SELLER: Gale Anne HurdLOCATION: South San Rafael Avenue, Pasadena, CA
PRICE: $15,000,000
SIZE: 3.05 acres, 13,500+ square feet, 7 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Majestically positioned on an exquisite 3 acre knoll in Pasadena's most prestigious neighborhood, this magnificent estate, designed by renowned architect Sylvanus Marston in 1923, has been heralded as "one of the finest examples of Spanish Revival architecture in the United States," as well as "one of Pasadena's most picturesque and treasured landmarks." Meticulously restored & remodeled in 2003, this villa exemplifies superb craftsmanship & authentic architectural detailing.
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: As we often are on Wednesdays, Your Mama is short on time. So this morning we're going to bring you a short and sweet post about a big ol' Spanish style house in Pasadena with a big ol' price tag. Belonging to powerhouse film producer Gale Anne Hurd and her third huzband, the screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh, this house, while not to every one's taste, is a tour de force in restoration and renovation.
Miz Hurd, a brainiac Stanford graduate with a double degree in economics and communications, has a long history producing extremely successful action and sci-fi films including the shockingly lucrative Terminator series, Aliens, Hulk, Raising Cain, and dozens more. The lady has made boo-coo bucks producing movies and she clearly likes to spend it on a nice place to bed down at night. Who can blame her?
Huzband Jonathan is known as a prolific screenwriter, also in the action/sci-fi genre, having penned a number of episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for the boob tube and The Punisher, Jumanji, and Die Hard: With a Vengeance for the big screen. He too has made a lot of money in Hollywood.
According to property records, the couple purchased this house in 2001 for $5,200,000. Records also show the house at a huge 11,512 square feet, but a recent report in the Wall Street Journal stated the couple expanded the house during the extensive renovation and restoration and now the place tops 13,500 square feet with seven bedrooms and 11 bathrooms.
Oh Lawhdy, here we have yet another mansion with so many bathroom you got to hire a girl to do nothing but scrub the damn terlits. Are rich people so lazy they can't walk more than 10 feet to a terlit and need a pooper in every room?
The 3-acre property climbs up a small hill and includes impressive entrance gates, tennis court, a simple, beautiful and rectangular pool, guest house, formal gardens and a large man-made lagoon out back. The lagoon looks nice, but Your Mama is concerned about the skeeters and the serious chemicals that are surely necessary to keep the skeeters from mating and proliferating.
Usually Your Mama macks on humongous houses feeling like so many are tacky wastes of space that most people don't know how to decorate (see 50 Cent's house of horror and Jamie Foxx's recent purchase of an upsetting 17,000 square foot bad dream). But this one we are swooning over. There is little in this house that we would put in our own house, but it's all so exquisitely "done" that it's tough to find something to really beef about.
Normally we hate billiard rooms, but this one has that gorgeous rug and we are totally digging the burnt orange felt on the pool table. Even the drapes, somehow, work.
The master bedroom includes of a sitting room with another marvelous rug. We hate the sofa and chairs, but we'll let that slide. Also in the master are two beautifully restored and elegant bathrooms. We could not be more thrilled that Miz Hurd and Mister Hensleigh did not rip out all that great tile and replace it with acres of imported marble. Nothing wrong with imported marble, but if you could have this, well, that's better in our book.
Clearly the couple had a very talented and experienced gay decorator up in this house working decorating magic at every turn. The house manages to be elegant and sophisticated and still feel like a place you could comfortably curl up barefooted and read a script.
We don't want to live in Pasadena, but we do want to spend the weekend at this house. So Gale dear, please call Your Mama before you move so we can come over and lay around by that pool sipping gin and tonics and eating little cute finger foods prepared by the chef.
Coincidentally, Miz Hurd's former house in Beverly Hills, now owned by celebrity fitness freak Gunnar Peterson and his extremely rich heiress wife Janet, has recently popped on to the market.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Luke Ford, Internet Movie Data Base
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