SELLER: John MayerLOCATION: Pacific Palisades, CA
PRICE: $1,325,000
SIZE: 3,648 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Late last night while Your Mama did battle with a routine bout of insomnia we perused all the new real estate listings in the Los Angeles area. It wasn't long into our crawl across the internets that we came across a residence in The Highlands neighborhood of the upscale Los Angeles, CA enclave of Pacific Palisades. The house, listed at $1,325,000, set off all Your Mama's finely tuned celebrity real estate alarm bells so we took a little looky-loo around the interweb and determined that the house in question belongs to self-important seven time Grammy winning singer/songwriter John Mayer.
Property records show Mister Mayer, a man afflicted with a vexatious verbal diarrhea that often lands him in hot water with the press and the public, purchased his Pacific Palisades pad in June of 2006 for $1,750,000. It doesn't take a genius or too much flicking of the well worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus to figure out that even if his Real Estates manage the highly unlikely feat of a full price offer, Mister Mayer will still have to endure a swift and stiff slap to his real estate keister with a minimum loss of $425,000 plus the fat real estate fees that could easily run him another 50,000 clams.
Listing information reveals that Mister Mayer's two story crib, built in the mid-1970s and located on a quiet cul de sac lined with unnervingly similar and architecturally jejune residences, measures in at a surprisingly generous 3,648 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms. The harrowing, homely and deeply regrettable front façade is both defined and defiled by a water stained garage door and a particularly perverse mansard style tile roof.
A walled and gated courtyard leads to the front doors, a set of multi-colored stained glass double doors that make Your Mama shiver and shudder with aesthetic pain. Guests are greeted in a large foyer that looks suspiciously and unfortunately like the antechamber of a nightclub where a big burly dude with tattoos and a 10th grade education or some improbably thin young ladee with artificially inflated breasts and a clip board might ask a person for their identification. A single panel of deep purple fabric, pulled to one side and pooled on the floor, mimics a velvet rope and marks the entrance to the main living spaces where the nightclubby day-core shifts into high gear.
Listen bunnies, Your Mama is bedeviled by this seemingly endless decorative trend in Tinseltown where young rich celebrities do up their day-core like the VIP section of a damn night club. Listen teddy bears, Your Mama can appreciate a slick and trendy nightclub just as much as the next person of marginal refinement but we haven't even an iota of desire to live up in one. Blech! We fill with sorrow and deep sadness at the notion of spending a long night in a crowded club only to come home to a living room that looks like a damn disco. In the case of Mister Mayer's disco day-core in his house in the PacPal Highlands, it's a little like putting lipstick and a pair of cha-cha heels on a pig because, you know, a pig is always a pig.
Anyhoo, the dramatic stone-floored double height living room has distinctly VIP lounge-like vibe. There's a fireplace with swirly marble surround and semi-sheer Roman shades cover and a trio of extra tall windows that look out into a tangle of untamed trees and bushes at the rear of the property. We confess to being somewhat fond of the blue on blue faux bois rug and the steely blue velvet Neoclassical style sofa that we'd bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly is not an antique but we can't say the same thing for the four sided leather bench/coffee table or the silvery lounge chairs placed in front of a large screen tee-vee with built in speaker system.
A grand piano sits prominently between the living room and the dining room, currently furnished with little more than a long clean lined table, ten Philippe Starck Ghost chairs, silver (or maybe they're bronze) mesh curtains, and kind of dee-lish and campy old-time chandelier. Altogether it's a very glam space–perhaps too glam for the home of a single man like Mister Mayer and his platonic male roommate–and perfect for setting out a late night boo-fay for anyone willing to drag themselves from the pool table at Trousdale or the back room at Voyeur in West Hollywood all the way out to Pacific Palisades. We are of the mind that this room might actually be perfectly acceptable if it had a rug for warmth and maybe some mossy things and/or a cluster of epiphytes to provide an organic quality to an otherwise pretty sterile room. Just a thought.
The oddly shaped kitchen, lined with cabinets that look like they might be original to the house, has been upgraded with marble counter tops, medium grade stainless steel appliances, and a pot-free pot rack that hangs precariously over the range. A breakfast bar for two separates the kitchen from a family/media room with floor to ceiling windows on one wall and some very disturbing and very 1970s louvered doors the other. The walls and cabinets in both the kitchen and the family room appear to be a light lavender color, which would be an interesting if not particularly masculine choice, but it may just be the photos that give the long narrow space a slightly purple tint.
It will not and should not surprise to the children to learn that a disco ball hangs above the staircase that leads to the second floor bedrooms that include a master suite comprised of bedroom, bedroom sized custom-fitted walk-in closet, dressing area with a built-in light bulb lined dressing table, and a large pooper with marble tile floor, twin sinks, a sunken soaking tub and separate glass enclosed shower with a built in seat and a fancy and complicated looking showering apparatus. In the oddly shaped but adequately sized bedroom heavy silk drapery hangs in front of plantation shuttered French doors that open to an impossibly narrow balcony that hangs over the back yard area. Given that the closet is empty and the bed just a bare mattress, it's seems clear that Mister Mayer has packed up his sling bikinis and done decamped for new digs.
The property backs up to an uphill slope of undeveloped property which is perfect for a privacy loving person. In addition to the walled courtyard at the front of the house where Mister Mayer hung a striped hammock, a narrow back yard wraps around two sides of the big ol' beige beast and includes amoebic (and anemic) strips of lawn, dense but not particularly well considered plantings, a fire pit and various concrete patios for dining and lounging.
Since Mister Mayer recently moved his aged father into an assisted living facility in Los Angeles, Your Mama presumes Mister Mayer will retain a primary residence in the City of Angels. However, he's not without a home base in the SoHo area of New York City where in February of 2005 he paid, according to peeps at Streeteasy, $2,173,690 for a 2,063 square foot apartment directly above an apartment owned by supermodel turned media mogul Tyra Banks.
listing photos: Coldwell Banker–Beverly Hills East
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