Cher’s New Home: Only Temporary
CHER, who has been giving concerts from Boston to San Diego during the last couple of months, found time during her tour to buy a new $4-million house in Malibu, which she plans to use as her main residence until a mansion that she is having built nearby is completed.
The actress/singer is planning to build a house that a real estate source said will be “a sprawling, walled fortress, like something you would see coming out of the Arabian desert.”
Planned on 1.72 acres that she purchased last year near Pepperdine University, the ocean-view mansion is expected to be more than 15,000 square feet. It will replace a 40-year-old hacienda and some corrals that are now on the site.
Cher sold her 10,000-square-foot-plus home, with Egyptian decor, in Benedict Canyon about 18 months ago to actor/comedian Eddie Murphy for about $6.3 million, including some of her furnishings. She built that home 10 years ago.
The two-story home that she just purchased was built on slightly more than an acre in the Point Dume area. It is a Mediterranean-style house with five bedrooms, a step-down living room and marble fireplaces and flooring in about 5,200 square feet.
It also has an ocean view, tennis court, tennis pavilion and a waterfall that feeds a spa and a terraced swimming pool.
When telephoned, Ron Wilson, Cher’s interior designer, said: “In the house that she just purchased, we will do another extension of what Cher enjoys calling her ‘futuristic prehistoric’ style, which is a very textured, monochromatic approach to the interiors, using a lot of stone, precast concrete and natural materials.” The exterior is white.
Cher had been renting in Malibu since last fall, when she moved from a rental on Wilshire Boulevard.
STEPHANIE EDWARDS, the red-haired TV spokeswoman for Lucky Stores who co-hosted the 1990 Pasadena Rose Parade with Bob Eubanks and hosted Channel 9’s recently canceled “L.A. in the Morning,” and her husband, actor MURRAY MacLEOD, have decided to remodel in Santa Monica rather than build in Bel-Air.
They’re fixing up their longtime house near the beach and have put the Bel-Air property that they purchased for their dream house on the market at $1,525,000 with Micheline Swift at Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills. The property, a bit less than an acre with a three-bedroom fixer-upper on it, has city and ocean views.
The Beverly Hills house where JOSE MENENDEZ and his wife, KITTY, were murdered last August has been leased by a Saudi prince for two or three months at $40,000 a month, real estate sources say.
The house, which some realtors are calling “Nightmare on Elm Street” because of the killings that occurred there, was put on the market in June at $5.95 million.
“It was hardly listed when a doctor made an offer on it, but that deal fell through,” a source said.
Songwriters JOHN TRIVERS and ELIZABETH MYERS have just moved into a $1.25-million home they had built on The Strand in Hermosa Beach. They call their new home the “New York Loft by the California Sea.”
The musicians, who met while playing in the pit orchestra of the Broadway production of “Grease,” lived in an industrial space in the Park Avenue South section of New York City before moving West. The industrial space had been a sewing-machine factory and then a dance studio before it became their home.
“We wanted to re-create that loft feeling,” Myers said through his spokesman, Steve Goldberg.
Mark Appel, the Playa del Rey architect who built the strikingly contemporary Manhattan Beach house featured in the movie “Against All Odds,” designed the Hermosa Beach home, which Goldberg described as “high-tech.” The nearly 3,000-square-foot home has four baths and three bedrooms, including a master suite that overlooks the ocean and has a fireplace.
The living and dining areas are in one large room with exposed, red steel I-beams and a two-story atrium. An upstairs music room has hardwood floors, a vaulted ceiling, 12-foot-long skylight and mitered windows with a panoramic ocean view. It was designed especially for Myers’ grand piano.
Myers and Trivers created the musical theme for the “CBS Evening News,” Goldberg said, and Myers co-wrote the hit “Shakin’ ” with Eddie Money and orchestrated ballets for Agnes de Mille and the Joffrey Ballet. Trivers wrote songs for Blue Oyster Cult and played bass on the “We Are the World” LP with Tina Turner, Goldberg added.
Sculptor ERWIN BINDER, who counts Johnny Carson and Bob Hope among his dozens of famous collectors, has put his estate in Los Feliz Hills, just below the Griffith Park Observatory, on the market at $895,000.
Binder has owned the three-bedroom, three-bath villa with guest apartment/maid’s quarters, patios, loggias and gardens for about 20 years.
He decided to sell the nearly 3,000-square-foot home, built in 1926, because he wants a larger residence where he can create larger sculptures, said Bruce Jay, broker/co-founder of Bruce George Associates, who has the listing.
“We’re looking in the San Fernando Valley, because there is more land there,” Jay said.
Binder, who is listed in “Who’s Who in American Art,” has created a number of major pieces, including the controversial, 12-foot war memorial “Requiem” in Burbank.
