NOTE: All you chickens who got here early were treated to a sneak peak of the dee-voon photos of Miz Aniston's new digs. All you late comers are, unfortunately, going to have to high-tail it down to your local news stand for a peek at the pictures in the actual publication. Sorry babies.NOTE NO. 2: There seem to be a few snaps here...Quick and have a look-see before they vanish into thin air.
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Celebrity real estate watchers around the globe have been sitting on pins and needles, jumpy with anticipation wanting some 411 on the the Beverly Hills, CA house that former Friends star turned romantic comedy queen Jennifer Aniston has been renovating for the last couple of years. Finally, now that she's finished the do-over and moved her skinny butt into the house, she's had it photographed for Architectural Digest so that she could "celebrate the people who made it: the master craftsman who poured so much of themselves into its creation." Those master craftsman would surely include her very well known, celeb-friendly dee-ziner Stephen Shadley who has also worked on several homes for Diane Keaton and Woody Allen.
The first pictures to hit the interweb seem to be those on the blog Jezebel. The photos, children, are drool worthy as you can plainly see and we can all thank Carla Ridge for providing Your Mama with the the link over. We're sure the children are, like Your Mama, deeply distracted by those fat yellow arrows, but they were put there by the folks at Jezebel to illustrate all the places in the house were they think Miz Aniston will wallow in her 40 and single status and pine endlessly for ex-hubby Brad Pitt. Pleeze.
Anyhoo, Miz Aniston purchased the Bev Hills hideaway in October of 2006 for $13,500,000 from big-time contemporary art collector Rosette Delug. Miz Delug, whose wealth is mainly derived from an enviable dee-vorce settlement in the early 2000s, had only purchased the house two years before, in September of 2004, for $7,200,000. Miz Aniston really must have wanted this damn house because she just about doubled Miz Delug's dollars. The very interesting and sassy Miz Delug is, for all the children who don't know, a late comer to the upper end contemporary art collecting circles in which she now orbits but she is well known in the art world for sucking up artwork like a Hoover and, according to a previous article about Miz Delug, she has what she calls a "vagina wall" in her mid-century modern Trousdale Estates home where she's hung a number of works by various artists whose subject matter is the hoo-hoo. We l.o.v.e. her and would d.i.e. for her to be our art world fairy godmother. However, much as we might prefer, we're not here to discuss Miz Delug and her wacky art world ways. We're here to have a look see at Miz Aniston's new real estate baby so let's get started.
Miz Aniston's new nest, located up a long, curving and paparazzi thwarting driveway, was originally designed by noted architect Hal Levitt in the early 1970s. Property records show that at the time Miz Aniston snatched it up, the single story sprawler measured 9,105 square feet and included 6 bedrooms, 7 poopers and 4 fireplaces. We're not sure how true to Mister Levitt's original designs Mister Shadley and Miz Aniston stayed, and we don't know how many bedrooms and poopers the house now contains, but we do know–because we have a copy of the magazine–that Miz Aniston did away with the "his" pooper in the master suite, turning it into a spa bath with a soo-blime soaking tub fashioned of wood. We're not convinced this doing away of the men's room is some kind of sign or symbol of Miz Aniston's romantic loneliness or that she's a man hater burned by a broken heart one too many times, but it seems that most of the other snarky gossip blogs and tabloids do.
Your Mama is not going to go on too much about the details of Miz Aniston's day-core–we'll leave that to the children–but we will say that we find the interior spaces to be sophisticated and warm but also muscular and even masculine but with a delicious softness around the edges. Some blogs and whatevers are saying this is her decorative homage to being a single lady, where she will whittle away her middle age with Botox and man blues. Could be. What do we know? But, we're pretty sure that the sort of man Miz Aniston dates–and we can all be assured she will date again because she is a dater–will feel quite comfortable in this house that doesn't, as far as we can see, whisper with much heartache or desperation. In fact, it sort of feels like with this monolithic overhaul that, au contraire, Miz Aniston may very well be finally owning her life as it is and not what it could have been had she sayed married and gone the mommy route. Of course, Your Mama thinks nine and some thousand square feet is too damn big for one person to ramble around in, but Your Mama is also well acquainted with the real estate size queen proclivities of super star actor types like Miz Aniston who seem to need big houses to contain their big personalities, bigger egos and punishing insecurities.
Moving along...Your Mama is positively swooning and sweating over the mirror image wood paneling of Brazilian curmaru in the living room or the library or whatever that room is where Miz Aniston has hung that marvelous orange and lavender Robert Motherwell painting called A Throw of the Dice No. 17. (Damn gurl, you got yerself a Robert Motherwell painting!) Unless Miss Thing actually plays that blond baby grand–which according to A.D. is a 1960s fruitwood Sauter–it's just pretentious decorative overkill as far as Your Mama is concerned. We're also more than a mite concerned that there are actual cigarette packs–custom wrapped in the same blue-y lavender as in Mister Motherwell's painting–sitting in the Jacques Adnet designed ashtray. We know that Miz Aniston likes to suck on them cancer sticks and it's her right to do so iffin that's what she wants to do. However, it pains Your Mama to think of all that gorgeous woodwork and those a-may-zing eggplant colored velvet chairs soaking up the stink of cigarettes. Let Your Mama tell all you smokers something straight up: All the Febreeze in the world does not take the stench and stank of nicotine away once it weaves its way in the fiber of the fabrics and attaches itself to the paint molecules. The only solution is to throw that shit out. We say this as a former pack a day smoker, children. We know first hand all about the lingering odor of smoking that gets all up in the fabrics and paint and it's awful. Just awful.
We're feeling the Asian influence in the bedroom with the wool and silk shag rug and the low low low platform bed custom designed by Mister Shadley. We're also appreciating the over-sized matching pair of table lamps. Ordinarily Your Mama prefers a room be balanced in a more asymetrical manner, but in this case we likey that the left looks exactly like the right.
We ache to see photos of the dining room where guests are summoned by Miz Aniston or her house gurl smacking a giant Thai gong. According to A.D. the dining room seats 24 under an Alison Berger chandelier, which we assume is custom. If y'all don't know Miss Berger's work, get on the interweb and get your fingers clicking and a'clacking. She's nine kinds of good at what she does. We'd also like to see more of the kitchen which is all decked out in travertine and equipped with a wood burning pizza oven–one of those new(ish) celebrity trends in cookery that we don't care about–and a glassed in wine room that has the Dr. Cooter peeing his pants with envy.
Now children, before y'all go crying and whining about how the house looks sterile or like a hotel suite at the 4-seasons in Bali, please keep in mind that before a photo was snapped each of these pictured rooms was cleared of the mess of daily life–magazines, scripts, remote controls, cell phones, keys and eyeglass cases for example–and worked over hard by a stylist whose job it is to make everything look perfect...not lived in, perfect. We used to get the lived in look in the fab but defunct Nest magazine, but this is Architectural Digest people. Houses in A.D. aren't supposed to look lived in. They're supposed to look like an undisturbed decortive perfection preserved and pickled in a giant vitrine of photographic formaldehyde. We're quite sure that when the A.D. people packed up when home, the clutter of Miz Aniston's life returned.
Miz Aniston gave her new estate the name Ohana, which means (extended) family in Hawaiian. Your Mama happens to think that's a depressingly cheese ball name, but we're cynical that way. Even still and although we don't care for the sorts of romantic comedies 0f Miz Aniston's professional milieu, we do wish her a bit of peace and quiet in her new home.
Miz Aniston–who donated half a million clams to Haiti relief–continues to own a house high in the Bird Streets area of Los Angeles–that's above Sunset Plaza people–that she bought way back in January of 1993 for just $715,000. It's our understanding from someone with an intimate knowledge of the area immediately surrounding that house that she uses the house to store her vintage Mercedes 280SL–that she claims she's never drove or even rode in–and office space for her personal staff.
images: Scott Frances for Architectural Digest (via Jezebel)
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