Daria Zhukova Leaves Her Nest in The Birds

Let's all hop in our time-capsule hoozy-majigs and go back to November of 2010 when Your Mama happened upon the listing for a 9,691 square foot faux-Tuscan mansion at the tippy-top of The Birds, a star-studded and sexy-sexy neighborhood of steep winding streets–all of which are named after, you got it, birds–that hovers over the heart of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, CA

Listing information showed the 6 bedroom and 8.5 pooper property was priced at $16,500,000 while property records revealed its owner: Russian multi-billionaire Roman Abramovich's much younger baby momma Daria 'Dasha' Zhukova. Miss Zhukova, according to records, paid $19,500,000 for the beneficially sited property in January of 2010. Although she dates one of the world's most prolific buyers of international trophy properties, it should be noted that Miss Zhukova has her own money thanks to her Russian oil-magnate daddy Alexander Radkin Zhukov. The pampered heiress collects and vends contemporary art and for a short time served as editor-in-chief of the bi-annually published fashion mag Pop.

Anyhoo, within days the listing for Miss Zhukova's nest in The Birds vanished from the interweb and shortly thereafter Your Mama received a friendly but firm communique from one of Miss Zhukova's representatives who insisted that Dasha's big digs in The Birds was "most definitely not for sale."

That was, apparently, a mouthful of hogwash because according to the Wall Street Journal, the striking Russian beauty has done sold her domicile in The Birds for $19,500,000, the exact same price she paid. No transfer records yet appear in any of the online databases we scoured so we're just going to have to take the Wall Street Journal's good word on this.

We had a strong hunch that Miss Zhukova's representative was lying through his little teeth so we're not the least bit surprised by the sale but by far the most juiciest real estate tidbit dropped by WSJ is that Miss Zhukova attempted to buy the two adjacent properties. That would have given Miss Moneybags a sizable compound with serious privacy and the sort of glittery view from downtown to the Pacific Ocean that Los Angeles real estate dreams are built upon.

We're not exactly sure why Miss Zhukova was unable to secure the adjacent properties, particularly since her baby daddy's real estate pockets are startlingly bottomless. One of the adjacent properties has been on and off the market for years and is currently listed with an asking price of $18,000,000. The other adjacent property–a boxy and somewhat forbidding Mexican-modern mansion designed by the late great architect Ricardo Legorreta–was acquired by Irish property investor Patrick McKillen in late 2010 for $9,000,000 a remarkably low number considering it had been listed at a skin-scorching $20,000,000. There's a story there about why Mister McKillen paid what he did but it's Easter bunnies and we just don't have time to forage through the internets to sort it all out. Maybe later...

Given that Miss Zhukova–who we understand lives primarily in London and Moscow where she owns the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture–has deep roots in Los Angeles. Not only did she spend her formative pre-university years in Los Angeles her mother still lives in Lala Land so it seems unlikely that she'll abandon property ownership altogether. And indeed, property records show that Miss Zhukova continues to own a house in Beverly Hills that she bought in November 2007 for $6,495,000. Presumably this is where The Mother lives, but honestly chickens we don't know who, if anyone, lives in that house. For all Your Mama knows Miss Zhukova uses the house as nothing more than a storage facility for her extensive and brutally expensive wardrobe.

Mister Abramovich–and by extension Miss Zhukova–maintain scads of insanely-pricey, ridiculously-ritzy and high-maintenance homes around the world including in celebrity-stocked locales like Aspen, CO, St. Barths in nhe Caribbean, Cap d'Antibes in the south of France and perpetually swinging London. The lavish living globe trotters recently acquired a temporary (and historic) shelter in London's Chelsea area where they can live–or, more accurately, bunk-down when they're in town–until they're able to move into a palatial 30,000 square foot but still under-construction mansion on Lowndes Square in London's upscale Belgravia area.