Tuesday, December 3, 2013

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

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

He will be able to stare at the billboard with his face on it just below this house on Sunset.

lil' gay boy said...

Oh my . . . modern porn at work.

Paul McClean displays quite the deft hand at evoking the MCMs of the Bird Street without resorting to unctuous imitation. It's also refreshing to see that his website demonstrates that this Bird Street gem is not a one off.

Could have been a very pricey icebox but the execution is superb; (the up-swept sculpture is a personal fave). One can almost forget it tenuous perch on a precarious slope, cheek-by-jowl with its neighbors. Yet without any direct (or indirect, for that matter) references, the siting strikes me as rather evocative of an Italian or Grecian hillside home.

lil' gay boy said...

Streets, damn it, Streets...

Anonymous said...

Monday without Mama was gornisht u'bupkes (nothing and less than nothing)!

Paul McLean has designed another crisp and austere modern home with magnificent siting skill. Ryan Brown, per his web site, consistently creates warm and comfortable interiors, even if extraneously accessorized with ubiquitous orchids.

The Rabbi's musical club mix includes Sunrise/Sunset, sung by Zero Mostel, Hava Nagilah, a Connie Francis version, and Tumbalalaika, the Barry Sisters rendition. Hear her lay down the beat at Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel!

Rabbi Hedda LaCasa

Anonymous said...

Looks like the perfect place to OD on coke.

Anonymous said...

What on Earth does a 23y/o boy need a high maintenance house like this for? Investment?
I hope whatever the final price was, that the furnishings were included. More power to him.
As Kathy Griffin once quipped, when did DJs start having 401K plans and health insurance? At 23y/o, with hopefully a long life ahead, I pray the coins keep a coming for him and his family.

Unknown said...

Wow, it's very nice. the life is really excellent in Hollywood hills.
in my country, Vietnam, some building is very cheap in capital and resolve amount of demand, it's only 20,000$ for a flat in central, example:
Chung cư Kim Văn Kim Lũ or Chung cư Đại Thanh

Sandpiper said...

In my dreams.

Anonymous said...

I am shocked Mathew Perry didnt buy this ...like she needs another house! And the Marliyn over the bed is from Ikea. Ryan..shame shame. Otherwise a cool pad

Anonymous said...

Part 2...Oh, and I would bet my long body b*tches (if I had some) & (if I was a betting person, which I am), that the Oracle Girl bird street sale, triggered this sale.

lil' gay boy said...

Tower Grove = GHETTO,

I agree with your assessment of what he did to the Montalban Residence -- absolutely criminal. Ricardio Legorreta was a unique & distinctive architect, and McClean definitely should have left well enough alone (even FLLW wasn't a genius every damn time, and McClean is no FLLW).

But I have to remind myself the Montalban Residence was a remodel, and perhaps(no doubt) McClean's ego got the best of him; from what I've seen of his other compositions, despite their strong familial theme, I like.