Monday Pick Up Sticks

After a long and much-chronicled search Tinseltowner Leo DiCaprio is reported to have at long last acquired a deluxe Manhattan pied-a-terre in a newly constructed, wellness-oriented building in the heart of Greenwich Village between Union Square and Washington Square Park.

No word yet on which of the five units in the boutique building he selected but whichever it is he blew an impressive wad; The least expensive unit—almost 3,700 square feet with three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms—carries a hefty $14.5 million price tag and the most expensive, a four bedroom and 4.5 bathroom duplex penthouse with a 2,300+ square foot roof terrace complete with solarium, outdoor shower, spa and convenient half bathroom, is saddled with a downright fat $50,000,000 asking price. (New York Post)

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Ukrainian-born Dancing With the Stars hoofer Karin Smirnoff snapped up her second million dollar-plus house this year. In January (2013) the lithe ballroom expert paid $1.35 million for a five bedroom and six bathroom house in super-suburban (and hot-as-Hades) Woodland Hills (CA) and just this month she shelled out another $1.25 million for a three bedroom and three bathroom Mediterranean villa in the the Hollywood Hills. (Trulia Luxe Living)

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After 20 years of marriage actress, long-time Malibu residents Jane Seymour and actor/producer/director James Keach are headed for the court of divorce and, so the celebrity real estate scuttlebutt goes, Mister Keach shelled out $4.4 million for a three bedroom and three bathroom bachelor pad condominium in the ever-more upscale (and notoriously politically correct) ocean side community of Santa Monica, CA. (L.A. Times)

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After an unsuccessful but valiant attempt to unload it for $95,000,000 and then $85 million, steel magnate Leory Schecter re-listed his two-unit combo condo on the 35th floor of the prodigiously pricey 15 Central Park West building in New York City with a much lower but still mind-numbing $70 million price tag. 

The children may recall that before he undertook a renovation that combined the two units into one 6,000 square foot sprawler Mister Schecter leased one of the units to beleaguered professional baseballer Alex "A-Rod" Rodriguez for around $35,000 per month. The other half was leased to big shit businessman Henry Silverman who founded the business services juggernaut Cendant Corp. (New York Observer)

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Although it was peeped by a slew of rich and/or famous people including Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Steve Madden, and Matt Cohler (of Facebook fame and fortune) as well as a couple of Middle Eastern potentates it was Zhang Zin, one of China's wealthiest self-made lady billionaires, who dropped $26,000,000 on a recently and completely over-hauled (and particularly stunning) 8-floor townhouse on a plum, tree-lined street block between Park and Madison avenues in New York City's hoity-toity Upper East Side.

Side note: You just gotta love that a multi-billionaire Chinese lady capitalist bought a New York City townhouse where, as per listing photographs, the formal dining room hung with eight—eight!—multi-colored Andy Warhol lithographs (or prints or whatever they are) of communist party leader Mao Zedong. Can we call that some delicious real estate irony? Yes, we can.  (New York Post)

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The large and architecturally egregious Pacific Palisades mansion that international pop star Rihanna occupied and fled after a series moe-rons attempted to trespass and burglarize the property—one man was found up on the God damn roof—has returned to the market with an asking price of $65,000 per month. Ri-ri has reportedly settled into a rented downtown New York City duplex and bought a $22 million dollar townhouse-type mansion on her native Barbados. (Trulia Luxe Living)

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The boxy contemporary mansion in a swanky gated development in Phoenix (AZ) that child actor turned race car driver Frankie Muniz bought in 2010 for $2.65 million has popped up on the open market with an asking price of $2,995,000. Blah. Blah. Blah. (Realtor.com)

Meet the Real-Life Staging Lady In a Pink Toyota

Listen, children, rather than (diss and/or) discuss a multi-million dollar mansion being bought or sold by a rich and/or famous person Your Mama's gonna veer slightly off-track for a minute, okay? If this not your cup of blog-reading tea, well then we kindly ask that you shutcher trap and recognize we'll be back with our regularly scheduled celebrity real estate programming soon enough...Okay? Okay.

For the last five or six years this property gossip has mercilessly poked, prodded, joked and jived about the aggressively generic decorative handiwork of Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota, a fictitious home staging professional with an all but pathological thing for white slip-covered sofas, potted orchids, and throw blankets ever-so-carefully splayed on ottomans. Well, children, the real-life Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota does indeed have a thing for white upholstered furnishings—they're inoffensive and fit every style of home, she says—and the lady apparently never met an orchid she didn't like—they require little care and look exotic and important—but she actually drives a late-model Range Rover and her name is Meredith Baer.

A staged home, at its best, is specifically and very much purposefully designed to transmit a luxurious if slightly generic decorative quality that allows a potential home buyer to view the home without the distraction of clutter and daily life detritus of the home's occupant(s) and nobody does that better or more prolifically than Miz Baer, a former model and journalist who spent her childhood on the grounds of the prison at San Quentin where her father was an associate warden. Today, Miz Baer is a home staging industry pioneer and veteran with more than 16 years of experience who owns and operates an eponymous L.A.-based luxury home staging concern where she employs more than 100 people, including 18 interior designers. The decorative goods and wares of her trade are catalogued and stored in a 135,000 square foot warehouse just south of downtown Los Angeles (above). To put that in perspective, children, the average size of a Home Depot comes in at just 105,000 square feet. Oh, and P.S., she's also got smaller satellite warehouses in Bridgeport, CT and Boca Raton, FL.

It takes Miz Baer and her team just a couple of days to plan and execute the installation for an average sized house. A 10,000 square foot mansion can be done three or four days and it takes a week or maybe two to coordinate and install temporary decor for a 20-30,000 square foot mega-mansion. As y'all might expect, home staging is a fairly pricey proposition and the cost is almost always absorbed by the homeowner. A regular-sized home costs between fifteen and twenty grand to have staged by Miz Baer and, of course, the bigger the house and/or the more elaborate the installation the fatter the bill. She told Your Mama the most she's ever been paid to stage a house was about $250,000 to do up a large estate in the tony seaside community of Montecito, CA, but, when asked, assiduously declined to identify the owners citing a non-disclosure agreement "signed in blood and headaches."

Even though she's often hired to stage celebrity-owned homes Miz Baer says that she and her team usually deal with the famous person's people and not the famous person. However, sometimes a high-profile homeowner does want to get involved in the process. One client, the "former owner of a major baseball team," wanted to discuss every detail of the staging installation and a male movie star who Miz Baer described as "gorgeous" actually went to the Rose Bowl flea market in Pasadena with Miz Baer so that he could hand pick accessories and haggle with vendors.

Since most have their own team of well-compensated lady designers and nice-gay decorators Miz Baer says a rich and/or famous person is unlikely to buy a house-full of staged furnishings and/or accessories. They do however, sometimes cherry pick one or two pieces from the staged decor of a house they've bought. Architecture and design aficionado Brad Pitt bought a contemporary residence staged by the Baer team and purchased a tribal stool they'd put in the master bathroom. Reese Witherspoon dropped a wad on some vintage paintings hung in a house she bought and, in happier marital days, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver once toured a house staged by Miz Baer and snatched up $50,000 worth of antiques out of the house right on the spot.

In addition to staging homes for sale Miz Baer and her team also do up short-term luxury leases. This service, she says, is particularly popular in Tinseltown with wealthy divorced men, young starlets, sports stars, and others who require a fully-furnished rental on short notice and/or for a six or eight month stretch. Miz Baer snitched to Your Mama that she recently did a luxury lease for someone she would only identify as a "major baseball player" who asked that she furnish a second bedroom as a den with a sectional sofa that could turn into a huge bed so he could—ahem—entertain a more than one lady at at time.

In addition to her busy staging services Miz Baer and her staff currently appear on the HGTV program Staged to Perfection, a half-hour reality-based home make-over show during which Miz Baer's 18 designers comb through Baer's Brobdingnagian warehouse for just the right items for staging properties listed for sale around Los Angeles.

Megan Ellison Sells Three in The Birds

Between February 2008 and February 2011 software heiress turned increasingly influential movie producer Megan Ellison snatched up three pricey properties on the same elbow-shaped cul-de-sac in The Birds, a spendy and perennially en vogue neighborhood in the mountains directly above L.A.'s bustling and also perennially en vogue Sunset Strip.

Miss Ellison, a wee lamb of 27 years, purchased her first nest in The Birds—the one one the far right in the publicly available aerial image above—from designer Steve Hermann in February 2008 for $12,600,000. The following April (2009) she picked up the property next door, which had also been re-worked by Steven Hermann, from media mogul Byron Allen for $6,250,000 and, finally and somewhat inexplicably, she scooped up the property next door to that in February 2011 for $13,750,000.

A few quick clicks and clacks on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that young Miss Ellison shelled out a total of $32,600,000 for the houses that are all walled, gated, and very contemporary with vast walls of glass and unobstructed panoramic views over Los Angeles that extend, on a clear day, to the Pacific Ocean and, on a particularly clear day with binoculars, Santa Catalina Island.

In early August, as Your Mama discussed back in mid August, Miss Ellison quietly one of her three Bird Streets properties—the last one she bought for $13.75 million—in an off-market deal to high-tech billionaire Ted Wiatt for $20,500,000. Now comes word, children, that in late October Miss Ellison surreptitiously sold her two other Bird Street properties, one went for $15,375,000 and the other—the one in the middle that she bought from Byron Allen—for $10,875,000.

A few more quick flips and flicks on the abacus shows that, just like her property-hoovering real estate baller father, Miss Ellison has the Midas Touch when it comes to residential real estate. All together Miss Ellison took in a mind-melting $46,750,000 on the sale of the three properties for which she paid a total of $32,600,000. Even those with the most rudimentary of mathematics skills can quite easily determine that lucky lucky lucky—or savvy savvy savvy, depending on how you see it—Miss Ellison's profit came to $14,150,000. Your Mama imagines that even after the upkeep and improvement expenses are subtracted and the taxes and real estate fees paid—with standard 4-6% commissions the real estate fees all by themselves could have easily topped two million clams—Miss Ellison will still walk away with a few million dollars. Not bad work if you can afford it, right?

As if her low seven figure profit (less expenses) weren't enough to boggle y'all real estate minds, stay tuned because here's where this ditty veers towards mind blowing. As previously mentioned (and discussed) Miss Ellison sold one of the properties to billionaire Ted Wiatt. Property records show she sold the other two for a combined $26,250,000 to the same foreign buyer who used a couple of opaque and unimaginatively-named corporate entities with links to offices in Beverly Hills and Monaco to acquire the residences.

Naturally, being the property gossip we are, Your Mama did a little asking around and it wasn't long before our much-appreciated informant Peter Propertyseller pegged the foreign buyer behind the corporate entities as Ashley Tabor, a 30-something year old Englishman and budding media mogul who happens to be the son of billionaire bookmaker, horse breeder and real estate investor Michael Tabor.

The younger Mister Tabor may not be a household name for most tabloid readers in the U.S. but he's may be remembered by the hoi-polloi as the fella who (reportedly) paid Rihanna $2 million to perform at a party last year at the super-posh One Sandy Lane resort in Barbados. The resort, it should be noted, is owned by the elder Mister Tabor and is where celebrity real estate rumor has it native Barbadian cum global pop-priestess Rihanna recently plunked down $22 million for a lavish townhouse mansion. Anyways...

According to Peter Propertyseller, Mister Tabor (the son) intends to raze both residences as does Mister Wiatt. Keep in mind that two of the houses, those on the ends, are less than five years old and the other, the one in the middle, had a down-to-the-studs renovation in the mid-Aught. They are, effectively, nearly new houses. So, if all that's true–and we have no reason not to believe what Peter told us—Misters Tabor and Wiatt together paid nearly fifty million dollar for just the land, much of which is just too steep a slope as to be usable, and will likely spend—what do you think, kittens?—at least another ten or maybe $15 million on construction of new homes?

That, children, is how the world's sickening rich super-rich sometimes spend their oceans of disposable income.

Miss Ellison actually owns a fourth house in The Birds—purchased in late 2011 for $1.8 million, gut renovated, originally listed for $3.75 million, currently listed at $2.99 million, and somewhat curiously in escrow since April (2013)—and in May 2013 she dropped $2.8 million for a wildly idiosyncratic one bedroom and one bathroom apartment at the coveted Police Building on the border between the SoHo and Little Italy 'hoods. We're not the betting type but iffin we were Your Mama would bet both our long-bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, that Miz Ellison will acquire at least one more apartment in the storied building.

P.S. Peter Propertyseller also snitched to Your Mama that Miss Ellison plans (or may be in the process) of acquiring commercial property in L.A.'s still-kinda-gritty but terribly chic and terrifically expensive Venice community to house her film production offices. He also told us he's heard she's in the market for a new L.A. home in the $20 million range. Rumor and gossip, kids, rumor and gossip.

aerial photo: Bing