Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Chelsea Handler Leases Modern Manse

Ever since late July (2010) when sassy and sarcastic comedienne Chelsea Handler went on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno program and he gifted her with a small horse for her new house in Los Angeles Your Mama has been inundated with queries about Miz Handler's new digs

Razor tongued Miz Handler, who kept her pikachu private on the December 2009 cover of Playboy, has been in the Hollywood shuffle since the early 2000s when she appeared on the Oxygen network's Girls Behaving Badly, a hidden camera prank show not so different than Punked, only funny. In the early 2000s she had a short-lived comedy sketch program on the USA network called The Chelsea Handler Show that was conveniently canceled in 2006, right about the time she hooked up with Ted Harbert. Mister Harbert happens to be the president and CEO of Comcast, the media juggernaut that owns E!, the network that airs Chelsea Lately, her current tee-vee gig on which she as the ho-stess and her posse of comedian pals poke fun at the silly things celebrities and other less glittery people sometimes do and say. Your Mama ain't saying the ladee slept her way to the top–if Chelsea Lately can even be considered "the top"–because we happen to think she's earned her place in the Tinseltown heap with her wicked, wacky, sharp-sharp-sharp, humorously hostile, and snarky almost to the point of being bitter ways.

Although Mister Harbert has an impressive spread that backs up to Will Rogers State Park in a rustic part of posh Pacific Palisades, CA, back in November of 2008, the couple paid $3,700,000 for a penthouse pad with panoramic Pacific Ocean views at the Azzurra complex in Marina del Rey, CA. Sometime in early 2010–or in late 2009 depending on who you ask or what you read–Miz Handler and Mister Harbert's relationship swirled down the terlit of love. Not long after splitting with her boss, horny Miz Handler hooked up briefly with a rather studly and well-formed Canadian animal handler and television star named Dave Salmoni and she may or may not currently be gettin' bizzy with rich, rich, rich and bullet hole riddled rapper 50 Cent.

Property records, via Property Shark, show that in May of 2010 Mister Harbert bought out Miz Handler's share of their 3,319 square foot former love nest penthouse in Marina del Rey for $1,147,000. This was right about the time, according to our always well informed snitch Lucy Spillerguts who confirmed a tip and query from the bizzy boys at Celebrity Address Aerial, that Miz Handler packed up her high heels and whoopie cushions and high-tailed it to a very contemporary and trés expensive mini-estate she leased in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles.

Listing information Your Mama scared out of the interweb indicates that Miz Handler shells out $35,000 per month to lease the fully furnished, walled, gated, and private property that includes a single story main house that measures 5,323 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 6 poopers. A separate guesthouse/art studio/gym at the rear of the property has double height ceilings and is where, Your Mama presumes, the lesbians roommates that Miz Handler is always talking about on the boob-toob shack up.

The exteriors of the house, designed by Los Angeles architect Marc Whipple and painted a variety of shades of dusty brick and burnt orange, presents itself as thoughtful and well considered collection of cubed masses interlocked with variously sized volumes perforated and punctuated by large expanses of glass and orderly rows of small square and narrow vertical rectangular shaped windows. Altogether it looks to Your Mama like a kind of contemporary take on a southwestern adobe inspired by the soo-blime Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta and mixed generously with a more extroverted version of the puzzle-like architectural magic created by late-great Mexican master architect Luis Barragán. This is not going to be every one's cup of architectural or residential tea, but Your Mama just loves it...not the day-core so much, but the building itself and the heavenly landscaping.

Listing information shows the modern manse has a total of five fireplaces including one in the airy "formal" living room where rows of small evenly spaced square windows where the walls meet the ceiling gives the room a somewhat strange but not unpleasant crenelation reminiscent of a castle. The main living space is a gigantic open plan kitchen/dining/family room with hardwood floors, huge expanses of glass, a variety of ceiling heights, and antique looking wood-framed doors that open to the back yard. Other luxe amenities in Miz Handler's temporary hideaway, according to listing information, include a projection room, sauna, and wine cellar.

A gigantic, bullet shaped swimming pool butts right up against part of the back of the house where tall wood framed doors open to allow someone to step into the pool directly from the dining room area. Although we think she might be fibbing about it, Miz Handler has talked on her tee-vee program how she has pool parties that get loud and out of hand resulting in guests fornicating in the bushes and neighbors getting 12 kinds of pissed off about the late-night racket.

Past the swimming pool–that actually has a rare diving board–and beyond a series of thick vertical posts and a wedge-shaped wall that disappears into the ground, sits the guesthouse/art studio/gym as well as the stables and tack room where, we imagine, the horse Mister Leno gave Miz Handler now lives although we find it difficult, nay impossible, to fathom Miz Handler actually straddling and riding a horse of that sort. The backyard grounds also include a built-in barbecue, a dining terrace with built-in seating shaded by pergola draped and woven with a thick carpet of vines, and a circular built-in fire pit surrounded by a circular trough of grey stones that's surrounded by a built-in circular concrete bench, a shape replicated in a dry garden of concentric circles in the front yard, .

The home was built in 1998 for a super successful commercial director and his artist/sommelier wife who, in addition to their home in Brentwood that they've leased to Miz Handler and according to property records, also own a home on the canals in Venice–Venice, CA–that they bought in the spring of 2010 for $2,775,000 from actress Jennifer Grant, the only daughter produced by the short May-December marriage of whackadoodle ack-tress Dyan Cannon and suave actor Cary Grant. The couple and their two horse loving daughters also, according to information sussed out of the internets, own a home in Italy.

Your Mama suspects Miz Handler will stay here put until she purchases a celebrity-worthy crib of her very own.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker Architectural Division

11 comments:

Lilithcat said...

Is that a gym, or a medieval torture chamber?

Anonymous said...

very cool house for a very cool lady!

Madam Pince said...

As Miss Chelsea would say, "I like it. I like it a lot." But I do agree with Lilith that the gym looks like something out of the Spanish Inquisition.

Anonymous said...

She's recently said on the show she "bought" a house. I don't think it's this one.

Jeannified said...

Yeah...that gym. I agree.

I DO like the house overall, though.

About the owners...are they the ones who make those commercials, where the husband looks somewhat like Gerard Depardeau? I can't remember what the commercials were for, unless it was for high-end appliances, like Viking or something liek that. However, I always admired the house in the commercials and wondered who those people were. They definitely seemed like a "real" family, and not just actors in a commercial.

lil' gay boy said...

"...actually straddling and riding a horse of that sort."

Oh what one could do with that phrase...

This particular architectural vernacular is rigorously rectilinear, relieved only by the juxtaposition of the curves of the pool, a rather naïve reflex; but as is typical of this style of home the result is either a successful composition or a study in bland geometry.

I too see the southwest influence in the design; at first glance it appears that it would be better suited for a desert lot with plenty of xeriscaping. This is one home, despite its siting in a carpet of green, that works well. It would have been all too easy (IMHO) to tip the scales over into a kind of mundane, high-rise effect; a penthouse on the ground floor, as it were.

The decor compliments the architecture and its palette allows the design to dominate.

As for the gym ––– who is her personal trainer; Torquemada?

Anonymous said...

1. she never was naked in playboy so she exposed nothing.
2. like someone said, she has bought a new house and this is not it. this is the place she moved out of just recently.

Aunt Gina said...

no real comment here, but my verifyin' word is "psyco" and I couldn't pass that up now could I?

Michael McCoy said...

I watch her show every night and follow her on Twitter. She has been posting photos of parties with staff members held at that house for months. She did announce on her show that she was a homeowner. Could you please find some info on her new house purchase?

Anonymous said...

I can't fathom staring at a conrete wall while on the treadmill.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.