrought iron gate on a largely and desirably flat .23-acre lot just above the bustling Sunset Plaza shopping and dining district along Sunset Boulevard. There are three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms in the 3,050-square-foot two-story main house plus an attached guesthouse composed of two rooms that flank a small Jack ‘n’ Jill style bathroom with diamond pattern wood floor. The classic center hall foyer features a petite version of the exact sort of elegant curved staircase for which Paul Williams’ homes are beloved by those who are smitten with elegant curved staircases and the generously over-sized step-down living room has a red brick fireplace and French doors that open to a wide and slender veranda with garden overlook. There’s also a formal dining room, an itty-bitty den/study dominated by a quarter-round corner fireplace with half-brick hearth, an eat-in kitchen updated with concrete countertops on eggshell-toned cabinetry, and a laundry room lined with built-in storage cabinets. Two guest/family bedrooms on the upper floor — one with huge, wrap-around windows that provide an over-the-tree tops skyline view — share an updated hall bathroom that retains it’s original lemon yellow bathtub and sink while the master suite provides French doors set into arched dormers that lead out to a shared terrace with tree-framed city view, fitted walk-in closet, and a roomy, updated bathroom slathered in probably expensive but decoratively pedestrian beige tiles. A charmingly wee flagstone courtyard just outside the dining room and kitchen between the main house and guest house steps down to a larger terrace with raised fireplace, built-in barbecue, and over-sized circular spa lined with azure ceramic tiles while the gardens that surround the house offer clipped boxwoods, meandering gravel paths, a handful of citrus trees, and room for a swimming pool.
We’re not sure where Miz Cook and Mister Gillies plan to set up house next but it seems unlikely they’ll move to the modestly proportioned and well maintained 1,436-square-foot house in an unassuming pocket of Redondo Beach CA, purchased by Miz Cook in April 2000 for $485,000.
Listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
