End of Week Pick Up: Georges Marciano

SELLER: Georges Marciano
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $24,500,000
SIZE: 19,590 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This one's for all the children out there who relish in a tetch of schadenfreude with their high-cost real estate scuttlebutt.

All the international property gossips' tongues have been wagging this week over the Beverly Hills (CA) estate of legally and financially embattled businessman Georges Marciano popping up on the open market as part of a bankruptcy sale with an asking price of $24,500,000.

Mister Marciano made the bulk of fortune as one of the co-founding brothers of the wildly successful Guess clothing company. He's the man most often credited with creating the company's iconic—and still-relevant if not fully fresh—boobs-and-bombshell-meets-noir-film advertising aesthetic that successfully branded the company in the 1980s with glamazon supermodels like Claudia Schiffer and Anna Nicole Smith.

He cashed out his nearly quarter-billion dollar stake in the company in 1993 and invested in various (commercial) real estate enterprises including the Bank of America tower in downtown Beverly Hills, sold in 2005 for about $135,000,000. He lived large and spent big. He shelled out more than sixteen million bucks on a 84-plus carat diamond (now called The Chloe Diamond after his daughter) and amassed a vast collection of contemporary art. The ubiquitous, roofless tour vans that put-put around the Platinum Triangle on every day of the week would frequently pause out front of the gates so gawkers could catch a glimpse through the gates of the fleet of Ferraris maintained by Mister Marciano and frequently lined up in an orderly row in the driveway in the front of his big ol' beast of a house in Beverly Hills he bought in October 1988 for an unknown (but no doubt substantial) amount of moolah.

Alas, the mighty sometimes fall. Sometimes they cut the noses off their own faces and sometimes, depending on one's point of view, they have their proverbial legs chopped off at the knees.

Several years ago, in the aftermath of a bitter 2004 divorce, an increasingly erratic Mister Marciano filed suit against a group of former employees whom he accused of looting money, wines and artwork. The suit back fired big time. Not only did forensic accounting not show any financial misconduct on the part of the former employees, the accused group counter sued for libel and won a staggering $425,000,000 judgement against Mister Marciano who shockingly and inexplicably made a silly run for the California governorship while all this was going down.

Mister Marciano, legally on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars, went on the lamb for a little bit. In a 2009 article in the L.A. Times Mister Marciano's spokeswoman claimed she herself did not know where he was living. He eventually popped up in Montreal where he opened a LHotel, a boutique hotel in Old Montreal filled to the rafters with the blue chip artwork that used to fill his Beverly Hills mansion.

Even before his ruinously costly legal imbroglio, Mister Marciano wanted to sell his grand, Italian-style pile in Beverly Hills. It was listed for six months in 2005 and again in January 2007 when it appeared on the open market with an asking price of $28,000,000.

In the early days of 2012 Your Mama heard through the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine the estate was being shopped off-market with a $32,000,000 price tag. With no takers at that sky-high price the property was officially put on the open market last week with a much lower price tag of $24,500,000. Listing information and previous reports on the matter reveal the property is being sold on behalf of Mister Marciano as part of involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings related to the aforementioned, nearly half billion dollar judgement.

Designed and built in 1927 by Robert D. Farquhar, the palatial palazzo has been home to a number of Hollywood hot shots including Showbiz pioneer Harry Cohn, the famously tyrannical co-founder of Columbia Pictures. Mister Cohn reportedly sold the estate to powerful Tinseltown talent agent Johnny Hyde who, while in his mid-70s, took a Svengali-like personal and professional interest in Marilyn Monroe.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, we were recently told by a Britnni Britannica, a gal pal with an encyclopedic knowledge of historical homes in Los Angeles, the grand mansion was owned by 1960s and 70s ears talk show host Mike Douglas who allowed the house to be photographed for Architectural Digest. Miss Britannica and another historically-minded gal pal Helen A. Hightower told also us the house itself—not the finishes and day-core but the architecture and layout—are almost identical to that of Owlwood, the legendary Holmby Hills mansion formerly owned by Tony Curtis and Cher and now owned by the widow of mortgage industry billionaire and diplomat Roland Arnall.

Current listing information shows Mister Marciano's estate spans 2.05 high-profile acres in an especially desirable pocket of Beverly Hills where, should one choose, it's just a short one (long) block walk to Your Mama's favorite (if hideously expensive) luncheon spot in Los Angeles, The Beverly Hills Hotel.

 Listing information shows the fairly well monumental mansion measures a massive but not-quite-mega 19,590 square feet with 7 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms. The master bedroom alone has a paneled sitting room (with fireplace and high gloss ebonized wood floors, shown above), over-sized bedroom, private study and his and her bathrooms. Other interior spaces include an entrance hall with high-gloss black and white checkerboard marble floor, a double-height foyer wrapped with a star-style staircase, formal living and dining rooms, paneled library, billiard/game room, a room for playing cards, family room, two kitchens and—natch—a screening room.  

The extensive, fully-landscaped grounds and gardens have various terraces and balconies, pathways and wide stone staircases that join the multi-level backyard areas that include a vast, sloping lawn; double-gated stone-driveway and motor court; swimming pool and spa with convenient cabana; sunken tennis court with viewing pavilion; and two guest houses accessible through their own, separate, gated motor court.

A very few minutes research on the interweb turned up easily accessible public records that indicate Mister Marciano's currently for sale estate may not be the only Beverly Hills mansion he owns. In June 2005 a limited liability company directly linked to (but not necessarily controlled by) Mister Marciano paid $7,475,000 to acquire a gated, 1.19 acre Sunset Boulevard estate with an 8,000-plus square foot mansion, swimming pool, tennis court and extensive gardens.

Just about two years before that a limited liability company also directly linked to (but not necessarily controlled by) Mister Marciano paid $6,500,000 for the 1.44 acre, triple-gated Sunset Boulevard estate immediately next door. That property has an even bigger 11,000-plus square foot, L-shaped residence with 9 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, a swimming pool, pool cabana, and tennis court. Your Mama has been told a bazillion times that rapper turned mogul Fifty Cent used to lease the estate but we can't really vouch for the truth of that rumor.

Mister Marciano remains in a pitched legal battle to hang on to whatever assets he can, including property and possessions seized in Canada as a result of the California court order. We're not sure what constitutes winning or losing in a situation like this but in February of this year a Canadian court ruled to hold a number of his assets seized in Canada for "safekeeping" until "the high court rules on the validity of a massive seizure of Marciano assets in Montreal to conform to a California court order."

With the number of high-priced residential real estate sales in high gear it's probably a good time to sell the property at a decent price. Then again, Your Mama don't know a this from a that so we'll leave the sale price speculations to the professionals and the otherwise opinioned. 

listing photos: Nick Springett for Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills North

Lady Antebellum's Dave Haywood Buys and Buys Again

BUYER: Dave Haywood
LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $2,100,000
SIZE: 6,750 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last week we picked apart the recent real estate activities of Lady Antebellum lead singer Charles Kelley who recently upgraded his living situation in Nashville, TN. Now comes word, via The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial that another of pop-country phenom's three co-founding members has also been in the mood to snatch up some star-style NashVegas real estate.

In early February 2011 frequently touring Mister Haywood paid $329,000 for a modest and low-maintenance condo in a fairly new mixed-used complex located in the burgeoning shopping and dining mecca in downtown Nashville called The Gulch.

Listing information Your Mama coaxed up out of the dark underbelly of the interweb shows the mid-floor, tower unit has 1 bedroom (plus den) and 1 bathroom in a fairly compact 942(ish) square feet of interior space. Listing photos from the time of the sale show polished concrete floors throughout; a stacked washer and dryer; an unexpectedly large closet/dressing room; and an open plan living/dining/kitchen with long wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors that open to a balcony just about big enough for two or three people to stand around, shoot the shit and smoke.

Half a year after Mister Haywood signed all the necessary documents to acquire his compact condo in The Gulch he went and got himself engaged to a music industry executive gal pal he'd been friendly with for about five years, so the story goes. They were married in mid-April 2012, just about six weeks after he/they dropped $2,100,000 on a much larger, family-type spread on a quiet cul-de-sac in leafy Belle Meade, TN, an upscale community southwest of downtown Nashville.

Belle Meade is a quiet place—we understand from well-heeled locals—but it certainly claims its fair share of high-profile homeowners who include Nashville native turned Tinseltown queen Reese Witherspoon; 80s lady K.T. Oslin; former vice president and climate change advocate Al Gore; country couple Vince Gill and Amy Grant; HCA heir and former Republican Senator Bill Frist; and King of Leon's Jared Followill, just to name a few.

Listing information shows Mister and Missus Haywood's new, French-ish, kinda-Tudor-style mansion was built in 2002, sits on a shy, mostly landscaped acre and has 6,750 square feet spread out over three floors with a total of 4-5 bedrooms and 6 full and 2 half bathrooms.

A curving driveway sweeps past a two-car parking pad at the front of the mansion and curls down and back around to a small, lower level motor court at the side of the house with attached two-car garage. A short set of stone steps an a brief walk across an elevated, stone terrace leads to the front door discreetly tucked into a shallow porch at a crook in the tepidly baronial, taupe stucco structure.

The mansion's main public spaces orbit around the wood-floored center foyer and adjoining stair hall. The formal living room has a carved stone fireplace and two walls of floor-to-ceiling built-in book cases while the formal dining room has a uniform row of three very narrow, arched windows that open to the aforementioned front terrace. A more casual, double-height Great Room—we hate that term but that's what it's called in listing information—has a second fireplace with carved wood mantelpiece and wide bank of multi-mullioned windows that extend almost all the way to the floor and provide an elevated view over the back yard that slopes gently down and away from the house towards a thick stand of trees.

Both the dining room and the (so-called) Great Room have direct access to the spacious, cook-, party- and family-friendly center island eat-in kitchen outfitted with antiqued white cabinets; glass-fronted uppers, some sort of expensive-looking, stone counter top material; two-stool snack bar; warming drawers, ice makers and all the other accoutrement customarily found in a luxuriously equipped multi-million dollar mansion's kitchen; and a wide, semi-circular breakfast area lined with windows that overlook the backyard.

Two guest/family bedrooms with separate en suite facilities on the second floor share shared den and game room convertible to bedroom. Double doors in the formal living room connect to the main-floor master suite appointed with nearly identical his and her bathrooms and a fourth bedroom on the lower level has a private attached bathroom and direct access to the backyard. There's also a second den (with third fireplace) on the lower level that opens through a pair of French doors to a wide stone terrace that extends off the full-width of the back of the house.

Stone steps descend from the stone entertainment terrace to a grassy lower terrace with pergola structure off to one side. A few more steps lead down to a lightly tree-dotted and slightly sloped soccer pitch-sized grass patch ringed by a thicket of mature trees.

Now, children, have some sense and recognize the listing photos show the house decorated by the seller and does not (necessarily) reflect the decorative taste(s) of Mister and/or Missus Haywood.

The boys from the band aren't the only ones who have (fairly) recently bought properties. Turns out in late 2010 the lead lady in Lady Antebellum—that would be Hillary Scott who recently hitched her romance wagon to Love and Theft drummer Chris Tyrell—spent $725,000 to buy a relatively humble, completely renovated and expanded 4 bedroom and 3.5 bathroom bungalow with loft-like open plan interiors in Nashville's West End neighborhood.

listing photos: Showcase Photographers for Worth Properties

Afternoon Tidbit: Oprah Winfrey

Real estate reporter (and former celebrity property gossip) Bob Goldsborough at The Chicago Tribune revealed today in his Elite Street column that daytime chat show hostess and media mogul Oprah Winfrey has put one of her Chicago condominiums up for sale with a $2,800,000 price tag.

Not only did Miz Winfrey pay $5,600,000 for the full-floor, lake-view spread in Chicago's upscale Streeterville 'hood in 2006, she never even moved in, put it out for lease last year at fifteen grand a month and now she's willing to take a multi-million dollar loss just to get rid of the damn thing.

The new and current price means that even if someone comes along and pays the billionairess the full $2,800,000 asking price, she's still facing a $2,800,000 loss not counting carrying costs, taxes, maintenance charges and real estate fees. Not that she can't afford such a loss, but still a multi-million dollar loss is a mulit-million dollar loss even if it is just couch-cushion change for a billionaire like Miz Winfrey.

Your Mama has dissed and discussed the 13-room sprawler that spreads out over 4,607 square feet on the sixth floor of a beauteous Beaux Arts building. Iffin yer innerested in our thoughts about the apartment you can go here (with photographs and floor plan) and/or here and/or here.

Miz Winfrey has long-owned a multi-unit combination duplex atop Water Tower Place in Chicago but since her television network (OWN) is headquartered in Los Angeles she accordingly spends more and more of her time farther west at The Promised Land, her 40-acre estate in Montecito (CA) and her farm in Hawaii.

Your Mama imagines if the lady can indeed make this network of hers work for the long haul she'll snatch up a private and pricey bolt hole in Los Angeles where she can stay when she doesn't feel like shacking up in a 5-star hotel or commuting back and forth to The Promised Land via chauffeured car or helicopter. We shall see, kittens, we shall see.

listing photo:

Joan Collins Re-Lists Manhattan Pied-a-Terre

SELLER: Joan Collins
LOCATON: New York City, NY
PRICE: $2,200,000
SIZE: 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Today, dontchyall know, is the 79th birthday of still-globe-trotting actress, author and Showbiz icon Joan Collins. In honor of her birthday—and belatedly for her 2010 award-winning, star turn in the short film FETISH—Your Mama thought we'd take a quick look see at the New York City pied-a-terre she recently put back on the market with an asking price of $2,200,000.

Miz Collins—often carefully painted up like a geisha or like no body's bizness, depending on one's point of view of these things—has been successfully shakin' her classically-trained money maker on stages, screens and tee-vees since the early 1950s. Although quite capable of nuanced character portrayal Miz Collins is arguably and may forever be most famous for her long-running boob-toob role as the filthy rich, Nat Sherman-smoking, one-dimensional villainess Alexis Colby on the iconically campy tee-vee program Dynasty.

The wildly successful night time soap story ran throughout the 1980s when women of a certain upper class and status dripped with diamonds at all times of day, wore shoulder padded and waist-nipping power suits that gave them imposing silhouettes, and lacquered their bubbled hair into armor-like helmets capable of deflecting even the sharpest of underhanded compliments from the other lunching ladies. Her character Alexis Colby—and to a certain extent she herself in real life (as well as her less-couth sister Jackie)—exemplified this sartorial trend that took on and whole-heartedly embraced a very artificial-looking notion of what constitutes chic-ness and glamor for jet-setting socialites.

Anyhoo, this is not, celebrity real estate aficionados may recall, the first time at the New York City real estate rodeo for Miz Collins who was born and bred in England but has been a citizen of the world with four far-flung residences. In May 2011 The Daily Mail quoted an article in Hello! magazine in which Miz Collins is quoted saying, "Many people have said to us, 'how on earth can you afford to keep four homes?' And the fact is, in this day and age, we can't." Now children. Use your noggins and don't jump to ugly conclusions about Miz Collins financial affairs. Just because Diva told Hello! she can no longer afford to keep four multi-million dollar private residences around the world doesn't mean she can't well afford to keep three. Okay?

The high-gloss septuagenarian—who emphatically claimed in mid-2010 in she hadn't fallen down vanity's slippery slope of Botox or plastic surgery—has had her Midtown Manhattan pied-a-terre on the market on and off for both lease and sale at a variety of different prices since 2008 when it first popped up for rent at $15,000 per month. The price was quickly lowered to $12,000 and 5 or six weeks later dropped again to $10,000.

In March 2011 her three-unit, three-exposure, combo co-operative at The Dorchester—a mid-rise, white-brick, post-war wart of a building just two blocks from Tiffany's flag ship shop on Fifth Avenue—was put up for sale at $2,895,000. Alas, no takers even though the price was repeatedly chipped away at until February 2012 when it was $2,200,000 and taken off the market.

In late 2011 Miz Collins and her real estates team went a little creative with their real estate efforts and offered her already combined crib as a package with the almost 2,000 square foot apartment next door, a two-unit combo owned by someone else. The opening asking price for the whole kit-'n'-kaboodle was $4,775,000, a number that fell to $3,950,000 before it dropped off the market in late March 2012.

That's all a long way around to mid-April (2012) when Miz Collins re-listed her unwanted Manhattan roost with a familiar asking price of $2,200,000. Listing information (and the floor plan included with it, below) shows the approximately 2,200 square foot apartment has separate but adjoining living and dining rooms with over-sized windows; a puny, windowless kitchen stuck in the middle of the apartment; two, well-separated bedrooms plus a den convertible to a third; and 3 compact bathrooms, only one of which has an actual window.

Current listing information, which identifies Miz Collins as the owner, describes the apartment as "a soignée sanctuary high above the city's frenetic din." First of all, it's on the 8th floor and anyone who has ever lived in New York City knows you're hardly above the city's "din" on the 8th floor and in Midtown the 8th floor is unlikely to provide much in the way of a city view. Secondly, it's just not soignée, at least not as shown in listing photographs. Sure, the dining room is spacious and some of Miz Collin's things have a downtown-ish and once-again trendily au courant 1980s sleekness but the apartment itself is a fairly-ordinary and painfully featureless post-war snoozer with a slightly gawky layout—check out the confusing O-shaped entry hall—at least three different wood floor patterns and a lot of mirrored surfaces that unfortunately only reflect the numerous featureless features of the apartment.

The "formal" living room—shown furnished in listing photographs with a spare and vexing collection of comestibles that, along with other eye-crossing choices, include a zebra-stripe sofa and foot stool—connects through an extra-wide opening to the "formal" dining room where one entire, long wall is mirrored from the baseboard to almost the ceiling.

The NY Daily News ran additional photos of the Miz Collins's apartment that show a black lacquer and mirrored pedestal with a too cliché orchid on top standing against the wall in the corridor just outside the clean-looking but decidedly-dated, all-white galley kitchen fitted with—you got it—a mirrored back splash.

Behind the dining room a long, narrow den—convertible to a bedroom—doesn't appear in listing photos to have a single mirror but does have tomato red paint on the walls, white paint on the ceiling and a complete wall of built-in bookshelves with entertainment center.

In the master bedroom, Miz Collins (and her nice-gay or lady decorator) swapped the mirror motif for a sea of matching toile-like fabric used to create custom bed dressings, wall coverings and curtain swaggery. The lacquered white dressing table (with tilting mirror), side tables and credenza-thing are, quite simply, unspeakable.

The window-free master bathroom was, not surprisingly, given a glitzy, Art Deco decorative over-note with fully-mirrored cabinetry and walls mirrored from about the waist up that run just about all the way around the tiny room. This is a fun house-y space that could far-too-easily turn into a house of infinitely-reflected horrors with a single naked person brushing his teeth or trimming her nose hairs. Think about that next time you consider installing wrap-around mirrors in your bathroom.

Listing information shows Miz Collin's New York apartment carries monthly common charges of $2,915 that add to the pet-friendly building's community pot that pays for the white-glove services that include full-time doormen, concierge, package-room people and laundry facilities. Although we can't confirm Your Mama imagines the housekeeping services provided by the building cost extra.

Miz Collins and her much (much) younger theater producer fifth husband Percy Gibson maintain three other residences including a 3 bedroom and 3 bathroom, high-floor condo at the star-studded Sierra Towers building in Los Angeles purchased in December 2007 for $2,700,000.

Mister and Missus Collins-Gibson also keep a secluded villa high in the mountains of La Croix-Valmer, not so far from the impossibly haute (and kinda vulgar) yachting stop of St. Tropez in the south of France, as well as a sizable flat in London's uppity Belgravia area. A kindly gent we'll call Tom Collins—no relation to Miz Collins—helpfully pointed us in to multi-page article from 2010 in—surprise!—Hello! magazine chock full of photos of the centrally-located London apartment she's owned 20 (or so years). Your Mama might label the day-core as an elegant example of nouveau landed gentry meets Tinseltown and she herself described it as, "cosy," and "traditional English, but with a touch of 18th-century French." Y'all can call it what you will.

listing photos and floor plan: Core