Joan Collins Buys Dynasty-Type House

Actress Joan Collins has bought a Dynasty-type house in Beverly Hills.

Familiar to TV viewers as Alexis Carrington on the popular weekly show “Dynasty,” Collins purchased the mansion--built in the early ‘60s by the late British actor Laurence Harvey--for herself and her spouse and business partner, Peter Holm. (After they were married last November, they co-produced the TV special “Sins,” which also starred Collins when it aired in February.)

Their home is on 1 3/4 acres behind gates and has about 12,000 square feet, including a 2,500-square-foot guest house and a 9,500-square-foot main residence with three bedrooms and two maid’s rooms. It also has a pool and a view, which its former owner apparently didn’t have the chance to enjoy.

Stephen Shapiro, executive vice president of Stan Herman & Associates in Beverly Hills, said the seller is an 80-year-old gentleman who “lives in several places throughout the world. He bought the place because he thought he was going to spend time here but then found that he had no need to come to Beverly Hills.”

Shapiro represented Collins in the sale. “You want to know how it happened?” he asked. “I went to Spago for dinner and Joan was there. I gave her a kiss hello, then said I had heard that she had bought the Rock Hudson house.

“She said, ‘No, Stephen, I didn’t buy that, and when are you going to find me a house?’ I told her I had just the house for her, showed her the one house the next day, and she bought it.”

In the past, Shapiro also sold houses to Collins’ sister Jackie, author of “Hollywood Wives” and other novels, and Linda Evans (Krystle Carrington on “Dynasty”). “And our office sold Catherine Oxenberg (Amanda in “Dynasty”) a house,” he added. Sounds like this should be in “All in the Family.”

Now that she has bought the mansion, Joan Collins has listed her smaller home (a little more than 5,000 square feet) in the “Beverly Hills Post-Office area” for $1 million with Shapiro. Other sources indicate that she paid about $2 million for her new digs.

“Ted Field just bought the Harold Lloyd house!” announced Bernard C. Solomon, president of the Everest Record Group, who had owned the famous mansion since he and his wife, Dona, purchased it in 1979.

Field, an heir of Chicago department-store magnate Marshall Field, was mentioned in “Hot Property” two weeks ago. It was his 10,000-square-foot house, also known as the old David O. Selznick estate, that Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon bought.

(Selznick lived there while producing “Gone With the Wind” in 1939, but Field reportedly never lived there, having bought the place about four years ago just before getting a divorce.)

“Now Ted Field, who is newly married, has one of the six great estates of the West Side,” Jeff Hyland, who co-authored “The Estates of Beverly Hills” (published by Margrant Publishing Co. of Beverly Hills), said.

Patterned after a 17th-Century Italian villa and completed for silent-film star Harold Lloyd in 1928, the 36,000-square-foot home, also known as Greenacres, has 44 rooms, including a hand-painted garden room where Lloyd’s Christmas tree stood all year. It has a built-in pipe organ and projection facilities, gold-leaf coffered ceiling, circular oak staircase, and dining room in two cities.

“Lloyd used to joke that he had dinner in Beverly Hills while his friends in the same room dined in L.A.,” Hyland said.

Hyland, who is also a principal of Alvarez, Hyland & Young in Beverly Hills, represented the sellers in the Greenacres sale (which was part of the Solomons’ divorce proceedings) along with Victoria Lockwood of his firm and Joyce Rey of Merrill Lynch/Rodeo Realty. Paris Moskopoulos of Paris Realty, who listed the house that Field sold to McMahon, represented Field.

Greenacres was listed for $9 million but went for the court appraisal of $6.5 million.

Wonder what the “six great estates of the West Side” are? Besides Greenacres, they include:

--the 55-room oil-rich Doheny family’s Greystone, now owned by the city of Beverly Hills and about to be turned into a modern-art museum;

--hotel magnate Conrad Hilton’s house, now owned by real estate tycoon David Murdock;

--the Kirkeby estate, being marketed by the Kirkeby heirs (through Willis M. Allen Co. in La Jolla and Jon Douglas Co. of Beverly Hills) as “the world’s most expensive single-family home” for $27 million;

--Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion West, built by the son of the original owner of Holmby Hills, and

--Beverly Hills co-founder Burton Green’s 10,000-square-foot house, recently owned by thoroughbred-horse owner Eugene Klein (former owner of the San Diego Chargers and, before that, National General Corp.) and currently owned by a Middle Eastern businessman who added on a 10,000-square-foot guest house/guardhouse/garage.

So you thought home prices in California were going up? Check out Manhattan, where Douglas Elliman-Gibbons & Ives has released a comparison of the average selling price of a co-op apartment in 1976 with one last year. The figure, for the same unit, jumped from $63,167 to $626,977! (By the Douglas Elliman Index, that’s an average selling price of $117,431 a room.)