Meryl’s Choice: Home on Westside
Actress MERYL STREEP, a native of New Jersey who has been outspoken about liking to live on the East Coast, and her husband, sculptor DONALD GUMMER, have bought a house in Los Angeles.
“We bought here because I got a job here. I never made a movie in Hollywood before,” she said in a telephone interview from the Burbank set of “Defending Your Life,” a romantic comedy co-starring Albert Brooks.
Streep, who won Academy Awards in 1982 as best actress in “Sophie’s Choice” and in 1979 as best supporting actress in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” most recently co-starred with Roseanne Barr in “She-Devil.”
“We were renting (in Santa Monica) and found it hard to live among other people’s things, so we decided to get a place of our own,” she explained. The couple have three children.
The Gummers bought a two-story, Spanish-style house on the Westside for slightly more than $3 million, real estate sources said.
Built in 1972, the 6,469-square-foot house has four bedrooms, 5 1/2 baths, a dramatic spiral staircase and electric gates leading into a garden and circular driveway. The home also has mountain and canyon views.
“We’re planning to go home (to Connecticut),” she said, “but we found this (house) as a place where we can stay whenever we come out and I work here again.
“We really like Los Angeles.”
GRETA GARBO’S “West Coast residence,” where the actress, who died April 15, spent her winters for 25 years, is on the market at $2.7 million.
Garbo owned considerable real estate at one time in the Beverly Hills area but sold it all, including four commercial buildings on Rodeo Drive, sources said.
The French Regency-style house, on 3 acres in the Beverly Hills Post Office Area, is owned by Anthony Palermo, Garbo’s business manager and confidant for the last 14 years.
“But for all intents and purposes, it was her house,” he said. “She gardened and had her roses there.”
Palermo bought the home for her to use, he said, after nutritionist Gayelord Hauser, Garbo’s longtime friend, died in 1984.
“When he passed away, the property was in the name of the Gayelord Hauser trust,” Palermo recalled. “Miss Garbo said to me, ‘Gosh, what am I going to do? I’m too old to own another house, to have it in my name.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry.’ I bought it from the trust so she could come there and be undisturbed.”
The three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home, built in the ‘30s, has a guest house and a swimming pool. It has been rented, for short periods, by actor Dudley Moore and film exec David Putnam.
Palermo put the property on the market for a short time last year when Garbo was ill. “But now . . . I’m intent on selling it,” he said. It’s listed with Joe Coons at Rodeo/Prudential Realty.
CURTIS HENDRIX, the New York entrepreneur who last year relocated to Los Angeles and bought the former Sanwa Bank Building--a 13-story office tower on South Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles--for $135 million, just purchased, with a partner, 410 acres in Malibu and an 1,849-acre ranch in San Luis Obispo.
Hendrix didn’t say how much they paid for the properties but indicated that he and his partner will develop them each at a cost in the $50-million range. Hendrix’s partner is John Paul Jones Dejoria, founder and owner of Paul Mitchell Hair Products.
“We’re working on something for Malibu that will be helpful in solving some of the environmental problems and not create traffic,” Hendrix said, adding that he should have more details in a few weeks.
About 2,000 feet of the Malibu property fronts on Pacific Coast Highway, and the rest is in Tuna Canyon, less than 2 miles north of Sunset Boulevard. It had been owned for 20 years by a doctor and other investors and is divided into 14 estate sites.
The San Luis Obispo property, known as the Eagle’s Nest Ranch, came with zoning approvals for an 18-hole golf course and 225-room lodge.
“We’re also going to create 16 50- to 100-acre ranchettes with rights to use the hotel and golf course,” Hendrix said. “We’re in the process of submitting drawings (to the city).”
While also forming development options for their Malibu property, Dejoria has begun construction in Malibu on a 15,000-square-foot, Mediterranean-style mansion for himself and his family.
McDonald’s fast-food founder RAY KROC’S former 204-acre Santa Ynez Valley ranch will be open to the public and prospective buyers for the first time Saturday and next Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Now owned by the Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities, the ranch was developed and used by Kroc, who died in 1984, as a country retreat for his family and business associates.
It’s on the market through Coldwell Banker’s Montecito and Santa Barbara offices at $11.5 million, reduced from its $14-million asking price when first listed last August.
The property includes a 4,700-square-foot owner’s residence on a 20-acre hilltop; a 15-bedroom guest house; theater, conference/library building, two helicopter pads, twin tennis courts, a volleyball court, stables and two swimming pools.
The ranch can be reached from the Armour Ranch Road exit of Highway 154 in the Santa Ynez Valley, after a 22-mile drive over the San Marcos Pass from Santa Barbara.
Dodger first baseman EDDIE MURRAY has purchased a new Normandy-style, 10,000-square-foot house with a private lake and free-standing, 4,000-square-foot chauffeur’s quarters in Sand Canyon at $3.4 million, sources say.
Sand Canyon is the wealthy residential area of Canyon Country, southwest of the Antelope Valley Freeway.
Murray’s purchase is believed to be one of the highest sales in the area.
