Screenwriter Kevin Williamson Sells Hollywood Hills Home

SELLER: Kevin Williamson
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,715,000
SIZE: 5,140 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: After just four months and a starting asking price of $3,950,000, film and television writer/producer Kevin Williamson has unloaded his boxy, glass and white stucco contemporary crib in L.A.'s Hollywood Hills for $3,715,000.

Mister Williamson, best known as the screenwriter and (executive) producer of the wildly successful Scream film franchise as well as a number of money-minting television programs that include the long-ago canceled Dawson's Creek and currently on the air The Vampire Diaries, acquired the Hollywood Hills residence in December 2003 for $3,100,000

Property records indicated Mister Williamson sold his house to a single man with the exact same name as a professional basketball player who dribbles and shoots (and whatever) for the Indiana Pacers but we're not sure if that's really who bought the house or if it's just someone with an identical name. Stranger things have happened.

Listing information shows the two-story residence, situated on a quiet hillside road near the top of Runyon Canyon and composed of a series of interconnected planes and volumes, sits on a thickly treed .65 hillside acre lot, was originally built in 1990, measures 5,140 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms.

Wide slabs of concrete descend gently down a narrow strip of unnaturally green grass from the (un-gated) motor court with three-car garage and two-car carport to a locked and gated courtyard entrance. A sky lit entry steps down to the open-plan and bi-winged "formal" living areas with high-gloss wood floors (that look like but may or may not be mahogany), minimal architectural detailing, and wide expanses of windows and sliders that open to a terrace that floats over the canyon with sky-high city, canyon and mountain views.

The sky lit and expensive-looking center island kitchen comes off a little Arts and Crafts-y compared to the lacquered sheen of most of the rest of the residence but is well-equipped with some sort of solid surface counter top, cabinetry custom-fashioned from what appears to be some sort of nearly exotic wood, a walk-in pantry, and the full complement of high-grade stainless steel appliances including side-by-side fridge and freezer that all by themselves, we guesstimate, cost far more than the Yolanda the cleaning lady's Kia Rio.

A few steps down from the kitchen the family room has vast windows, a high ceiling, and an inset wide-screen tee-vee mounted above the massive, beveled fireplace. There's also a state-of-the-art screening room with an adjoining wet bar, a cozy library with fireplace flanked by open display shelves, built-in book cases with glass doors, and lofty ceilings.

The master suite offers a separate, private office with a wall of built-in bookshelves, a good-sized bedroom ringed on two sides with floor-to-ceiling windows and glass sliders that connect to a narrow terrace, a gigantic custom-fitted walk-in closet with center island dresser, and a large and luxurious yet perfectly ordinary-looking bathroom with double vanity, separate shower and jetted soaking tub, dressing area, and private cubby for the crapper.

Recreational amenities include a stone-floored and mirror-walled fitness room with sauna—if torturing one's body into physical submission can be considered a recreation—and a trapezoidal concrete sunbathing and dining terrace with sweeping mountain view over the canyon that falls away below the house. A swimming pool and spa bisects the terrace, a chunky ramada nestled into the tree line provides a respite from the relentless SoCal sunshine, and an interior poolside kitchenette with dishwasher is perfect for mixing up summertime pitchers of gin & tonic.

Other Showbiz types living up in the same twisted neck of the Hollywood Hills near the tippy-top of dog- and celeb-friendly Runyon Canyon include über-artist David Hockney, actress (and soon-to-be UCLA student) Justine Batemen (Desperate Housewives, Family Ties), Jay Leno's bandleader Rickey Minor (who bought Katey Sagal's house in late 2010), Oscar winning movie maker Quentin Tarantino, and Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain and the way better Donny Darko) who, as far as Your Mama knows, remains privately ensconced in the gated and  mini-estate around the corner he's leased for years.

Of course, Your Mama don't know a donut from a doughnut, so we can't be sure to where Mister Williamson decamped but we do find evidence in the property records he coughed up $2,400,000 in July 2011 for a walled and gated, 4,660 square foot mock-Med mini-mansion just off Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, CA.

listing photos: Val Riolo for Coldwell Banker / Sunset Boulevard

Mark Pincus Picks Up Posh Pacific Heights Pad

BUYER: Mark Pincus
LOCATION: San Francisco, CA
PRICE: $11,500,000
SIZE: 11,500 square feet (approx.),

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The stock price of social media game developer Zynga (CityVille, FarmVille, CastleVille, and etc.) may be plummeting at an alarming rate but its iconoclast tech-tycoon founder Mark Pincus is clearly rolling in financial clover as evidenced by his recent, $16,000,000 purchase of a rather massive mansion in San Francisco's ultra-posh Pacific Heights 'hood.

The essentially symmetrical, red brick and grey shingled Dutch Colonial Revival residence sits down a long, private and gated driveway on an elevated 14,000 (or so) square foot lot in an area of Pacific Heights known as the Gold Coast, so called because it's extra fancy even for fancy pants Pac Heights. The front of the house, with a suburban 7-11 parking lot-sized motor court, is all but hidden from the street while the back of the house sits high and proud with commanding bridge, bay and city views.

Marketing materials Your Mama teased up out of the internets indicates the four-floor mansion was designed and built in 1907 by noted Bay Area architect Albert Farr and originally owned by entrepreneurial businessman Edwin W. Newhall whose family has owned it for more than a century. Mister Newhall had a debilitating stroke in 1914, at which time the awkwardly located elevator was installed, and went to meet his maker in 1915. The property passed to his widow Virginia who eventually bequeathed the behemoth house to their son Edwin Newhall Jr. (and his wife) who in turn turned the house over to their only daughter Jane who occupied the premises until her death in summer 2011 at the ripe old age of 97.

The impressive (if woody) interiors spaces retain much of their original architectural details such as wood paneled walls, herringbone pattern wood floors, exposed beam ceilings, six red brick fireplaces, period light fixtures, and diamond-paned windows.

The mansion also adheres largely to its original floor plan which, while spacious and grand, has a few uncomfortable moments not conducive to modern living. The children will note, as did our eagle-eyed house gurl Svetlana, the fairly compact, galley style main floor kitchen that Your Mama imagines may (or may not) have originally been a service pantry.

The larger, original (and adjacent pantry and "Food Prep Room") is located on the lower level and connected to the upper level kitchen via a switchback service stair that continues to climb all the way up to the (unfinished) attic. A kitchen on the lower, service level was probably a fairly standard set up in the homes of the wealthy in 1907 when residents would have maintained a small army of domestic staff to attend to their cooking and cleaning needs but it's not exactly how most young (and very rich) people live nowadays.

Listing information we peeped shows Mister Pincus's new pad in Pac Heights has 7 bedrooms and 6 full and 4 half bathrooms. However, our perusal of the floor plan(s) turned up 7 bedrooms (plus two more rooms that could, if desired, be pressed into use as sleeping chambers), five full and four half bathrooms plus two additional staff areas—one in the basement the other on the third floor, each with three cell-sized bedrooms and one shared bathroom.

A wide stairway and raised front porch with six Doric columns leads to the main floor living areas that include an impressive front hall with charming, arched inglenook, a living room big enough to be a ballroom with drop dead views, a smaller library with fireplace and built-in book cases, and a banquet hall-sized dining room, also with electrifying view and massive fireplace.

The lower level service areas include the aforementioned original kitchen and trio of cell-sized staff rooms plus a wine vault, exercise room, commodious storage rooms, a big ol' boiler room, and a laundry room large enough to make Luwanda the Laundress weep with envy. A dumb waiter in the central hall on the lower level conveniently lifts groceries and other small items to the upper levels and a narrow carport at the side of the mansion shades one or maybe two, tandem-parked cars.

The monumental master suite stretches across the entire rear of the second floor and encompasses a vast bedroom (with fireplace and spine tingling view); a sizable, separate but connected sitting room/office (also with fireplace); two walk-in closets; and direct access to—depending on how you count—1.5 or 2.5 bathrooms. Three other guest/family bedrooms on the second floor each have direct (if not entirely private) access to a bathroom.

An unusually grand staircase in a sky lit central atrium connects the second to the third floors where two more large guest/family bedrooms share a divided bathroom and a third, smaller guest/family bedroom has no direct or even convenient access to a lavatory.

Also on the third floor is a downright dee-voon  family room labeled on the floor plan as "The Ship Room" due to its exposed wood architecture very closely resembling the rib-like interior hull of a wood-built ship as well as an office/sitting room (with adjoining wet bar/storage area) and three more itty-bitty staff bedrooms that share a lone bathroom.

Exterior space is somewhat limited to the over-sized motor court in the front and a slender, landscaped terrace along the back of the lower level that provides (mostly) unobstructed city, bay and bridge views. The back yard slopes precipitously to a towering brick rampart that Your Mama would be quite surprised if Mister Pincus didn't build up for privacy and/or otherwise equip with a state of the art security system that may or may not include an armed guard or two with a nervous eye tick and a hair trigger.

The Gold Coast location of Mister Pincus's palatial new pad does not get better when it comes to San Francisco real estate with bigwig and muckety-muck neighbors like Oracle bajillionaire Larry Ellison, social world staples Gordon and Ann Getty, University of Phoenix's billionaire owner Peter Sperling, social networking nabob Michael Birch, Oracle heiress Nicola Miner and her novelist husband Robert Mailer Anderson, and eco-socialite author Sloan Barnett and her nutritional supplement pusher husband Roger Barnett who dropped some big bucks last year on the lavish manse of (deceased and) deliciously eccentric international social figure Dodie Rosekrans.

Mister Pincus and his wife have been on a real estate merry go round recently having just sold not just one but two separate San Francisco residences. He took a knee-knocking $960,000 loss (not counting carrying costs, improvements and real estate fees) when he sold a highly stylized bungalow in the Cole Valley neighborhood for $1,890,000 in January (2012). In March (2012) he unloaded a far more grand, four-floor mansion with six bedrooms in the exclusive Presidio Heights 'hood for $8,200,000. He paid $8,100,000 for the towering mansion just about 2.5 years earlier.

listing photos and floor plan: Pacific Union International

In Case You Haven't Heard...

photos: Walt Danley Realty

...professional basketball dribbler Jason Kidd of the New York Knicks listed his 13,523 square foot, vaguely Mexican hacienda-style mansion in Paradise Valley, AZ with an asking price of $5,995,000.

photo: Clark Dugger Photography for Bulldog Realtors

...Shabby Chic queen Rachel Ashwell coughed up $930,000 to buy an itty-bitty and already Shabby Sheeked two-bedroom cottage in Venice (CA).

photos: Heidi Krauss

...Super Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps, winner of more medals than any other athlete ever, has reportedly sold his four-floor Baltimore townhouse at a punishing $400,000 loss.

photo: Islands.com

...Formidable octogenarian French multi-billionaire heiress Liliane Bettencourt sold off her private island in the Seychelles for £39,000,000. A quickie consult with our currency conversion contraption shows that comes to 60,973,400 American dollars at today's rates.

Madame Bettencourt—the largest shareholder in cosmetics and beauty juggernaut L'Oreal, founded by her father—has owned D'Arros and a few surrounding islands since the late 1990s when she secretly paid a member of the Iranian royal family (around) $18,000,000 (US) for the tropically picturesque, pill-shaped coconut plantation island (and a few surrounding atolls) that includes a luxurious main residence as well as separate quarters for guests and caretakers.

Iffin any of the children don't know the truly scandalicious story of Madame Bettencourt and her (admitted) tax evading ways, her (alleged) "payments" to French politicians including former president Nicholas Sarkozy, and the 1.3 billion dollars in gifts and insurance policies to much younger man-pal b.f.f. François-Marie Banier—now cut out of Madame's will after a bitter legal intervention by Madame Bettencourt's daughter who argued her elderly mother is not longer competent to handle her own (financial) affairs—then you should. Y'all can read all about Madame's difficulties and dramas in a 2010 article in Vanity Fair.

Mariska Hargitay Orders Up Townhouse

BUYER: Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $10,700,000
SIZE: Big with 6 bedrooms and 5 full and 4 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Mariska Hargitay—Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning She-Ra of the interminably long-running police procedural Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (L&O:SVU)—and her handsome, 6-foot-five-actor husband Peter Hermann (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Our Idiot Brother, A Gifted Man) have plunked down $10,700,000 on a fully updated and recently renovated townhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Miz Hargitay, the fetching and chastely smoldering daughter of busty pin-up babe Jayne Mansfield and former Mister Universe Micky Hargitay, was crowned Miss Beverly Hills in 1982, speaks five languages, will reportedly earn around half a million smackers for each episode of the 14th season of L&O:SVU and has three young children with Mister Hermann, one she birthed in 2006 and two more they adopted last year. German-born Mister Hermann matriculated at Yale, speaks four languages and before he was an actor he taught ESL and was a fact checker at Vanity Fair magazine. Don't they just kinda make you feel sick with inadequacy? No? That's just Your Mama? Anyhoo...

Listing information and other marketing materials we snake-charmed out of the interweb does not state the square footage of the of  townhouse—we guesstimate it at around 5,000—but does show it was built in 1900, is conveniently well-situated between Central Park West and commercial Columbus Avenue, stands a fairly narrow 18-feet wide, and rises six floors above ground with an additional, elevator-accessible and fully-finished basement with several storage rooms and half bathroom. Listing information also states the townhouse has six bedrooms and nine bathrooms but a quick perusal of the floor plan and Your Mama counts five actual bedrooms and five full and four half bathrooms.

The traditional brownstone exterior belies the completely contemporized interior spaces worked over by the real estate investor sellers who paid $4,400,000 for the house in the last days of 2009.

The parlor floor entry at the top of the delicious stoop—we do love us a good God damn New York City stoop—opens directly into a slim but spacious and decidedly spare open-plan entry/living room/library that stretches approximately 50 feet long front to back. The street-facing entry/living room area has a gas fireplace with a broad, minimal-minded chimney breast; there's a powder pooper tucked semi-discreetly near the stairs that descend to the lower level; and a barely-there glass railing at the library end of the room allows for an unobstructed view of the surrounding townhouses out the double height windows that stretch up from the kitchen-dining-lounge one floor below.

A second, under-the-stoop entrance on the garden level opens a bit clunkily directly into the formal dining room separated from the kitchen only by a short and wide corridor flanked by the elevator, powder pooper and storage closets.

Radiant heated floors warm the tootsies on cold winter mornings in the sleek, eat-in Euro-style kitchen fitted and finished with dark chocolate-colored cabinetry, white counter tops of unknown but no doubt high-grade material, and top-quality stainless steel appliances that include two dishwashers and integrated, side-by-side fridge and freezer.

The center island kitchen (with extra-long snack and booze counter that easily accommodates four) opens to a small sitting and dining area with soaring double-height ceilings and massive glass windows and doors that connect out to an ipe wood-walled garden with built-in barbecue station.

The celebrity-style master suite takes up the entire third floor with sizable, street-facing bedroom, separate (but connected) office/dressing room with terrace access, two walk-in closets (plus a small dressing area), and a blindingly white and windowed marble bathroom with double sinks, make-up vanity, and separate soaking tub and glass-enclosed steam shower.

Each of the four spacious guest/family bedrooms on the upper levels has direct access to an un-shared and attached bathroom. One has three slender floor to ceiling windows that open to a street-side Juliet balcony and another has direct access to a private, garden-side terrace. A small but convenient laundry room sits between the bedrooms on the fourth floor and a narrow study/playroom sits between the two others bedrooms on the fifth.

The sixth floor, penthouse level sun room—the only floor of the townhouse not accessible, the lazy and infirm will want to know, via the elevator—has a crisp clean-lined entertainment kitchen, a compact walk-in closet perfect for board game storage, a handy-dandy half bathroom, and two wide banks of mahogany-trimmed windows and French doors that connect to north- and south-facing terraces. The smaller north terrace overlooks the back gardens and rear façades of the neighboring townhouses and the larger, street-side south-facing terrace is girdled by a tall and privacy ensuring, horizontally installed ipe wood fence.

This is hardly the first time Mister and Missus Hargitay-Hermann have popped up in property gossip columns and Your Mama has discussed their real estate activities on numerous occasions over the years. At one point the Hargitay-Hermanns maintained multi-million dollar residences on both coasts. In April 2007 they took in $2,650,000 when they sold a nearly 3,000 square foot house in the so-called Bird Streets area above the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles (CA) and in October of the same year they unloaded a 2,700-plus square foot, Jeffrey Bilhuber-decorated duplex penthouse on Beach Street in TriBeCa home, sold for $5,100,000 to a couple of financial industry fat cats.

They moved from their TriBeCa duplex penthouse to a substantially larger duplex penthouse atop the cast iron-constructed O'Neill Building located on busy, wide and quite loud Sixth Avenue. Property records and previous reports suggest they paid $7,000,000 for the 4,167 square foot penthouse in October 2007. They quickly caught a severe case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped the cupola-sporting penthouse almost exactly one year later for $8,150,000.

Most recently we discussed the Hermann-Hargitay's real estate doings in June 2010 when they upgraded their real estate circumstances in the Hamptons by coughing up well over seven million smackers for a 7,000-ish square foot cedar-shingled mansion in East Hampton (NY).

listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Douglas Elliman