On Friday Your Mama discussed a 15,000+ square foot Southern Colonial mansion in L.A.'s uppity Holmby Hills 'hood custom-designed in the late 1960s by much lauded and applauded Old Hollywood architect Wallace Neff for Teledyne co-founder Henry Singleton and his wife Caroline. The Singleton's manse had been on the market a few years ago for $85 million but since September 2013 the grand and gated estate has been listed on the open market with a lower but still astronomical $75 million price tag. In mid-February, according to various online listing sites, the property was put into escrow indicating it was on track to be sold. Since then rumors and swirled that the buyer might be a mysterious Englishman or perhaps the preposterously pampered 29-year old Formula One racing heiress Tamara Ecclestone.
However, children, buckle your real estate saftety belts because even though it was widely reported he paid $23 million for the old Harry Cohn house in Beverly Hills, Your Mama now hears via covert communique from Gloria Gotsthedirt that the buyer isn't a mysterious Englishman or a British heiress or a Chinese industrialist or, as some may have speculated, a Russian oligarch but rather veteran Tinseltown t.v. and movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer who, according to Miz Gotsthedirt, will shell out sixty-some million clams for the stately 7.65 acre spread that sits just north of Sunset Boulevard and is surrounded by some of L.A.'s most impressive and posh estates.
Just in case any of y'all might be under the illusion that Mister Bruckheimer's real estate eyeballs are bigger than his bank account you should keep in mind that, largely due to the Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure franchises, his high octane (if low substance) tent pole movies have grossed, according to this, nearly 4.7 billion dollars in worldwide box office receipts and the nine time Emmy winner's long and impressive list of television credits include (among many other programs) the wildly popular Amazing Race and CSI franchises. Back in 2010 Forbes (via The Richest) estimated his net to be around $850 million with an average annual income of more than $105 million between 2004 and 2011. If anyone in Hollywood can afford a $60-some million house that probably costs more than a million buck a year to maintain and operate, it's Jerry "Blockbuster" Bruckheimer.
Like other entertainment industry moguls who make money hand over fist, Mister Bruckheimer and his second wife, former Mirabella editor and novelist Linda Sue (Cobb) Balahoutis Bruckheimer, maintain an impressive portfolio of private residences.* Since the mid-1980s, when he bought it for $1,865,000, the Bruckheimers' primary residence in Los Angeles has been the so-called Siskin House, a gorgeous and glassy, Thornton Abell-designed international style affair in sleepy but swanky Brentwod with, according to property records, 7 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms in just over 6,300 square feet.
The couple also maintain a 400-ish acre ranch property in Ojai, CA, they picked up in July 2006 and where they annoyed some of their lesser heeled neighbors when they planted a bunch of trees near the property's perimeter that obstructed their views of the Topa Topa Mountains. In the mid-1990s the couple purchased the 1,200 acre Walnut Groves Farm in itty-bitty Bloomfield, KY, about 45 miles outside Missus Bruckheimer's native Louisville. A 2005 article about Missus Bruckheimer's preservation efforts in Bloomfield reveals the massive spread includes a restored and updated 1820s Antebellum mansion with landscaped grounds patrolled by peacocks, extensive equestrian facilities, a barn that hides an ice rink, a handful of guest cabins, a smokehouse turned billiard parlor, a wash house and a cannery (whatever those are), a stone-edged swimming pool and spa, a Grecian temple-like gazebo, and a restored slave cabin.
In other Holmby Hills real estate news: Your Mama hears through the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine that the recently completed and very contemporary, 14,000 square foot Estate Four-developed villa next door to the Singleton estate—quietly shopped off market, we were told, to an international clientele with an asking price of $55 million—is also in escrow and about to be sold but, in all honesty, Your Mama does not, unfortunately, currently have any more dish or details than that.
Interestingly enough another of Your Mama's informants heard the buyer of the Singleton mansion and the Estate Four villa are one in the same and that the buyer—who may or may not be Mister Bruckheimer—plans to raze the Singleton mansion and replace it with something probably bigger and more modern and use the Estate Four residence as a guest house. Now that, if true children, is how a hardcore real estate baller rolls...
UPDATE (01.19.14): We are now hearing that Mister Bruckheimer is not the buyer but rather, as was first snitched to Your Mama by Our Fairy Godmother in the Holmby Hills, a wealthy fella from London.
*In 1987 Mister Bruckheimer paid $2.4 million for a modestly sized residence on Malibu's Carbon Beach that he sold in an off-market deal in the December 2012 for $18 million to property collecting software tycoon Larry Ellison. Mister Ellison, as Malibu property watchers well know, owns a dozen or more properties along Carbon Beach and this property gossip wonders if he'd like to buy up all of Carbon Beach? Why not? He already owns the entire island of Lanai in Hawaii so why not the whole of Carbon Beach? But we digress...
listing photo: Coldwell Banker
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