Danny Bonaduce's House of Bad Feng Shui

SELLERS: Danny and Gretchen Bonaduce
LOCATION: Cromwell Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $4,500,000
SIZE: 7,065 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5.25 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Classic Spanish Andalusian Mansion built in 1926 by architect Harry Hayden Whiteley, restored to 2007 standards. Very private, gourmet kitchen, huge gardens, room for a pool, theatre...Views to ocean and mountains, gated at the street...2-story hand painted ceiling and arches in entry restored, all systems are new as well as roof. Spectacular!

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This morning we bring you the house of another former child star whose life has been a roller coaster of success and complete chaos. Back in his glory days, Mister Danny Bonaduce had the world in the palm of his tiny hands as he rode around in a multi-colored bus singing and dancing for television audiences as Danny Partridge on The Partridge Family. But after the show ended, he fell into a vortex of drugs and hookers that left him living in a motel in Hollywood sucking on a crack pipe.

In the late 1980 and early 1990s, the Red Mess found work on radio, but a steady job with a steady income didn't do much to change his proclivities for the underbelly of life. In 1990 the red headed do-do bird was arrested at a Daytona Beach crack house. Nice. The following year he was arrested for roughing up a tranny hooker who he claims he did not know was a tranny when he/she got into the car.

Shortly thereafter, the Red Mess was set up on a blind date with a lady named Gretchen. Well, they must have had some sort of crazy chemistry because the couple was married just seven days after their first date. Seven. 1.2.3.4.5.6.7. Which Your Mama thinks is just a recipe for disaster.

Although the couple produced two children with the unfortunate names Count and Countess (we can't make this shit up children), the marriage was, not surprisingly, very tumultuous. In recent years, the couple opted for the washed up celebrity route of letting cameras into their home to capture the carnage and dysfunction of their sad lives for all the world to see. Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter will watch just about any reality show, but we drew the line at Breaking Bonaduce. We tried to watch this show exactly twice but were so mortified and embarrassed for Danny and Gretchen we quickly turned the channel. Fortunately, the couple is getting a dee-vorce, so we assume we will now be spared the upset of having to watch this man self-destruct on national television.

The couple, probably flush with advance money from Breaking Bonaduce, purchased this big house in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles in February of 2005. The records we accessed to not reveal the amount they paid for the property. We're quite certain Mister Big Time can wave his magic wand and miraculously come up with the actual figure, but Your Mama's bag of tricks does not contain that particular ability, we'll have to guesstimate the couple paid around $2,500,000 for the house. But children, that is not the gospel, so do not go repeating that number to every Tom, Dick, and Sally who gives a rat's ass about Danny Bonaduce.

Your Mama has considerable mixed feelings about this property. We are by no means an expert on the ancient art of Feng Shui, but we are concerned this house has a severe lack of harmony which has resulted in considerable upheaval and discord in the home and which may be in part responsible for the high drama and hysterics of the Bonaduce family.

From the outside, the house is very impressive, sitting high on a hill with a climbing and curving celebrity style driveway. But the house, which occupies a large street to street lot, also sits somewhat strangely on the parcel and requires one to climb a good number of stairs and traverse a lot of ground just to get from the drive court to the front door. Not only is this complicated access not good for the Feng Shui and an easy flow of chi, this is not the sort of house one wants to be toting one's own groceries. By they time Your Mama reached the kitchen at this house, huffing and puffing from exertion, we are quite certain our Popsicles will have melted and the milk curdled from being out of the refrigeration too long.

Once inside the house we are greeted by a magnificent rotunda entrance hall with a grand and sweeping staircase. Every drag queen in our little black book would be clamoring for the opportunity to glide and preen down that gorgeous stair case, and the constantly curving walls are excellent for easy movement of the chi. However we recommend the Bonaduces immediately remove all those scary little statuettes and busts underneath the stairs, because not only are they strange and tacky, they can not be good for the Feng Shui.

Your Mama does not care for a grand pie-ana in the living room, unless of course, the homeowner actually PLAYS the thing, and we're not certain any of the other furniture we see in the photo is worthy of the slightly too narrow room. But the high beamed ceilings are quite lovely and even though we're not the glossy floor type,we're liking the glossy wood floors. We love the arched window and we love the Andalusian archway at the back of the room, but honestly, we wish the archways were the same shape rather than two different shapes. The different shapes create visual confusion which also can not be good for the Feng Shui.

The kitchen appears to be a real mish-mash of old and new and good and bad. Even though we wish it were black, we're digging the very expensive Aga stove, and we can live with the green tile work, but what is that light fixture doing in this house? We expect to see these sorts of lighting abominations in retirement villages in Ocala, Florida, but in a $4,500,000 house in Los Feliz? No. That light fixture upsets the balance of the entire room creating an environment that is not conducive to the well being of the kitchen, the heart of the home.

A home theater, while a staple feature in many high end Los Angeles houses, is difficult to do well, and we're sorry to say, this one, with it's bachelor style black leather seats and cliche red velvet curtains, does not succeed. This room looks like it was designed for Mister Bonaduce to watch porn.

One feature that is sorely lacking on the property is a heated swimming pool. The listing states there is room for a pool, but as ya'll know by now, if Your Mama was spending over $4,000,000 on a big house in Los Feliz, we would want that swimming pool already in place. And given all the bad Feng Shui throughout the house, a big water feature out back might help to absorb some of Mister Bonaduce's bad juju, which you have to know has the chi flow all screwed up in here.

We don't mean to appear to be a hater, but the man is a train wreck. It's only a matter of time before he begins makings seriously bad choices again, right? Your Mama is not wishing for the demise of Mister Bonaduce, but what is to come of a man in his late forties with serious demons and a waxed and ripped body who likes spending time with strippers? This can only end badly children.

Sources: Answer.com, NNDB, A Socialite's Life