Jakob Dylan Quietly Sells Malibu Mini-Compound

SELLER: Jakob and Paige Dylan
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $7,375,000
SIZE: 7,752 square foot, 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It took a bit of a group effort between Your Mama and The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial to figure out that singer/songwriter Jakob Dylan quietly unloaded a freshly rehabbed compound-like mini-estate in the Point Dume area of Malibu for $7,375,000.

Mister Dylan, besides being honest to goodness rock 'n' roll royalty—his daddy is Bob Dylan, in case you didn't know, fronts the band The Wallflowers and, along with Dave Matthews, co-founded the fairly newly formed supergroup The Nauts.

As best as this property gossip can tell, Mister Dylan and his former actress/budding screenwriter wife, Paige Dylan, purchased the hair-more-than-an-acre spread in February 2011 for $3,980,000. They hired accomplished Malibu architect Doug Burdge to give the 1950s-era semi-Spanish style residence a cosmetic overhaul that included the removal of a swimming pool and the installation of downright drool-worthy, wide plank white oak wood floors throughout.

Listing details show the main house plus the two guest houses have a combined square footage of 7,752. One of the guest houses, as per the listing, has 650 square feet and the other 722. If Your Mama uses our ever-reliable bejeweled abacus to add up those latter two figures and then subtract the sum from the total square footage we come up with a main house that measures in at 6,380 square feet. Listing details we perused explicitly suggest the buyer verify the abode's square footage by their own means as the L.A. County Tax Man shows the house has just 5,303 square feet. (Curiously, a digital listing we dug up from the time the Dylan's acquired the property peg the place at 5,611 square feet with six bedrooms and 7 bathrooms.) Whatever the size, online marketing materials show the property has seven bedrooms and five bathrooms but, honestly children, where not sure if that includes any bedrooms and/or bathrooms in the guest cottages.

A high wall and an even higher thicket of shrubbery obscure the peering eyes of passers by and a gated driveway pushes deep into long and narrow property where it circles up to pass under a humbly scaled porte-cochere and pools up in a motor court with front-facing attached garage.

Wrought iron and glass doors open into a ridiculously but pleasantly over-sized reception gallery with pitched beam ceiling, huge windows and what Your Mama imagines (and hopes) is an authentic Beni Ourain rug. The luscious wood floors and vaulted ceilings continue into the living room where a chunky, minimalist fireplace with over-sized firebox anchors one end of the room and a wall of built-in bookshelves the other. Four sets of single-pane French doors that open to a terraces hemmed in on three sides by the back of the house and a baby grand piano and an acoustic guitar or two easily converts this the sitting room in to an extremely intimate music venue.

It's possible and maybe even likely, much of the Dylan's personal day-core and artworks were stripped down for the marketing process but, even if not, we're in an honest swoon for the all but unadorned formal dining room that stops short of cold austerity with a glimmering crystal chandelier (that could probably be hung a mite lower), a rustic and beat up, 10- or 12-seat farmhouse table and eight elegant and refined button tufted chairs that evoke a soupçon of 1940s glamour. But anyways...

We don't care what any of the children say about the uninspired, plain-Jane exterior of this house—because it's pretty ho-hum—but we think the kitchen is kinda fantastic. Two boxcar-sized center islands have slab marble counter tops on walnut cabinetry. Each has a two-stool snack bar and neither, it should be noted, are located underneath a dreaded and—Yes!—occasionally malevolent pot rack, thank you very much. The appliances are top-quality stainless steel and include double wall ovens and full-height side-by-side refrigerator and freezer. One end of the room has a built-in breakfast banquette next to French doors that open to motor court at the front of the house and, at the opposite end of the long, sky-lit space, more French doors open to a roof-shaded dining terrace that overlooks the backyard.

The kitchen flows directly into a step down family room with corner fireplace and a sculptural staircase that ascends to a large loft space with kiva-style corner fireplace and glass doors that open to a wrought-iron railed balcony and staircase that leads down to the backyard recreation and entertainment areas.

The privately situated, second floor master suite has a high, vaulted ceiling and plenty of room for a sitting area. A quartet of single-pane French doors open to a slender, wrought iron railed balcony that affords an long and wide, over-the tree tops view of the ocean. There are two roomy closets, as per listing details, plus a big and glitzy bathroom with two marble-topped vanities surmounted by florid, Rococo-esque mirrors, a jetted garden tub, a glass-fronted shower stall, and—Praise be!—a separate, privacy promoting cubicle for the crapper.

The back of the house wraps around three sides of a spacious, plaza-like central courtyard terrace where previous to its most recent renovation there was a small swimming pool and spa surrounded by a whole lot of red brick terracing. (The Dylans apparently installed a spa somewhere—it's noted in listing details—but they did not put in another pool. No offence, but for nearly eight million clams we want a pool but, then again, if you have eight million for the house you probably can scrape up another quarter million for a badass swimming pool complex.)

The terrace steps down to a thin strip of lawn that, in turn, steps down to a lighted tennis court. The paltry bit of grass between the tennis court and the terrace might seem stingy except that there's a vast stretch of lawn between the street and the front of the house where there's a children's playground tucked up into the shade of a small stand of mature trees.

Your Mama's research on the internets suggest Mister and Missus Dylan have lived or at least maintained a residence in Malibu since 2008 when they paid $3.35 million for a 1.3 acre property (with 2,365 square foot house) that they sold in the last days of 2011 for $3,575,000. Our research also suggests but does not entirely prove the couple still own yet another house in Malibu, this one an almost 6,000 square foot, decidedly contemporary dwelling on a gated, ocean view plateau in the foothills above Point Dume that last traded hands in the early days of 2011 for $4,250,000.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker

Louis C.K. Snags Gloomy Shelter Island Tudor

BUYER: Louis Szekely
LOCATION: Shelter Island, NY
PRICE: $2,440,000
SIZE: 4,957 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Most New Yorkers at least the ones we know and whether they can afford one or not, have a picture of their ideal weekend getaway. For Bunny and Flower it's a rustically chic and arty-farty compound in upstate New York. For Jo-Jo R-Po it's a puny, un-winterized waterfront bungalow on the North Fork. And for Soozie-Q and Fred it's a rambling (and nearly ramshackle) shingled cottage on a large (if somewhat untended) lot in a quiet corner of the Hamptons.

For Emmy-winner Louis Szekely, an upwardly mobile stand-up comedian and sitcom star known professionally as Louis C.K., it's Primrose Cottage, a gloomy but stunningly intact, turn-of-the-century timbered Tudor on two water front acres on Shelter Island that he reportedly snatched up for $2.44 million.

So the scuttlebutt goes, Babe Ruth once summered in the three-story, 4,957 square foot house that listing details show has half a dozen bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and six wood-burning fireplaces. (Big whoop!) The generously proportioned main rooms stop short of grand—it's a vacation house, after all—and, although they could use some spit and polish, retain an impressive array of original architectural details. The tightly spindled staircase alone is a revelation and the built-in inglenook benches next too some of the fireplaces couldn't be more charming even if they are a wee impractical for modern day life.

The pastel paint on the walls in some of the rooms is on decorative trend—not that Mister C.K. gives a shit about that—but it looks a bit wan and old fashioned in the somewhat dim listing photographs. And the kitchen, well, it looks reasonably sized but—lowerd have mercy, butter beans—it needs a complete overhaul starting with that mortifyingly massive (and massively mortifying) pot rack. All the children should know by now that Rule #8 in Your Mama's Big Book of Decoratin' Dos and Don'ts adamantly forbids the use of pot racks in residential kitchens. Not only are they voracious dust magnets they're also a capricious if inanimate menace that will drop a pot on a puppy's head without warning or snatch the weave right off the head of an unsuspecting weave wearer.

An asymmetrical front porch overlooks an otherwise landscape-less, hedge-ringed lawn and, off the rear of the residence, a spacious and inviting, brick-floored screen porch has a long view over the flat back lawn to the water's edge. There isn't a swimming pool or a tennis court—there's room for both should Mister C.K. want them—but there is, however, a private dock that extends out into a cut that provides direct and easy boat access to West Neck Harbor and Noyac Bay. The convenient boat parking facility was probably a selling point for Mister C.K. who owns an micro-yacht that was recently featured on Jerry Seinfeld's pleasantly droll web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

We read, Mister C.K. once lived at the fabled and controversially condo-fied Apthorp complex on the Upper West Side but we also have a vague memory of being told by someone—we don't recall when or by whom—that he moved downtown, to the formerly boho now fully gentrified West Village. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

In addition to his somewhat dark and relentlessly self-deprecating stand-up work the veteran comedian also writes, directs and edits a smartly calibrated and critically acclaimed, semi-eponymous sitcom (Louie) that closely adheres to the framework of his own life.

In other Shelter Island celebrity real estate news, maverick ceramicist and home goods guru Jonathan Adler and his creative iconoclast husband Simon Doonan—amongst a myriad of other endeavors he's a sassy columnist at Slate and the Creative Ambassador-at-Large of Barney's—have one of their kalaidoscopically colorful and widely published homes on Shelter Island up for lease for the month of July at $11,000 per month. Incidentally, the A-list gays tried to sell the quirkilicious 1970s A-frame modern back in 2010 for $1.795 million after they bought another, much more impressive waterfront spread where they custom built a super-modern bungalow featured in a 2012, Doonan-penned piece in Architectural Digest. (It was also fawned over in Dwell and Hamptons magazines.)

listing photos: Daniel Gale / Sotheby's International Realty via Curbed

Jason Priestley Upsizes in The Valley

BUYER: Jason Priestley
LOCATION: Studio City, CA
PRICE: $2,720,000
SIZE: 5,075 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A couple of weeks ago Your Mama and all the other celebrity real estate watchers learned from the long-legged blond at Trulia Luxe Listings that race car driving actor/director Jason Priestley and his make-up artist wife Naomi Lowde-Priestley sold their Toluca Lake home to a not-famous couple for $2 million. The sale represents a $140,000 loss that does not account for carrying costs, any maintenance and/or improvement expenses the couple may have incurred or the real estate fees.*

This week, oddly enough, Your Mama heard word from a couple of snitchy informants, including the inestimable real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak, that the Priestley couple, who have two young children, bought a substantially bigger new house about four miles directly west in a leafy pocket of Studio City, CA for $2,720,000.**

Listing details show the freshly constructed and well appointed, two-story wannabe-Cap Cod sits on less than a quarter acre right on the border between Studio City and Sherman Oaks and has a total of five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 5,075 square feet. A prominent, full-frontal two car garage has direct entry to the main house and a detached cabana adds additional living space . (By Your Mama's quick and rudimentary calculations the Priestley's new digs in Studio City is just over 1,800 square feet larger than their former home in Toluca Lake.)

We don't love the exact tone of ashy medium brown as appears in listing photographs but otherwise we live, children, for the seven inch wide floorboards that run throughout the main floor living areas. A medium-width but exceptionally long center hall entry extends clear through to the back of the house with wide openings into adjoining formal living and dining rooms, both with scads of custom mill work and the former with a marble-faced fireplace. Not that it matters more than a damn pickle what this moody property gossip thinks but we could happily have done without the showboat-y glass display cases built in to the columns that support the shallow archway between the living and dining room.

A luxuriously fitted butler's pantry with marble back splash and warming drawer links the dining room to the expensively outfitted family-sized kitchen. Along the long back wall of the kitchen dark counter tops (of unknown material) sit on snow white Shaker-style counter tops while the generously proportioned center island has steel grey Shaker-style cabinetry topped with an impressively thick single slab of marble. In addition to the four-stool center island snack counter there's a small informal dining area in front of a picture window with backyard view and all the appliances are top-grade, as should be expected in a house at this price point in this location. The kitchen opens to the family room where there's a deeply coffered ceiling, a bookcase flanked marble-faced fireplace, and a wall of wood-framed glass doors that fold open to a concrete-floored veranda that overlooks the backyard.

Also on the main floor is a powder pooper for guest, an en suite guest bedroom, and a home theater with a projection system, milk chocolate brown fabric wall panels set off by lipstick red columns, lily gilding nightclub lighting, and tiered seating for (about) 11 in puffy black leather recliners with built-in cup holders. (We know they are a pearl clutching sight for sore eyes, children, but Your Mama would bet our long-bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, and our mean ol' pussycat Sugar those recliners are as comfortable as they are hidjeous.)

Upstairs, three guest/family bedrooms have private bathrooms and a second family room might easily be put to use as a children's play room, arts and crafts nook, yoga lounge or Pilates parlor. The spacious master suite has a (third) marble-faced fireplace, built-in bookshelves, something called "separate entry closets," and a wee private balcony with backyard overlook. Slathered in marble—floors, counters, shower—the master bathroom has two sinks on either side of a built-in hair and make-up vanity, a soaking tub for two set into a bay window, and a separate, glass-enclosed steam shower.

Back downstairs, the veranda off the family room and kitchen area—which Your Mama would like so much better if it were more comfortably half again as deep—gives way to newly sodded lawn. Off to the side, there's a built-in barbecue situation and, in the far western corner, what we imagine may (or may not) have once been a detached garage was converted to a pool side cabana with kitchenette and convenient half bathroom. A wide set of French doors and a long wall of folding glass doors expose the cabana to the terrace that runs along the smallish saltwater swimming pool with picayune suntanning shelf and inset spa.

*Mister and Missus Priestly paid $2,140,000 for their 3,266 square foot Toluca Lake home in May 2007. They first listed the property in the fall 2011 for $2.1 million. It did not sell and was taken off the market and re-listed in February 2014 for $2,099,000, a figure that might as well be $2.1 million.

**We were able to confirm the purchase with property records—it was purchased through the same trust as their former home in Toluca Lake—and as far as this property gossip can tell the Priestleys paid nearly a million dollars more than any other property sold in the immediate vicinity in more than a year. 

listing photos: Keller Williams Realty

Virginia Madsen On the Move

SELLER: Virginia Madsen
LOCATION: Thousand Oaks, CA
PRICE: $1,088,000
SIZE: 3,691 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: We have a lovely fella we'll call Missy Hoo Hoo to thank for the kindly communique that informed Your Mama that Oscar-nominated actress Virginia Madsen has her reasonably spacious if fairly ordinary tract house inside the guarded gates of the Rancho Conejo development in affluent Thousand Oaks, CA, on the market with a $1,088,000 asking price.*

Miz Madsen, in case some of the younger children don't know, has shaken her Showbiz money maker in Hollywood since the mid-1980s but didn't reach her to-date professional salad days until 2004 when she was nominated for an Academy Award for her quirky turn as a waitress in the low budget and much ballyhooed film Sideways. While the Oscar nod—she was also nominated for a Golden Globe—didn't catapult her to superstar leading lady status, she has worked steadily ever since. There have been numerous television programs (Justice League, Monk, Scoundrels, Witches of East End), a fair number of movies (The Number 23, The Haunting in Connecticut), and a bevy of television movies (Anna Nicole, Hatfields & McCoys). As per her resume on the Internet Movie Data Base, she has lead roles in at least four movies currently in one stage of production or another.

Property records show Miz Madsen acquired herThousand Oaks abode in November 2005 for $1,351,000. A couple of quick calculations on our bejeweled abacus shows that even if her young and scruffy-chinned real estate agent manages to coax a full price offer, his Tinseltown client still faces a hardly inconsequential $263,000 loss, not counting carrying costs, improvement expenses and real estate fees.

Current listing details show the two-story house was built in 2004 and backs up to a public park that Your Mama imagines could get loud with screaming children at least every now and then. There are four bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms and a garaging for three cars in two bays, both with direct access to the house. Your Mama isn't an educated expert so we really can't be sure what blend of architectural styles are present here but there's plenty of used red brick veneer applied to the exterior's lower level and there's a whole lotta quintessentially tan stucco on the upper level. Some of the vinyl-framed windows have (probably faux) shutters, the roof's edges are lined with brown clay tiles, and there's a minuscule, second floor veranda that overlooks the red brick driveway.

Inside, listing photos suggest Miz Madsen has an unrestrained passion that borders on an addiction to elaborate wall treatments. In the narrow entrance hall and unexpectedly voluminous, double-height formal dining room the walls are slathered in a questionable, duo tone crosshatched situation that looks a little like an over-scaled linen pattern. Beige, natural stone tiles the in front hall and dining room switch to mahogany-toned wood with a semi-gloss treatment in the "formal" living room where we can't not notice the at least as equally labor intensive—and probably more questionable—bronze toned paint treatment on the walls and the ceiling.**

Around the backside of the staircase in the formal dining room the an eat-in center island kitchen has faux-aged raised panel cabinetry, speckled tan granite counter tops, high quality appliances and—you got it, Tea Cups and Tiddlywinks—a hand-applied custom faux-paint treatment. The kitchen opens into a family room with television surmounted gas fireplace, plantation shuttered windows and doors to the backyard, and even more of the same buttery colored paint treatment as in the kitchen. Inexplicably and much to the chagrin of Feng Shui experts and aficionados around the world, the floor in the family room is partly done with a natural stone tile and partly with wood, or some of that new-fangled porcelain tile that looks like wood.

Honestly, children, Your Mama never thought we'd have to make a hard and fast rule about this but all but Rule No. 187 in Your Mama's Big Book of Decoratin' Dos and Don'ts now avers with laser sharp self-righteousness that, "A single room in a well-dressed residence shall not have more than one floor material installed at the same time. It's confusing and unnecessary and, functional as it may be in any given circumstance, it just looks like shit. It does and y'all know it does, too." Talk about needing a goddamn nerve pill. Pleeze.

Along with the discrete power room, one of the three guest/family bedrooms is tucked back into a private corner of the house were it has direct access to a private bathroom. Two more guest/family bedrooms on the second floor each also have an en suite pooper. Double doors*** lead into the master bedroom where—in our humble and meaningless opinion—the taupe-toned shag wall-to-wall carpeting clashes angrily with the haute-glammy silver-leaf treatment applied to the walls. French doors open to a private balcony with park and sunset views and there's a an L-shaped walk-in closet off the spacious if entirely beige bathroom that's outfitted with twin sinks, a jetted garden tub and separate shower stall. The upper floor is finished with a spacious secondary family room and a sink-equipped laundry room.

As in many upscale housing developments from coast to coast in the United States, Miz Madsen's Thousand Oaks' backyard is unquestionably compact. It's barely bigger than a decent sized courtyard, really. But it is carefully outfitted with a narrow strip of flag stone terracing, a plunge-sized salt water swimming pool and raised spa that comfortably seats eight, and a vine-draped and curtain-hung pergola that shades a seating area around a built-in fire pit. The property backs directly up to a publicly accessible park with tennis courts, soccer pitch, a couple of softball/baseball diamonds, and a children's playground.

We freely confess that we haven't a clue where Miz Madsen plans to decamp not that her Thousand Oaks home is about to be sold. It's possible, if somewhat unlikely seeming, she'll hole up in the three bedroom and three bathroom condo in the western end of West Hollywood that property records reveal she picked up in 2006 for $860,000 and appears to co-own with her mother. But we sorta doubt it.

*As of today, online listings indicate the property is deep in escrow with an unknown buyer at an unknown price.

**Do not even ask, children, because we will not go there over all the chocolate brown contempo-style furnishings Miz Madsen done shoved up in her bronze-toned formal living room. Your Mama is plum out of nerve pills and we simply can not tolerate those wacky-footed abominations another second without needing at least two pills and a gin and tonic chaser, extra lime, please and thank you.

***Double door entries to master bedrooms in suburban tract homes are another of Your Mama's many pet peeves. Aren't double doored master bedrooms, after all, just a cliché of tract house design meant to invoke a false sense of grandeur? No? Yes? Are we just being snobby? Anyways...

listing photos: Coldwell Banker