SELLER: Tony Hale
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1.799 million
SIZE: 2,226 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Seasoned celebrity real estate snitch Lucy Spillerguts sent word via covert communiqué that increasingly in-demand actor Tony Hale has his home near the eastern border of the affluent Los Feliz community in Los Angeles up for sale with a $1.799 million price tag and also available as a high-end rental at a rate of $7,500 per month. Married since 2003 to Daytime Emmy-winning make up artist Martel Thompson — they met at a bible study group in New York City, something you don’t hear too often in Hollywood circles — Mister Hale secured his spot in the pop cultural pantheon with his portrayal of panic attack prone man-child Buster Bluth on the too-soon canceled sitcom “Arrested Development,” and he currently kills it as the unctuous and tightly wound yet somehow charming vice presidential aide Gary Walsh on the cable series “Veep,” a plum supporting role for which he’s been nominated for three consecutive Emmys — 2013, 2104, and 2105 — and won two.
Last sold in September 2005 for $1.35 million, the obviously updated and carefully maintained four bedroom and three bathroom 1930s Colonial, which comes in at a modest-by-celeb-standards 2,226 square feet, is mostly hidden behind a high hedge and has a rigorously symmetrical and partly clapboard sided front façade where a vivid, lemon yellow front door opens to a central entrance hall and stair gallery flanked by formal living and dining rooms. Both the living and dining rooms have bay windows that overlook the front yard, and the living room actually has a second bay window that looks out to the backyard as well as a fireplace that’s smartly centered along a long wall and surrounded by built-in storage cabinets and open display shelves. A breakfast nook with banquette seating and a tall and slender built-in household desk — listing photos show one of the couple’s total of three Emmy statuettes sitting on a high shelf — connects through to a fully renovated and fairly understated galley kitchen with eggshell toned cabinetry, similarly neutral toned solid surface countertops, shimmering stainless steel backsplashes, and medium-grade stainless-steel appliances. Listing details show there are two guest/family bedrooms on the upper floor that share a hall bathroom along with a master bedroom with balcony access and attached bathroom finished with a vintage-style two-sink console vanity, built-in linen and toiletry storage cabinet, and a decidedly contemporary glass-enclosed shower space. Downstairs there’s an additional fourth bedroom and third bathroom. A bi-level, red brick terrace at the back of the house is shaded by a gridded trellis structure, and the lower section of the patio is anchored by a free-standing white brick fireplace. It’s a few more steps down to a petite and flat although otherwise unremarkable grassy area and a few more still to a detached two-car garage accessed from the alleyway that runs behind the property.
If any of the children think the professionally upwardly mobile Mister Hale will upgrade his residential circumstances to a more commodious and expensive, celeb-style home, well, you’d be wrong. As it turns out, the Hale-Thompsons already paid $1.579 million for a slightly smaller home behind a high and secured fence in the San Fernando Valley community of Studio City that listing details we dug up show is has just two bedrooms and two bathrooms in just over 2,000 square feet plus a bonus room/guesthouse tacked on to the rear of a detached two-car garage.
Listing photos: Teles Properties
