Birthday Break

Listen puppies, today is Your Mama's birthday–yes, it really is–so we've decided to give our self a wee break. Instead of working our fingers to the bone like we do most days we're going to spend the day on our back deck, sipping gin and eating the dee-voon white-trash birthday cake the Dr. Cooter made for us.

However, we hate to leave the children high, dry and starving for a celebrity real estate morsel so here are a few nuts and berries to keep y'all busy for a while.

1.
Alternative music maker Moby recently moved from New York City to Los Angeles where he's made house in the legendary Wolf's Lair, a storied castle perched high above Lake Hollywood. Moby bought the fairy tale property last year from divorcing music executive Jay Faires and tee-vee talker Debbie Matenopoulos.

The quirky house had first been listed with an asking price of $7,500,000. Property records show that Mister Moby paid $3,925,000 for the 3.31 acre aerie and according to a recent article in the New York Times, the picayune, pixie-like musician spent another couple million on renovations and restorations that included the installation of a new kitchen, the addition of three bathrooms to the main house, the conversion of a garage into a recording studio and situating a small meditation deck to hover serenely over the lake.

Photos in the New York Times reveal that Mister Moby has sparely but smartly furnished the house with pedigreed mid-century modern furniture that, as far as we're concerned, makes a delicious juxtaposition against the eccentric architecture and historical architectural details.

2.
We're not sure how many people actually care about this but for those who do Madonna's fire-ravaged childhood home in Rochester Hills, MI can now be purchased for just $49,000. Your Mama presumes there are a healthy handful of crazed "fans" who are, at this very minute, pawning their car stereos and selling their 14-karate gold jewelry to come up with the damn down payment. Iffin we were Madonna–and thank heavens we are not–we'd buy the property, raze the house and donate the land for a neighborhood park with taxes paid for the next 99 years. Just a thought.

3.
Your Mama gets a lot of questions about pocket listings: What are they? Why would someone do a pocket listing? Click here for the low-down on pocket listings. Let us know if you have any questions.

4.
It's no secret that celebrities have special real estate desires and needs and the money to buy them. Here's a list compiled by people at Zillow of the top 10 features famous folks look for in a home.

5.
Hip hopper Salt of Salt-N-Pepa listed her Melville, NY mansion with an asking price of $2,295,000. Who?

6.
An unidentified buyer paid a stunning $47,000,000 for a New York City townhouse originally built for one of those lavish living Vanderbilts. The 33-foot wide townhouse was sold as a pocket listing (see above) sans broker, which means no commission will be paid.

7.
Your Mama asks that the children consider the audacious brilliance of the tiger-striped wall-to-wall carpeting in this New York City penthouse at the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Our friends at Curbed think the high-floor corner condo, recently listed at $24,000,000, might belong to Band-Aid heiress Libbet Johnson whose brother Woody–that would be the owner of the New York Jets and father of tragic socialite Casey Johnson–happens to own the penthouse next door.

Reality T.V. King Lists Hollywood Hills Hideout

SELLER: Mark Cronin
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,550,000
SIZE: 3,444 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: While flipping and flitting through some of the newer listings around Tinseltown our beady little eyes were caught by a vintage house in the hills above Hollywood that property records reveal belongs to television executive Mark Cronin and is listed at $1,550,000.

Your Mama knows that most of y'all don't recognize Mister Cronin's name but he's one of the people responsible for creating, producing and/or writing some of the tawdriest, trashiest and most proudly meretricious reality television programs that have ever graced–or bedeviled, depending on your point of view–the boob-toob. Listen, hunnies, we are no stranger to reality tee-vee but even Your Mama's jaded jaw hangs agape when we happen across one of Mister Cronin's paralyzing and sometimes traumatizing creations. We don't want to watch these shows but iffin we come across one of them we can't usually help but to sit stunned, equal parts mortified and mesmerized.

Mister Cronin spent much of the 1990s as a writer and producer for foul-mouth shock jock turned plutocrat Howard Stern. In the late 1990s Mister Cronin turned to television eventually churning out a long list of some of the lowliest of the low-brow reality tee-vee turkeys including The Surreal Life, Flavor of Love, Charm School, Rock of Love with Bret Michaels, America's Most Smartest Models and the truly, deeply upsetting Bridalplasty on which a dozen self-loathing women compete to win plastic surgery procedures and a fantasy wedding. Gawd. It's enough to make Your Mama need a nerve pill with our early afternoon pitcher of gin & tonics.

As far as Your Mama can tell, most of the programs created, produced and/or written by Mister Cronin involve isolating a lot of bottom rung famous and quasi-famous folks in a Pee-wee's Playhouse-style mansion in L.A. and/or putting a whole mess of shockingly inarticulate and wildly volatile strippers all together in a house with an endless supply of booze and seeing what happens. Usually these thong-straps-up-above-the-waist-of-their-skin-tight-low-rise-jeans-wearing beehawtchas drink, get loud, pull hair and generally act like a bunch of feral animals who would rather push a girl down the stairs than politely ask her to step aside.

Anyhoodles noodles, property records show that Mister Cronin acquired his 1926 Spanish casa perched below street level but still above the tree tops in the steep hills above bee-yoot-iful Beachwood Canyon in October of 2004 for $1,849,000. The property was first put on the market, according to Redfin, in mid-October 2010 with an asking price of $1,849,500. The asking price was later reduced to $1,675,000 before finally settling at it's current $1,550,000.

A few quick flicks of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that even if Mister Cronin's Real Estate can pull a rabbit out of a hat with a full-price sale of $1,550,000, he'll still have to swallow the bitter financial pill of a $300,000 loss not counting real estate fees, carrying costs and any renovations he and the Missus may have had done.

Listing information describes the house as having 3,444 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 5.5 poopers on three elevator-less floors. Either Mister and Missus Cronin horrendous taste in bed linens and zee-ro use for books to fill the bookshelves that line one wall in the office/library or they've already stripped the house of personal belongings and done decamped to their bigger digs. More on that later.

A classic turreted entry leads to a step-down formal living room with original narrow-strip wood floors the run throughout the house, a fireplace, beamed and vaulted ceiling and windows on three sides some of which provide panoramic views of Los Angeles that rolls out like a glittering carpet below the house. The coral-walled dining room has an ugly and unnecessary pass through to the kitchen that Your Mama recommends the new owners seal up. The eat-in kitchen appears to have been fairly recently redone with granite counter top, Shaker-style birch cabinets, portable center work island and mid-grade stainless steel appliances. Although we can't be sure, the kitchen has a well-designed but generic Scandinavian thing about it that makes Your Mama suspect that this may be an Ikea kitchen.

The five bedrooms are split, according to listing information, between the three floors. There are two bedrooms on the upper level, a guest suite with separate entrance on the lowest level and in between the master suite with its severely dated and depressing bathroom. All you need to know about this bathroom, children, is that the fixtures are brass, the tile floor beige and the counter tops veined green marble, the sort more commonly found in in a library or banking institution. The master bedroom shares the middle level, according to listing information with a "media room" with a very ordinary-sized flat-screen television mounted to the wall and French doors that open to an elevated terrace with city views.

Sitting well below the house a city-view terrace that feels like a boo-teek resort in the trees has a lap-lane swimming pool, spa, patch of grass, tree shaded lounging area and what listing information calls an "entertainment ramada." Don't worry kids, Your Mama had to consult the dictionary to figure out what a ramada is too.

We are for sure and indeed rather fond of this ramada thing but we are also concerned about what happens when frolicking poolside and stricken with an uncontrollable need of a fresh gin & tonic, a candy bar or terlit. It is at least a long flight of stairs up to a pooper and three glutius busting flights up to the kitchen or wet bar in the library/office/family room. The children can be assured that our haughty house gurl Svetlana's solution to our need for poolside booze or a sugar fix would to stand at the window of the kitchen and toss bottles into the swimming pool. Her advice for anyone pool side in need of a pee? Cop a squat over in the bushes.

Over the last few months a considerable kerfuffle has erupted and tension created between neighborhood residents and the scads of tourists who drive their cars through the neighborhood to get to one of the best spots in all of Los Angeles to see and photograph the Hollywood sign, a beloved, powerful and internationally recognized symbol for Los Angeles and its movie-making history. It seems that some locals don't care for the newly installed directional signs that point tourists to the best vantage point for sign viewing. Many have mysteriously disappeared and the general consensus is that the culprit might be a neighborhood vigilante who ripped them down in the cloak of darkness in a grass-roots effort to thwart any out-of-towners who might want to use their narrow, quiet and dangerously curvy streets in order to get up close and personal with the sign.

Property records indicate the Mister and Missus Cronin packed up and moved to a stately mansion in swanky but very staid San Marino, CA, right next door to Pasadena. Listing information Your Mama teased up out of the interweb shows the couple's new 1924 "Italian Renaissance Revival" mansion sits on over one acre of manicured grounds and formal gardens. The 6,769 square foot villa has, according to listing information, six bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a library with three walls of leaded glass windows, an eat-in kitchen and a master suite with two bathrooms and three tiled terraces.

listing photos: Deasy Penner & Partners

Your Mama Hears...

...that east coast bound Tinseltowner Jennifer Aniston is not buying two apartments in a white-glove pre-war building in the West Village as has been reported here, there and everywhere, but three.

According to a source Your Mama freely admits we do not know, Miss Aniston plans to purchased not only Sally Hershberger's itsy-bitsy but exquisite jewel box penthouse listed at a mind-altering $5,900,000 and the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment directly below that's listed at $1,800,000 but also the unit next door.

The third unit, owned by a Canadian gal, measures 850 square feet according to listing information and like the other two units includes just 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom. Records reflect that the apartment was purchased just one year ago for $1,650,000 and the apartment first showed up on the listing services in early April with an asking price of $2,100,000, a number that has since been slivered to $1,995,000.

The asking prices for the three units combined comes to a staggering $9,695,000. It's unlikely Miss Aniston will be paying that amount for all three units that measure up to under 2,500 square feet of interior space and include a wrap around terrace with multi-million dollar views. Even if her Real Estates and Business Managers manage a 20% discount on each of the three units she's still looking at shelling out nearly eight million clams for three apartments that could quite easily cost Miss Aniston another couple million more to combine, renovate and decorate.

The children should note that the listing for this third unit that we heard through the celebrity real estate grapevine that Miss Aniston is purchasing is still marked "active" so this is all just rumor and gossip at this point, children, rumor and gossip.