Bob Hope Finally <i> Sells</i> Something
Who says Bob Hope never sells a piece of real estate?
The comedian--who is well known for his vast, Southern California property holdings--and his wife, Dolores, sold a vacant lot in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking Universal Studios, for $60,000 to a married couple who reportedly plan to build a house on it.
Patti Chiarodit of Ramsey-Shilling Realtors, Toluca Lake, represented the Hopes, and Liz Titizian of Century 21-Bud Margolin Realtors, Studio City, represented the buyers.
Ken Olin and Patricia Wettig, real-life husband and wife who co-star in TV’s “thirtysomething,” have moved, from Pacific Palisades to a larger home in Brentwood, which they purchased for $1.3 million from job-recruiter-turned caterer Joan Baeder Voge and her husband Bill, a UTA Airlines executive.
Escrow closed a few days ago on the 46-year-old Cape Cod-style house, with pool, north of Sunset Boulevard.
Judy Firestone of the Jon Douglas Co., Santa Monica, represented the buyers, and Betty Sulkin and Cecelia Waeschle of Merrill Lynch/Rodeo Realty, Beverly Hills, represented the Voges.
1989 is getting a jump start on high-end home purchases, judging by the fact that . . . . several Beverly Hills area homes, selling for more than $4 million each, entered escrow in the past week. (More on them in future columns.)
Now that the count is in, the 1988 $5-million-and-more market for the Westside of L.A. was, indeed, sizzling, with 21 closings before December and 11 more in escrow that month. In 1986, there were only 13 Westside houses sold in that stratosphere, and in 1987, there were seven.
Marvin Davis and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be among those welcoming invited guests Thursday at a party marking the opening of the $20-million Sports Club/Irvine.
The oilman-turned-tycoon is one of the owners, and the basketball great is a member of the new, 100,000-square-foot club--the second large and luxurious facility in a sports-club chain. (The first large club, which opened in West L.A. in 1987, has boasted such celebrity members as Princess Stephanie of Monaco, Teri Garr, Linda Gray, Kenny Loggins, Lou Ferrigno and Pat Boone.)
Other owners of the Sports Club/Irvine are Michael Talla and Nanette Pattee Francini, who started the chain with the smaller Sports Connections, and members of the development partnership Miller-Klutznick-Davis-Gray. This is the Davis group’s first project with Talla and Francini.
Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards paid $3.6 million for a Brentwood house just before Christmas as a gift for her daughter by her first marriage, we just learned.
The actress and her producer husband live near Paradise Cove in Malibu. The house they bought for her daughter, Emma, is one of the first built in Brentwood by Columbia Savings, which formerly specialized in tearing down and rebuilding in Beverly Hills.
The 6,900-square-foot Brentwood house replaced a 1950s-era, 3,000-square-footer worth about $1.3 million.
Auction lovers from throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan have been invited to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville next Saturday to see such Tennessee properties as these go on the block:
The former Hank Williams Sr. home in Nashville; the 197-acre Milky Way farm with its 20,000-square-foot mansion, built for Frank Mars (inventor of the Mars candy bar) in Pulaski; the Bellevue Mansion, which dates back to the 1790s, in Nashville, and singer Ronnie Milsap’s farm in Williamson County, Tenn.
Linda Arvin of Nashville--one of only a dozen female, certified auctioneers in the country--will handle the bids and qualify the buyers, within 3-5 working days of the event. Y’all come, she says.
Chuck Fries, chairman of Fries Entertainment (producer of TV movies and mini-series), closed escrow a few days ago on a 9,000-square-foot house on 1.4 acres in Beverly Hills for $5.6 million.
The TV mogul sold another big (8,162-square-foot) Beverly Hills house last June for $3.5 million to radio psychologist Toni Grant and her multimillionaire husband, John Bell, chairman and CEO of Bell Packaging Corp., headquartered in Indiana. (What a commute!)
