WHAT: A new lease on a huge house
WHERE: Lake Sherwood/Thousand Oaks, CA
HOW MUCH: $15,900 per month
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In case any of y'all somehow missed it all the tabs and on the blogs the last few months, Tinseltown royal turned reality tee-vee queen Tori Spelling has another bun in her oven, her fourth in five years. And what, my pretty ponies, frequently happens when a rich and/or famous person has a baby? That's right, they move house.
Case in point, earlier this week celebrity property gossips went hog wild with the news that preggers-again Miz Spelling and second husband Dean McDermott flipped the Malibu, CA residence they bought last September (2011) for $2,400,000 back on the market with an asking price of $2,675,000.
Listing broker (and Bravolebrity) Madison Hildebrand told the property gossip gals at The Wall Street Journal Tori & Dean, bought the 1.73 acre spread on Malibu's Point Dume "with every intention of staying." They added organic gardens, built a chicken coop, put in corral for a miniature horse, and installed expensive and utterly soo-blime 100-year old French oak floors. A miniature horse!?! For real?
Alas, they did not, it seems, plan to become impregnated with a fourth child and with just 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms (plus a vintage, single-wide mobile home guesthouse), there isn't room for a wealthy family of six used to living in much more sizable residential circumstances. Miz Spelling grew up, as we all know, in a grotesquely gargantuan mansion in the hoity-toity Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles—her momma Candy sold The Manor last year for $85 million to pampered 22-year old Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone—and the Spelling-McDermotts moved to their petite pad in Malibu from a nearly 7,000 square foot faux-Tuscan mansion in ur-suburban Encino with 6 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms they bought in October 2008 for $2,945,000 and sold last December (2011) for $2,500,000.
Anyhoodles poodles, current listing photos for the comparatively diminutive Spelling-McDermott digs in Malibu show the residence completely devoid of furnishings. Obviously, the couple and their growing gaggle of offspring have already moved but where, oh where, did the Spelling-McDermott clan go the children might wonder?
Well, puppies Your Mama learned yesterday from our impossibly knowledgeable amiga Lucy Spillerguts that the Spelling-McDermotts hightailed it from Point Dume over the mountains to the ex-urban community of Thousand Oaks, CA where they leased a sprawling mansion behind the guarded gates of the swanky Sherwood Country Club. We're not privy to what amount the Spelling-McDermotts agreed to shell out each month to rent the privately situated estate but evidence we conjured and cajoled out of the interweb reveals it was available for lease at $15,900 per month. The property had also been listed for sale as recently as April 2012 with a price tag of $4,995,000, reduced from $5,495,000.
Listing information we teased up out of the internets reveals the single-story, multi-winged mansion, an brick and stucco pastiche of unknowable (and unholy) architectural inspiration, sits on an elevated 2.45 acre lot accessed by a long and wide winding driveway equipped with not just one but two remote-controlled gates. Most online listings show the bulky behemoth measures 9,189 while the Ventura County Tax Man indicates it's slightly smaller at 8,739 square feet. Either way, it's humongous and at least three times the size of their little house in Malibu.
Some of the interior spaces, according to listing information we perused, have been recently remodeled and the house includes 6 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms, a count that may or may not include any sleeping and/or terliting facilities in the detached pool/guesthouse that includes a substantial (and partially subterranean) lower level suitable for and convertible to an indoor roller skating rink, batting cage, bowling alley, fitness facility, a recording studio or live-in domestic quarters.
The expansive grounds include a circular motor court with a truly upsetting and unnecessary porte cochere supported by a quartet of columns meant to fancy the place up, a front-facing four-bay garage with room for five cars, manicured lawns, and a resort-style swimming pool and spa area with wide entertaining/dining/sunbathing patios and long views over the unnaturally green golf course, Lake Sherwood and the rugged peaks of surrounding Santa Monica Mountains.
Miz Spelling and Mister McDermott's do not lack for other high-profile neighbors they can invite over for a celebrities-only barbecue. Hockey hunk Wayne Gretzy (who sold his 12,000-plus square foot pile to Lenny Dykstra who tried to sell it for $25 million but eventually lost it down the gaping gullet of foreclosure) still owns a house in the 'hood as does tennis ace Pete Sampras (who custom built a contemporary compound in the community currently listed at $19,950,000), crooner Paul Anka, rocker Tom Petty. Pop superstar Britney Spears recently moved to the upscale enclave where she leases a substantial mansion on an elevated lot with views over the golf course, lake and mountains.
Unfortunately property records are a bit fuzzy—or maybe it's just the gin & tonic we drank for breakfast—but real estate listing aggregator Redfin shows the estate was sold to a non-celebrity couple in March 2010 for $2,700,000 by a non-celebrity woman who, innerestingly, bought it in March 2007 for $5,600,000.
aerial photo: Bing
listing photos: RE/MAX Olson & Associates via Orange County Real Estate