‘Wolves’ Man Takes to Hills
KEVIN COSTNER--whose “Dances With Wolves” won seven Academy Awards last month--his wife, Cindy, and their three children are settling into their newly built home in the foothills near Glendale.
The 6,500-square-foot house has five bedrooms, four fireplaces, a viewing room with a hidden screen and movie projector, and an office for the Oscar winner, who starred in “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham” before he directed and co-produced “Wolves.”
The Costners’ new home also has a swimming pool and about 75 pine and eucalyptus trees, which can be viewed from verandas and curved walls of glass.
“We didn’t want to cut down any of the trees, so we didn’t,” said John McInnes, the San Juan Capistrano architect/builder who designed the Costners’ new home. “One tree is 100 years old, and many are 30 to 40 feet tall.”
McInnes has known the Costners since the late 1970s when the actor was a framer on a house McInnes designed. Until they moved into their new home, the Costners lived in the same, small Pasadena house where they were living when McInnes met them.
“Kevin said then that two things were going to happen: first, that he was going to make it big in the entertainment industry, and second, that he’d have me design a house for them,” McInnes recalled.
He remembers spending years helping the Costners find a site, which they bought about four years ago but used as a rental until they were ready to build. There was a 1930s, 2,000-square-foot, Art Deco house on the nearly one-acre site, which was leveled except for a foundation, fireplace and wall.
“Cindy wanted an Old World, European-style residence, and Kevin wanted a rustic, natural environment where blue jeans, cowboy boots and a T-shirt wouldn’t look out of place,” McInnes said.
The end result is an Italian Mediterranean villa, which cost a bit less than $1 million to build and landscape. “It’s not glitzy,” McInnes said. “It’s a country retreat.”
ROD LAVER, one of history’s greatest tennis players, and his wife, Mary, have moved into their new home on the ninth fairway of an 18-hole golf course in Rancho Mirage.
“We’ve always enjoyed the desert, and I’m a hacker on the golf course, so this is just what we were looking for,” he said. “Besides, I can practice on one of the five tennis courts here.”
The Lavers bought a four-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home for an estimated $1.5 million in the gated community of Morningside, where the 52-year-old, two-time Grand Slam winner plans to conduct some tennis clinics.
“Our unit was one of the models, a duplex with a common firewall,” he said, “and we added a 30- to 40-foot-long skylight in the living room.”
The home has become the Lavers’ main residence. They moved from Newport Beach, where they had lived since 1966.
“I’m leasing a little place on the coast,” he said, “but desert tennis has expanded tenfold, and a number of great players live in this area now.” Among them, he listed Boris Becker and Charlie Pasarell.
Speaking of tennis . . . Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Pancho Gonzalez, Pancho Segura and other big names in the game have played on a professional court built by the late hotelier Howard Johnson at his former Bel-Air mansion, which has been listed at $3,595,000.
The 7,000-square-foot house, built in the 1960s, has five bedrooms, 7 1/2 baths and an indoor/outdoor family room with a kitchenette and bar for viewing the tennis court. The home also has a koi pond and a swimming pool.
The property, now owned by an interior designer who just completed refurbishing the house, is listed with Cecelia Waeschle and Joyce Rey at Rodeo Realty.
