November 6, 2011
Rumor has it sitcom star and romcom queen Jennifer Aniston caught a costly case of the Celebrity Real Estate Fickle. Since she landed a co-starring role (and earned many tens of millions of dollars from) Friends Miz Aniston has lived primarily in Los Angeles. In April of this year (2011), with an itch to spend more time in The Big Apple where her actor man-beau Justin Theroux ( American Psycho, Six Feet Under, John Adams mini-series) resides, Miz Aniston coughed up $2,069,084 for a 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom apartment directly below a compact 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom penthouse with wrap around terraces that she bought at the same time from hairstyling honcho Sally Hershberger for $4,950,000. The plan, presumably, was to combine the two small apartments located in a top-notch Bing & Bing building in the West Village into a still not particularly large duplex penthouse with 270 degree views from downtown to Midtown Manhattan. Alas, Miz Aniston has reportedly changed her real estate mind and signed contracts to acquire a pricey pad in a particularly posh building that overlooks private, pristine and historic Gramercy Park . The high-style, full-service building was developed by boutique hotelier and property developer Ian Schrager, designed by soo-blime minimalist architect John Pawson and has only 23 apartments (some have been combined). Residents have access to the copious amenities of the adjacent Gramercy Park Hotel –once funky now terribly chic and owned by Mister Shrager, natch–including room service, housekeeping, valet parking with car wash services, event planning and butler services, personal shopping and delivery services, and membership to the hotel spa and David Barton gym. We assume the apartment comes with a key to gated Gramercy Park across the street. Listing information shows the apartment Miz Aniston is (allegedly) on the cusp of acquiring, listed at a superstar-sized $8,700,000, measures 2,873 square feet with 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms and pocketbook punishing monthly maintenance and common charges of $11,258. Gorgeous wood floors run throughout the apartment that has generous 11’8″ ceilings and over-sized windows with park and courtyard views. The contemporary crib features a long entrance gallery with nearby powder pooper, and a large living/dining room with fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows, a sleek center island eat-in kitchen. The park view master suite has a walk-in closet/dressing room larger than some New York City studio apartments and an attached bathroom with two sinks, a tub for two and separate shower cubicle. Each of the two guest rooms–both set up as a nursery by the seller–has large windows and en suite terliting and bathing facility. We imagine (and hope) Miz Aniston will bring in her team of smart architects and nice, gay decorators to remove the twee and toile-ish day-core of the seller and replace it with something more appropriate for a gal whose tastes run more towards modern than Connecticut country house in the city. Other residents–or at least owners–of apartments in the swank building include blue chip gallerist Alexander Acquavella and German-born but Paris-based haute fashion über-icon Karl Lagerfeld who has his little (or never) used unit in the building currently on the market with an asking price of $5,200,000 . We can’t fathom why Miz Aniston would switch real estate gears and head for Gramercy Park so quickly after spending more than seven million clams on two downtown apartments but, if we’ve said it once we’ve said to 56,417 times, such are the often fickle and inexplicable real estate ways of the rich and/or famous. Back on the left coast Your Mama hears through the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine Miz Aniston has gone on the hunt for a new Tinseltown residence to lay her perfectly-maintained tresses after she was kissed by the real estate leprechaun in June (2011) when she sold her just renovated Beverly Hills, CA mansion to a mutual fund mogul from Orange County for a gasp-worthy $35,000,000 after just two months on the open market with an even more gaspy price tag of $42,000,000 . More than one of Your Mama’s many Platinum Triangle informants have snitched to us that Miz Aniston has peeped and poked around a number of deluxe homes in the ten million dollar range including a one-acre ridge-top spread in Beverly Hills owned by the scion of a prominent Los Angeles family as well as a sleek and sexy Hal Leavitt-designed house in the Trousdale Estates area of Bev Hills owned by AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips, decorated by Kelly Wearstler and recently acquired for well over $10,000,000 by music industry super-tycoon Simon Cowell. Until she picks and purchases a fancy-pants new pad in Los Angeles, Miz Aniston and Mister Theroux have leased a temporary love nest in the form a modestly sized but still quite pricey gated residence near the tippy-top of the star-studded Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip. We don’t know what the couple coughs up each month for the 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom ranch-style residence but we do know it was last available with a $20,000 per month price tag. Once again, we’re not sure why Miz Aniston would opt to cough up twenty grand a month to rent a house when she has long owned another residence in the Bird Street neighborhood that is, buy our rudimentary calculations, just over half a mile from her and Mister Theroux’s rental. But again, who are we to make sense of the wacky ways of celebrities and other high profile peeps with pockets deep enough to indulge their every real estate whim and desire? listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Douglas Elliman More: Weekend Nugget Number Two: Jennifer Aniston
Tags: aniston, apartment, beverly hills, beverly hills ca, celebrity, century city, city, mister-theroux, news, real-estate, sunset, weekend-nugget, west hollywood
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November 6, 2011
Did Johnny Depp slap down some dough for a getaway on the Isle of Wight? Could be. Real estate rumors have begun to circulate in the local press that the Oscar-nominated ex-pat American actor may have set his real estate sights on the historic and scenic Isle of Wight, located just off the southern coast of England. The wee island has been popular amongst literary types and royalty since at least the mid-1800s when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert acquired the vast Italian Renaissance-style pile known as Osborne House for uses as a summer retreat. Nowadays the island is best known among music-minded pop cultural types for hosting the annual Isle of Wight music festival . Over the summer there were local reports the insanely famous and famously reclusive actor was spotted roaming around the southern seaside town of Ryde and chowing down in local eateries such as the Ugly Mug Cafe in Shanklin where the home made cakes and sandwiches are wheat-, gluten- and dairy-free. Recent reports suggest the sightings (and photos) of Mister Depp over the summer may have been not of the actor himself but rather of someone who just happens to look a lot like the actor and doesn’t mind posing for photos as the actor. However, the latest report –sent our way via an acquaintance we’ll call Venetia Vaseseller–quotes Michelin-starred chef Robert Thompson who owns The Hambrough hotel in Ventor as saying, “People still think coming here is like stepping back in time. But it’s up-and-coming. Johnny Depp just bought a place in [the small village of] Bonchurch.” We have no inside intel on the matter. We’re just passing along a little celebrity real estate gossip and rumor. What we do know is that Mister Depp and his French actress-wife Vanessa Paradis maintain a number of swank residences around the world including a house in the affluent Paris suburb of Meudon, a remotely situated villa in Plan-de-la-Tour about 10 or 12 miles from St. Tropez in the South of France, a 45-acre private island in the Bahamas called Little Hall’s Pond Cay, and a gated, 2.54 acre estate in Los Angeles, CA with a hulking chateau-style mansion built in 1922 and perched on a hillside directly above the Sunset Strip. Property records we peeped indicate Mister Depp acquired his bamboo-ringed Tinseltown compound, former the home of from celebrity attorney Marvin Mitchelson , in October 1995 for $1,890,000. In typical celebrity real estate baller style property records also reveal a corporate entity connected to Mister Depp’s Sunset Strip estate also owns four smaller (but hardly insubstantial) residences on the same short, windy cul-de-sac purchased between September 2005 and October 2008. A quick consult with our bejeweled abacus shows Mister Depp shelled out a total of $10,070,000 for the four properties. Presumably Mister Depp uses the quartet of residences as office space and/or to house family, friends,
Tags: city-within, france, french, italian, johnny-depp, mister-depp, news, prince, queen-victoria, real-estate, southern, summer
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November 6, 2011
First thing’s first—it’s saving, not savings. Sunday morning marks the end of daylight saving time, when we set our clocks back one hour to revert to Pacific Standard Time. While the official time to fall back is 2 a.m., many people won’t have to do anything—their computers and cell phones will adjust automatically. Having to physically change clocks and watches may eventually become a thing of the past, like picking up the morning paper. Having an extra hour of evening sunlight in the summer seems to be a popular concept, except in Arizona and Hawaii, where daylight saving time is not observed. We keep tinkering with how we set our clocks. In 2007 the United States adopted the current schedule, with daylight saving time beginning the second Sunday in March and ending the first Sunday in November, lengthening it by four weeks. Saving energy during World War I was the goal when the United States first tried daylight saving time. It was repealed once the war was over, then brought back on an all-year basis during World War II only to be dropped again when peace broke out. Daylight saving time was finally standardized by Congress in 1966 and has changed several times since, with a winter version experimented with during the 1970s oil embargo. The rolling blackouts that hit California in 2001 brought up the idea of expanding daylight saving time, prompting the California Energy Commission to release a 37-page report. The proposal was to scrap standard time altogether, with the winter months observing daylight saving time and the summer months saddled with something called “double daylight saving time.” Thankfully, the commission concluded that the plan would only save marginal amounts of energy and it was never enacted. Turns out the blackouts had more to do with Enron than not enough electricity. Be sure to follow Beverly Hills Patch on Twitter and “Like” us on Facebook . Read more here: Daylight Saving Ends Sunday, Time to Fall Back
Tags: california, computers, congress, daylight-saving, device, marks-the-end, news, summer, technology, the-status, united, united-states, winter
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November 6, 2011
In a new exhibit titled ” The World of Breads ,” culinary school students at The Art Institute of California-Inland Empire have elevated loaves of bread to the status of art work in the school’s visual arts gallery. View original post here: S.B. COUNTY: Breads of the World exhibited
Tags: beverly hills, beverly hills news, breads, culinary-school, empire, institute, new-exhibit, news, original-post, school, the-school, the-status, visual-arts
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November 5, 2011
UCLA is now warning 16,000 patients that a burglar made off with their personal medical records two months ago, according to the Associated Press . When the doctor’s home was burglarized, the thief swiped the hard drive with the medical records — and the scrap of paper right next to it with the password. Whoops. more › Link: Burglar Makes Off With Records for 16,000 Patients in the UCLA Health System
Tags: article, beverly hills, burglar-made, burglar-makes, california, health, health-system, local news, news, password, scrap, swiped-the-hard, ucla
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November 5, 2011
Get out so you can geek out over pop art design, listen to classical music or take in some boozy musical improv. more › Read more here: Get Out: Designer Con, Boozy Musical Improv & Brandenburg
Tags: article, arts & entertainment, boozy, boozy-musical, california, designer, geek-out, geek-out-over, improv, million-kardashian, news, news los angeles, over-pop, personal-lives, some-boozy
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November 5, 2011
The debate between residents in the Trousdale Estates with high trees and foliage—and their neighbors who seek to restore hillside views—was on the City Council’s agenda Thursday. Members agreed to postpone a vote on a proposed ordinance that addresses the issue after a hearty discussion with city staff, community members and the city attorney. After research by the Planning Commission and city staff, along with public hearings, the “roof height plus one foot with a maximum of 15 feet,” as Vice Mayor William Brien phrased it, is the proposed rule for foliage that may block a neighbor’s view. Residents from both sides of the issue who attended the meeting pointed out “roadblocks” in the proposed ordinance’s legal language. “This ordinance raises many thorny policy questions, and there are certainly pros and cons to many, if not all, of the decisions that are made with regard to the issues that have been raised,” City Attorney Larry Wiener said. Several specific possible adjustments Wiener raised and council members discussed were: Adding wording in the ordinance to allow for access to a foliage owner’s property in order to determine the height of potentially view-obstructing trees or shrubs. Changes to a home’s roof height that would affect a foliage owner’s maximum height for trees or shrubs. Issues pertaining to tree growth and trimming that reflect a foliage owners compliance with the ordinance. Concern over more specifically clarifying how to determine when the city is actually required to settle disputes between neighbors over view restoration via the code enforcement process. The cost to homeowners trying to restore a view, which could climb to six figures if the matter has to go to court, because provisions in the ordinance shift the financial burden of enforcing the law to residents. The council will consider the ordinance again at its Nov. 15 meeting. Be sure to follow Beverly Hills Patch on Twitter and “Like” us on Facebook . View original post here: Council Postpones Vote on Trousdale View Ordinance
Tags: attorney-larry, beverly hills, beverly hills ca, chairman, council, facebook, local news, mayor-william, news, planning, trees-or-shrubs, trousdale, trousdale-view
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November 5, 2011
Was Elizabeth Taylor’s father, Beverly Hills art dealer Frank Taylor, worth more than top pop artist Andy Warhol? Yes, according to today’s Forbes 2011 rankings of the value of artists’ rights. Originally posted here: Forbes explains why successful art dealers are worth their weight in platinum
Tags: 2011-rankings, art-dealer, disturbing-idea, elizabeth, goals, news, people, power, warhol, weight, weird-human
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November 5, 2011
Amid the Crystal Cathedral chaos, Christians are speaking out against selling the church founded by Robert Schuller .
Tags: ca news, church, crystal-cathedral, embattled, goals, news, orange-county, people, power, robert-schuller, selling-the-church
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November 5, 2011
Mobile phone technology has evolved a lot in the last five years, with apps virtually for everything. But some of these apps contain hidden risks. Photo Credit: Mekahlo Medina, Julie Brayton Originally posted here: App Addict Alert
Tags: abductor, california, contain-hidden, credit, five-years, julie-brayton, los angeles county, man-suspected, mekahlo-medina, news, photo-credit, these-apps
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