Dunaway at Home in City Farmhouse
FAYE DUNAWAY, who is co-starring with Robert Duvall in the futuristic movie “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has purchased a home described as “a perfect, stone Connecticut farmhouse in a prime Beverly Hills Post Office Area location.”
Dunaway bought the house for about $2.5 million, according to public records, which also show a $1.5-million trust deed.
“So she must’ve put down a cool million,” said the title company representative. The property had been listed at $2,595,000.
The home was built in 1937, but was recently remodeled, other industry sources said. It has three bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths in three stories. There is a steam shower in the master suite.
The home also has a swimming pool and a two-story guest house, which Dunaway probably will use for her offices, said realtors not involved in the transaction.
The actress started her own production company, South Atlantic Film Enterprises, in 1987, when she moved back to her longtime Manhattan apartment from London after divorcing British photographer Terry O’Neill.
Movie mogul JACK L. WARNER’S home, the last great Beverly Hills estate to be owned by one family since Hollywood’s Golden Age, is about to come on the market, and the competition is fierce among realtors to get the listing.
“Four of us are doing everything we can to get it,” a prominent Beverly Hills broker admitted.
“Some brokers have been quietly showing it for some time at $45 million, but it might sell right away now,” another local broker said.
When listed, the 9-acre estate is expected to be one of the highest-priced private residences in the country.
Since the 1920s, it had belonged to Jack Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros. studios, and his wife, Ann. She died March 8, reportedly at 82. He died in 1978 at 86.
The property has a two-story, Georgian-style mansion on it, reached through two sets of gates and a drive through a sycamore forest. There is a courtyard in front of the house with a large fountain and a 300-year-old sundial.
There was a nine-hole golf course on the site. “But it was covered over after Jack died, so now, it’s just a grassy knoll area,” one of the brokers explained. “But the gardens are magnificent.”
KATHY SMITH, an NBC “Today Show” fitness correspondent who has had a couple of videos on the best-selling charts, and her husband, producer Steve Grace, have bought a home in Brentwood to accommodate their family’s active lifestyle.
Their 60-year-old home, on just under an acre, already had a swimming pool and a tennis court when the Smiths bought it for $1.85 million, and they are adding a master suite and a gym, where their daughter, 16-month-old Kate, can also work out.
The Smiths sold their former home in Westwood for $1.45 million.
One of the few large, classic California bungalows to go on the market in the past decade has been listed at $3.4 million.
Known as the Duncan-Irwin House for two of its original owners, the Craftsman-style home in Pasadena was a redesign by CHARLES and HENRY GREENE.
The original house was built in 1900. The Greenes redesigned it in 1906, combining architectural styles of the Swiss and the Japanese with a then-popular California design that used shingles.
The present owner, Dr. Michael Citron, an internist, spent nearly 10 years restoring the five-bedroom, four-bath house, which has 5,974 square feet of interior space and more than 2,000 square feet of terraces, porches and balconies.
Citron listed his home with Astrid Ellersieck of Jim Dickson Realtors in Altadena, because he wants to build a new Craftsman-style home in Washington state, Ellersieck said.
MAX MONTOYA, the All-Pro offensive lineman with the Cincinnati Bengals who was signed a few weeks ago as a free agent by the Raiders, says he’ll still buy a house in Los Angeles, despite the franchise’s planned move.
“In fact, my wife is out there looking right now, but we’ve been living in the Cincinnati area so long--eight years now--that it’s a shock to come home,” said the former Southern Californian by phone from his home just outside Cincinnati.
“We built our home here for less than $500,000, but it has an acre overlooking the Ohio River, and it’s a 4,800-square-foot custom home. When you see what you can get for $500,000 in L.A., it hurts.”
Montoya, who grew up in La Puente, and his wife, who is from Rowland Heights, are looking for a new home in the $500,000 range in Covina, Brea or Anaheim Hills.
“My mom’s helping us,” he said. “She’s a realtor with Red Carpet in Hacienda Heights.”
The SPRECKELS MANSION in San Francisco, owned by the Spreckels family since it was built in 1912, has gone on the market at $13.5 million.
The 27-room house, which occupies half a city block in the Pacific Heights area, was built for Adolph Spreckels, son of sugar king Claus Spreckels. Adolph Spreckels died in 1924.
In recent years, the mansion has been occupied a few months of the year by Spreckels’ daughter, DOROTHY MUNN, who also has homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Paris, according to Rollin Pechha at Fox & Carskadon/Better Homes & Gardens in San Francisco, who has the listing.
“She just decided the time had come to sell it,” he said.
The French baroque-style home has 12 bedrooms and 12 1/2 baths in 15,000 square feet, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Bay. There is an indoor pool in a separate structure, which also has a kitchen, changing room, lounge and five-car garage.
