Peter Morton Flips Out in Malibu

SELLER: Peter Morton
LOCATION: Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA
PRICE: $7,695,000
SIZE: 1,916 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Absolutely charming East Coat style on desirable West end of La Costa Beach. 4 bedrooms. Master with extra high ceilings and large deck. 2 other bedrooms up plus one down. Living room with bar and large kitchen all opening to a nice deck. Best deal on La Costa

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This morning we awoke to an email from Benny Beeswax who whispered through the wires that ridiculously rich restaurateur Peter Morton was selling off an ocean front house in Malee-boo. Well Your Mama's jaw dropped and our eyes practically popped out of their sockets because we thought perhaps Mister Morton might be selling off his spectacular and newly built contemporary compound on Carbon Beach, which would likely fetch well over $25,000,000. But no. Instead, he's flipping another, less grandiose ocean front property on not quite as swanky La Costa Beach.

In case the children do not know, let Your Mama provide a brief lesson on just who this Peter Morton and his family are and why we bother to include them in our discussions. In short, the Mortons are a modern day food service dynasty. Peter Morton co-founded the once hip now impossibly mainstream Hard Rock Café (there's one in every mall in America it seems). Before that, Peter's father Arnie Morton, the real tycoon in the family, founded the world famous Morton's The Steakhouse, as well as several other high end eatery chains that are a part of the Morton's Restaurant Group. Peter's young son Harry, who among other Tinseltown starvelets used to famously date a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan, entered the family food bizness when he founded the luridly named Pick Taco restaurants.

Property records indicate Mister Morton hasn't owned the 4 bedroom and 3 bathroom property very long having purchased it only in March of 2007. The sale price was undisclosed (or at least we could not find it), but at the time of the sale, the property was listed at $7,500,000.

If we had to guess–and we're just guessing here children, so don't any of you go yakking to yer friends about this like you know what you're talking about–we would say that Mister Morton picked up this place at a very good price, installed a few high-hats and too many yards of oatmeal carpeting, slapped on a coat of fresh paint, hired a stager on a minimal budget to bring in a few slip covered sofas, then called his real estate agent to sell this bitch off at a profit of a few hundred thousand dollars. The modestly sized house measures 1,916 square feet (as per assessor records) and has hit the market with an asking price of $7,695,000.

Naturally, we are not one iota impressed with the lackluster and uninspired interiors of Mister Morton's flip and, as the children might correctly imagine, Your Mama is of the mind that the place needs a small army of nice gay decorators to get up in there do the place all up with some new floors, a new kitchen, and a driftwood chandelier. Yes children, that's right, we said it, a driftwood chandelier.

It is too bad there isn't more deck space on the ocean side of the house, but what's there we like. Yes, the perimeter bench could be a mite precarious for all Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's boozier guests like The Chicken and Falsetta Knockers, who we dare say will easily tipple back two or seven before dinner. But that's no real worry because our wobbly heeled Miss Knockers prefers not to be in the sea air anyway because it just fucks up her weave.

It's also too bad that the hugely vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom only gets to be enjoyed by the homeowner and with whomever they're currently fornicating. With a big enough budget, the new homeowner might wisely consider bringing the public spaces upstairs and putting the private quarters on the lower floor. Do the children have any thoughts on that?

We know some of you children are going to whine about not "getting" the appeal of Malee-boo. And some of you will piss and moan that you think it's crazy for people to pay so much money to be slammed up next to their neighbor. But Your Mama, a child of the California Coast, has no problem with beach houses being so close that one need not even leave their own property to borrow a cup of sugar or a water bong from the aging hippie neighbor.

Listen kids, like it or not, living in close proximity to your neighbors is just part of the package along the Pacific Coast Highway, as well as in many other coastal communities around the U-nited States. It's no different in Laguna Beach, La Jolla, Oxnard, Santa Barbara or even farther up the road in less glitzy Cambria and Cayucus. And unless you're talking about estate sized properties in Palm Beach, along the rugged coast of Maine, or the Eastern reaches of the hoity toity Hamptons, it's that way up and down the shorelines of Florida, along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, and even in Galveston, Texas. We don't know where you all go to the beach, but most (not all) beach communities Your Mama is familiar are chock-full of tightly packed properties lined up like shoulder to shoulder soldiers on the sand.

Don't like it? Don't live at the beach.

In addition to the for sale flip on La Costa Beach and his impressive new compound on Carbon Beach (just up the sand from billionaire David Geffen's even larger ocean front compound and next door to former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's ocean front getaway), property records indicate Mister Morton also owns a 5,533 square foot house on Woodruff Avenue in Bev Hills, as well as another much larger and more impressive estate on N. Carolwood Drive in the western shadow of Suzanne Saperstein's $125,000,000 pile Fleur de Lys.