Brave heart -- and a big wallet
With the sale this summer of his Malibu home, Mel Gibson is proving to be a shrewd player in the real-life version of Monopoly.
The actor-director-producer sold his home on 155 feet of beachfront for nearly $30 million. He bought the 7,000-square-foot, Mediterranean-style estate in the fall of 2005 for $24 million.
The house, built in 1981, was remodeled shortly before Gibson purchased it. The home has six bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, a gym, a library, an office, an elevator, a lagoon pool, a cabana, a bar and a wine cellar.
The Malibu deal preceded Gibson’s sale this month of his 28-room, Tudor-style mansion on 76 acres in Greenwich, Conn. The selling price of the 13-bedroom, 16,000-square-foot estate was reported by Bloomberg News as $39.5 million.
And in May, Gibson bought a 400-plus-acre agricultural and cattle ranch in Costa Rica for $25.8 million, according to La Nación, a Costa Rican publication.
The Oscar-winning director and co-producer (“Braveheart,” 1995) was born in New York but was raised in Australia, where he also has owned grazing and farmland.
He has had three houses in Malibu, including one he bought for $3.5 million in 2000. It has four bedrooms in 2,300 square feet and sits on 50 feet of sandy beach.
Gibson, 51, and his wife, Robyn, have seven children. He is also known for his work on “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) and “Apocalypto” (2006) and he starred in the ‘80s film “The Year of Living Dangerously” and the “Lethal Weapon” film series.
Elvira’s new place is cryptaculous
Shortly before potential contestants started to line up at the July 13 open “casket call” for Fox Reality’s “The Search for the Next Elvira,” the show’s muse, Cassandra Peterson, bought a new home for close to $1.8 million.
Peterson -- who created and portrays Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark -- isn’t giving up the shtick, it turns out. She’s simply searching for a surrogate handmaiden with whom to share personal-appearance duties of the TV character. The series will debut on Oct. 13.
In the meantime, Peterson, recently divorced, is settling into her new home in the Moreno Highlands area of Silver Lake.
Traditional in style, the 2,800-square-foot house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The living room has a fireplace and coffered wood ceilings. The gourmet kitchen has custom cabinetry and Viking appliances.
The home, remodeled by DSDesign-Los Angeles, also has a black-bottom pool and views of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Gail Crosby of Prudential California Realty in Los Feliz had the listing. Howard Stevens and Shyrl Lorino, both of Coldwell Banker Realty in Los Feliz, represented Peterson.
Peterson, 58, created Elvira as a TV host of horror films in the early ‘80s.
$20 mil? That’s in the ballpark
Former Dodger and Angel center fielder Steve Finley and his wife, Amy, have listed their Rancho Santa Fe estate at $20.5 million.
The one-story house has seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms in 12,000 square feet. It was built in 2006 and sits on 7 acres.
Finley, 42, was released by the Colorado Rockies in June after signing a $1-million, one-year contract. He spent 20 years in professional baseball. His wife designed the interiors of their home, where they lived for only a year.
“It was built on spec and then the Finleys moved in, but it’s a lot of house, and they have other development projects, so they put their home on the market,” said listing agent Jenny Jantzen of Barry Estates in Rancho Santa Fe.
A price banker would have valued
The Modern-style Malibu home of the late Daniel Jacoby, an Internet banking pioneer, has been sold for about $12 million.
Jacoby was a co-founding partner of Digital Insight, a dot-com firm that was sold to Intuit for $1.35 billion.
His three-story house, designed by Kanner Architects, was built in 1994 and later remodeled to include four bedrooms and 4 1/2 bathrooms in 3,800 square feet. The cube-shaped contemporary home has a waterfall entry, polished black granite kitchen counters, white marble bathrooms, a media room, three cantilevered decks and ocean views.
Jacoby also founded Interfaith Inventions Inc., a nonprofit organization that promotes interfaith youth camps nationwide. He died at age 38 in 2004 of brain cancer.
Mark Gruskin of Westside Estate Agency’s Malibu office had the listing.
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To see previous columns on celebrity realty transactions, go to latimes.com/hotproperty.
