Nigerian Magnate Kola Aluko Nabs Another

A freshly finished Italianate mini-compound set behind motorized gates and high hedges on a prime street in the famously rarefied lower Bel Air area of Los Angeles popped up on the open market in June 2012 with a fat but hardly unheard of $29,000,000 price tag. The main villa and its detached guest/pool house—declared an "architectural triumph" in digital marketing materials—were conceived and executed by esteemed if somewhat under-the-radar architect Tim Morrison who—according to this—shares office space with and often works in tandem with also-esteemed West Hollywood-based architect Thomas Proctor.*

The steeply sloped, very vaguely boomerang-shaped and thus somewhat challenging street-to-street parcel encompasses just .7 acres and, depending on where online you look, the mini-compound's overall total square footage is 19,485 or 18,563 spread between a substantial main villa and a three-story detached guest/pool house. Either size it's a whole lotta luxurious interior space wedged onto a tight and lot that also features a couple of loggias, a wee patch of grass or two, and several sizable terraces hemmed by sturdy sturdy sturdy stone balustrades. A decidedly contemporary infinity edged swimming pool was engineered into the hillside over by the guest/pool house and and eight-plus car subterranean garage is decked out with a mosaic tiled car wash area, a deluxe feature we know Hector Q., mobile car washer to L.A.'s rich and famous, can appreciate.

Online listings Your Mama perused indicate there are a total of nine bedrooms and 14 bathrooms on the property. The main villa, a three story, elevator-equipped edifice that proudly opens to canyon and city views, contains three principal guest/family bedrooms on the upper floor plus an exceptionally spacious 2,200 square foot master suite. (F.Y.I. 2,200 square feet is just shy of the average size of an American home, children.) In addition to a separate sitting room and bedroom, the master suite has dual, custom-fitted dressing rooms and a pair of marble-slathered bathrooms, one leaning toward dapper (for him) the other bending more towards elegantly feminine (for her). Three more secondary guest/family bedrooms share the lower, semi-subterranean level with staff quarters, a gym, and a media room. There's an additional bedroom and bathroom in the detached guest/pool house in addition to a poolside living room with fireplace.

The impress-the-guests-style foyer in the main villa has limestone floors, double-height coved ceilings, and a heavy duty staircase that wraps around the room with some the chunkiest carved stone balustrades y'all have ever seen in your damn life. We don't care for the oval islands in the all-white and marble-countered kitchen because they just seem so forced and unnecessary and, although it's purdy to look at from certain angles, we feel uncomfortable with how the negative edge pool and the stone balustrades the flank it seem to want to scratch each other's eyes out. Also, unless it's the garage, Your Mama is baffled to the point of flabbergast by the vast, stone tile floored, and depressingly low-ceilinged lower level that looks like it could be a ballroom for hire at a Best Western in Minot, ND, but, other wise, in the hands of a talented and/or nice-gay or lady decorator, we think the house and grounds could be pretty spectacular if not exactly in line with our own personal taste. Anyhoodles, poodles...

Property records show the property in question was owned until the late 1990s by philanthropic real estate developer George C. Page who gifted the property to Pepperdine University, a prestigious (and pricey) private school in Malibu, that quickly sold it in July 1999 for $1,160,000 to a fella who quit-claimed it in 2002 to a corporate entity easily tied on the internets to the aforementioned architect Timothy Morrison. Mister Morrison borrowed a whole bunch of money and built the existing, Italian Riviera-ready mini-compound that was sold, according to property records and other online resources, in late October (2013) for $23.5 million. The buyer, according to property records, was an anonymous corporate concern that shields the identity of the owner so we can't say for sure but good ol' Yolanda Yakketyyak, a trusted and well-coifed real estate yenta who runs in high and even higher social circles, swore to Your Mama the buyer was Nigerian energy and aviation tycoon Kola Aluko.

Don't worry, children, if you'd not heard of Mister Aluko. He was, after all, just a year ago named to Forbes Magazine's list of Ten Nigerian Multi-Millionaires You've Never Heard Of. He has, however and to be sure, developed a slightly higher, playboy-ish profile since he's been poppin' up real regular in the property gossip columns for the last year or so and been palling around with Entertainment Industry big shots like Leo DiCaprio, Jay-Z and P. Diddy. So the stories go, the latter two hosted Mister Aluko's star-studded birthday party in Beverly Hills last year. Also raising his pampered, jet-setter profile in the international gossip columns is recent (alleged) association with the drop dead dee-vine if occasionally volatile supermodel and mega-rich man serial dater Naomi Campbell.**

Mister Aluko  may not (yet) be a hardcore real estate baller but, according to Your Mama's admittedly unscientific research and probably not comprehensive findings, the lavish living (and some say shady) Nigerian businessman hardly needs another high-maintenance mansion in Los Angeles. In July (2013) Mister Aluko shelled out $8.62 for a four bedroom duplex condo in a fine and full service if not exactly A-Grade pre-war building on Fifth Avenue in New York City and last year he allegedly spent just over $40 million to buy two top-of-the-line properties: one a gated, late 1990s French Country-style pile on a swank cul-de-sac just above Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills and the other a newly erected and aggressively contemporary situated just a few doors down from the Italianate mini-compound Yolanda swears he just bought. We can't vouch for it—making it just rumor and gossip, of course, but Yolanda also told Your Mama Mister Mister Aluko plans to use his new mini-compound as a guest house for his international business associates.

Clearly, children, Mister Aluko needs another twenty-some million dollar estate in Los Angeles like he needs another $50,000,000 boat like the one he bought a couple months ago and either loaned or leased in September to hip hop/pop power couple Jay-Z and Beyonce. But, if Your Mama has said it once we've said it 47,000 times before: Who, pray tell are we to make heads nor tales of the profligate real estate ways of the ever wealthier, increasingly itchy footed, and astronomically spendy super rich?

*Misters Morrison and Proctor are the folks who did up the Beverly Hills home now owned by Posh Spice and David Beckham as well as the guys who did the fairly recent re-do of a pedigreed—and gorgeous—Spanish Colonial estate in Beverly Hills that was formerly owned by actor James Colburn and later the Sultan of Brunei. The Bev Hills estate changed hands a few weeks ago when big business executive Kent Kresa, former chairman of both General Motors and Northrop Grumman, sold it for $27.5 million to—Your Mama heard word through the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine—a prominent Saudi Arabian multi-billionaire industrialist. Anyways...

**In addition to Mister Aluko, Miz Campbell has over the years been squired by an international crop of multi-millionaires, billionaires, and near billionaire who include: Italian Flavio Briatore; American Sean Puffy Diddy Daddy Combs; Brazilian Marco Elias; and, most recently, hunky Russian real estate baller Vladimir Doronin.

listing photos: Rodeo Realty

DJ Avicii Buys Bruno Mascolo's House in the Hollywood Hills

SELLER: Bruno Mascolo
BUYER: Tim Bergling, a.k.a. Avicii
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: Unknown
SIZE: 7,007 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In case any of the children haven't yet heard, DJs—the kind that do their thing in thumping mega-clubs and not the kind on the radio—are the this generation's rock stars and, as modern day rock stars, they earn rock star-sized incomes. Take, for instance, Sweden-born DJ Tim Bergling, a two-time Grammy-nominee known professionally as Avicii. For the last couple of years the dance genre DJ was ranked at number three on DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs list and the Forbes folk recently ranked the toe-headed 23 year old remix master and record producer as the sixth highest earning DJ in 2012 with a haul of around $20,000,000.*

By Your Mama's quick and elementary calculations on our bejeweled abacus, Mister Avicii earns almost $55,000 per day. That's $55,000 every day of the damn year, children. So, though he may be just a young laddie of 23 or 24 years old, he can well afford to pay—as we were first told by Our Fairy Godmother in the Hollywood Hills he did—an (as yet) unknown number of millions of dollars for an ultra-modern mansion in the much-coveted Bird Streets 'hood above L.A.'s Sunset Strip that was last listed on the open market with an asking price of $15,750,000.

The residence in question was owned, as per property records and previous reports, by hair care and beauty business bigwig Bruno Mascolo, the head of the U.S. division of the international Toni & Guy hair cutting empire and the former co-owner to the TiGIi Linea haircare conglomerate that was acquired by Unilever in early 2009 for nearly $412 million. As far as the property record data bases and other online resources that Your Mama peeped are concerned, Mister Mascolo paid exactly $10,000,000 for the highly libidinous, sharp-elbowed, and bi-winged contemporary in February 2009 and had it on the open market at a couple of different prices since the summer of 2012.

Our research shows the two-story residence was designed by modern-minded SoCal architect Paul McLean and built on spec as a collaboration between L.A.-based property developer Brad Kuish and nice-gay interior designer Ryan Brown. Older listings still available on the internets show the house has five bedrooms and seven bathrooms in just over 6,500 square feet while more current digital marketing materials show there are six bedrooms and seven bathrooms in 7,007 square feet of proudly sleek and decidedly aspirational interior spaces defined by soaring ceilings, extra wide plank wood floors, and vast expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows and Fleetwood sliders that fill at night with a twinkling, multi-colored carpet of lights.

A walled and secured courtyard entrance has both water and fire features that make for a rather dramatic passage to the even more (melo)dramatic main entrance, a glass-walled bridge that spans a vertigo-inducing concrete crevasse over the swimming pool and links the two wings of the H-shaped residence. The bridge/foyer, roomy enough to accommodate a sitting area and/or baby grand piano, opens on the right into an banquet hall-scaled Great Room. At one end there's an Italian-crafted center island kitchen expensively fitted with Euro-style appliances, waterfall counter tops of unknown but most assuredly pricey material, and a convenient, four-seat snack counter. There's also a 300+ bottle temperature-controlled walk-in wine vault, a dining area with built-in buffet and floating shelves, and a sun-drenched family room with fireplace and two towering walls of glass with panoramic city views.

The upper level of the opposite wing contains a study and a spacious but hardly humongous master suite complete with custom-fitted walk-in closet/dressing room and a Thassos marble-lined bathroom with double-wide all-glass shower. Two entire walls of glass in the bedroom slide open to a glass-railed balcony with an all but unobstructed view that sweeps over Los Angeles from downtown to Century City to—on a clear day—the Pacific Ocean more than ten miles away.

A boutique-hotel-y, double-wide staircase (not shown in listing photos) leads down to the one wing of lower level where there are a couple of bedrooms, a glass-walled game room, and a separate media room with state-of-the-art projection system, tiered seating and a built-in wet bar/candy counter. The lower level of the opposite wing contains several more bedrooms and bathrooms plus a four-car attached garage with direct entry to the house.

Lower level rooms look out and/or open on to the central courtyard where there's a spa tucked back into the aforementioned concrete crevasse overlooked by the entry courtyard as well as a 75-foot long, infinity-ended lap lane swimming pool with built-in cantilevered sun bed. The multi-level terraces around the pool provide plenty of room for preening and sunbathing as well as a built-in barbecue station.

Mister Mascolo and his blonde missus, Kyara, also own an ocean front home in the illustrious Colony community in Malibu (CA) that's currently on the open market with a $15.98 million price and—it was snitched to Your Mama by Our Fairy Godmother in the Hollywood Hills—in May (2013) they acquired a gated and privately situated fixer upper on a prominent perch above the Sunset Strip that was once featured on Million Dollar Listing and was purchased, as per property records, for $13.875 million.

*According to Forbes, The highest earning DJ in 2012 was Adam Wiles, a six-foot-five-inch Grammy-winning 29 year old music re-mixologist whose stage name is Calvin Harris and who raked in a mind-bending $46 million last year. Earlier this year (2013) Mister Harris, a native of Scotland, dropped seven million clams on his own Zen-inspired contemporary bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills.

listing photos: Hilton & Hyland

FABULOUS HOUSTON HOME TOUR–INCLUDES A FORMER GINGER BARBER HOUSE!

 

The Southampton/Museum District Home Tour “Cool Classics” is always the best home tour of the year.  The houses are always exceptional.   The tour is this coming Sunday – December 8th – from 12-4 pm.

Cathy Blum, who is in charge of putting the tour together said this:   “I just saw the best house I have ever seen in my 35 years of seeing tons of houses and my heart is 
still pounding.  It brought tears to my eyes like when you see an incredible 
work of art.  This is not a house to be missed.  It was a total renovation of 
a wonderful old Southampton home on the Boulevard and was loving in restored by 
the owner (a two year project).”

 

 

The house that Cathy Blum loves is located at 2241 Sunset Blvd. and +was totally renovated by Martha Baxter Finger and Blake Winston. 

 

Here’s a peek at what the house used to look like – beautiful, but in need of updating.  The brick was cleaned of the ivy and painted a trendy white.  A new fireplace becomes a focal point on the front façade.  Martha Baxter Finger is an interior designer working out of Houston.  Her own house was recently featured in Paper City Magazine.  Her house is a mix of mid century modern and fabulous antiques.

 

Here’s a look at her work, first her own house as seen in Paper City:

 

The living room is a mix of modern art and more traditional furnishings.  I love the green plaster walls and green silk curtains.  The French chairs are Jansen.  Baxter worked with architect Michael Landrum on remodeling the house.  Her husband had  owned it, but the house needed to be enlarged to make space for their blended family.  And while Baxter was used to living with beige, neutral colored interiors, her husband insisted on color in their newly designed home. 

 

The plaster walls continue into the dining room – furnished with a skirted table and a set of Jansen chairs. 

 

 

The entry staircase with the fabulous bronze railing.

 

 

 

The family room with fireplace and built in shelf. 

 

 

The family room – looking out towards the back.  A French table sits behind the sofa.

 

 

The office is painted dark – and has a beautiful antique desk that is juxtaposed against the more contemporary ceiling.

 

 

The powder room walls are mirrored.   Mercury glass sink.

 

 

Room off the kitchen features a sectional designed by Baxter.

 

 

The master bedroom brings more of the green in with the tufted velvet headboard and curtained canopy.

 

In the master bedroom there is a Mexican day bed in front of the window.

 

 

I love the master bathroom!  It was inspired by Jean Michael Frank.  The marble drawers are spectacular! Just gorgeous.

 

In addition to Baxter’s own house, this house is featured on Jeffrey Alan Mark’s web site – with the interiors credited by both Marks and Martha Baxter Finger.  The house is located in Austin, Texas.

 

The Austin, Texas house designed by both Jeffrey Marks and Martha Baxter.  The walls are gray stucco, covered in ivy. 

 

 

Beautiful property and landscaping.

 

Walking into the house – the floors are black Morocco styled tile, and the stair treads are also black tile.  Love the zebra against the black floors and stark white walls.

 

The entry is two story with a wood ceiling.  Fabulous space.

 

The living room is incredible!  Dark wood floors and ceiling with a large stone mantel, topped with carved wood.  The steel windows and door are fabulous.  Beautiful ceiling and oval window. Love the antique table against the windows.  Just beautiful.

 

The library with a large antique rug and fabulous stone fireplace.  I love how they painted the shelves black against the white walls.

 

Off the entry is the dining room with slipcovered chairs and dramatic wood table.

 

The kitchen is exotic with wire chairs and lanterns and wood floors and ceiling.  

 

 

The wine room is most fabulous – especially with the luxury of each chair having its own Hermes blanket. 

Seeing this house that Martha Baxter designed with Jeffrey Alan Marks and her house in Houston – makes me so excited to see the house she designed that is on the Cool Classics tour.  AND after hearing what Cathy Blum said about it – it sounds like this house will be the star of the tour.

To see the Austin house on Jeffrey Alan Marks’ web site, go HERE.

 

 

Another house on the tour is this one located at 2027 Bolsolver which was recently purchased by its current owners.  I had seen it when it was for sale and I’m excited to see what it looks like now.

 

Here is how it looked when it was sold – the house was so perfect, I can’t imagine it being improved on!

 

 

And then there is this house on the tour –located on Albans.   This is how it looked when it was sold several years ago.  It is located on Albans and has the distinction of being owned by Ginger Barber – many, many years ago!  This house was featured in several magazines, including Country Home and a now out of print Houston magazine.

Actually it was this house in 1994 that introduced Ginger to the public.  I remember being so in love with this house and studying every picture, every fabric, every accessory and trying to emulate her style – something I still do today, almost twenty years later! 

I found the old magazine from 1994 and scanned in some pictures of that house.  Many of you will probably recognize them.  It will be so interesting to tour this house, all these years later and see how it has been changed and remodeled over the years!  Here’s how it looked+-------------------------

+

all those years ago:

 

It’s so interesting to look back on how Ginger decorated all those years ago.  She used antiques and slipcovers back then, just as she does today.  Also, she used lots of English bamboo – like this antique hall tree.   The dining room is through the opening.  Of course there is a paisley shawl – a must have accessory back then.  And baskets.

 

 

 

The same view from a different magazine shows more of the dining room.   Surprisingly, the dining room is more contemporary than the Ginger of later times with its glass topped table.

 

 

This carving has stayed with Ginger through all her moves.  This was a great buy, something she has hung onto longer than most of her other possessions.

 

 

The living room had slipcovered furniture and an English cricket table.  Two wonderful wicker chairs sit in the front window.  This look is somewhat similar to her look today -  but this is much more cluttered.  Today, Ginger’s interiors are edited and toned down.  They aren’t nearly as busy as this room was.

 

In another magazine – you can see this English piece that Ginger has used in almost every house since.  It’s a great piece and she accessorized it with antiques and books.

 

 

Here’s a close up of the piece – back then.

 

 

The kitchen had terra cotta tile floors and a diamond patterned backsplash.  It will be interesting to see how the kitchen has been changed.  Of course – today Ginger’s styling is quieter.  But back then, the more cluttered the kitchen, the better!  Imagine photographs on a refrigerator shown in a magazine today!

 

 

The family room was added on – the pine mantel is so Ginger.  I still love the striped chair in the corner.

 

 

Wow - her son is now full grown!  Time flies.   The barley twist gate leg table is still a fabulous touch.  I wonder if Ginger has kept those lamps – but with white shades?

 

If you are in Houston this Sunday, be sure to take the Cool Classics Home Tour!