It took more than a year, and he was compelled to settle for substantially less than the original asking price of almost $8.5 million, but film and television writer-producer Alan Ball has finally sold his Hollywood Hills compound for a tad more than $7.2 million. The new owners are art consultant Lisa Lyons and novelist Richard Grossman, who headlined global property gossip columns last month when they sold the sprawling Cecil B. DeMille estate in L.A.’s gated Laughlin Park enclave to Angelina Jolie for a record-setting $24.5 million.
The secluded 1.15-acre compound, sequestered at the end of a long gated driveway and owned by the “True Blood” and “American Beauty” writer-producer since at least 2003, encompasses several tightly grouped structures that together include six bedrooms and six bathrooms in about 6,000 square feet. There are three bedrooms in the 1950s-era Craftsman-style main house, two more in a separate guesthouse with kitchen and one more in a self-contained loft-style guest or staff apartment atop a detached garage.
Also included: a cavernous double-height fitness center with attached steam room, a swimming pool and a spa. A built-in barbecue and a cabana are set into a sunny plateau below the main house at the bottom of a forbiddingly long staircase. Behind the guesthouses is a huge aviary where, much to the auditory chagrin of his neighbors, who included Quentin Tarantino, Ball kept his collection of famously loud macaws.
The Oscar-, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning “Six Feet Under” creator — whose current projects include the tentatively titled family drama “Here, Now,” starring Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins — and his actor husband Peter Macdissi long ago moved to an even larger and more expensive compound near the base of L.A.’s Runyon Canyon. They picked up that property in the fall of 2014 for a wee bit under $11.1 million from folk rocker Sheryl Crow. The Ball-Macdissis additionally own a picturesque, 40-acre hilltop spread in Ojai, Calif., that came up for sale in 2016 for not quite $5.9 million and remains available at the significantly reduced price of $4.6 million.
The seller was represented in the transaction by Zach Goldsmith at Hilton & Hyland and the buyer by Brett Lawyer, also at Hilton & Hyland.
