Dodger Scores in Home Game

Dodger pitcher TOM CANDIOTTI has purchased a home in Bel-Air for a bit more than $1 million.

Candiotti, 34, started his pro career in 1979, but it wasn’t until the middle of last season, when he left the Cleveland Indians and joined the Toronto Blue Jays, that he gained much notice. That’s when his knuckle-ball pitch “finally came together,” he said.

In December, Candiotti became the first knuckle-ball pitcher in the National League since 1983, when he signed a four-season, $15.5-million contract with the Dodgers, his favorite childhood team.

Candiotti, who grew up in the Northern California town of Concord, learned the knuckle ball as a child from his father, but he only started refining the pitch after he joined the Indians in 1986.

During his first pro season, with the Victoria team in British Columbia, he slept in a sleeping bag in the clubhouse. Before he left the Blue Jays, he was living in a Toronto hotel, though his primary residence was in the San Francisco Bay area.

His new home is in the gated community of Bel-Air Crest, developed by Goldrich & Kest.

The three-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot-plus house has 17-foot high ceilings in the entry and a sports bar capable of producing ice cream sodas.

The master bath has a spa and unobstructed views of the project’s golf course and deer path. There is a circular stairway to his private garden, which also has a spa and a putting green surrounded by fruit trees.

He is divorced and has two children.

The Beverly Hills family home of actor RICK SCHRODER, who is best known for his roles in the “Silver Spoon” NBC series and the 1989 miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” is on the market at $4.7 million.

Schroder, who co-starred with Michele Lee in the 1991 CBS movie “My Son Johnny,” and has just completed filming “The Call of the Wild” in Canada, is in Russia making another movie. He plans to appear in “The Return of Lonesome Dove,” which is in development and scheduled to run during the 1992-93 season.

He has been living in a newly built 4,000-square-foot house on a 17,000-acre western Colorado cattle ranch, which he purchased last year.

His parents, Richard and Diane, plan to relocate to the ranch, where Schroder, 22, lives with his baby son and son’s mother, Andrea.

Schroder’s parents built their Beverly Hills house, completing it about 2 1/2 years ago on the site of late actress Gloria Swanson’s estate. Rick and his sister, Dawn, lived there only briefly, sources said.

The 9,200-square-foot, Mediterranean-style home has five bedroom suites, a three-story gallery, billiard room, guest house and outdoor kitchen.

It was originally listed at $6.7 million, but was taken off the market before being listed recently with Adrian Grant, Yves Mieszala and Joyce Essex, all of Fred Sands’ offices in Beverly Hills.

DENISE Di NOVI--who produced “Batman Returns,” “Heathers” and “Edward Scissorhands”--and her husband, cinematographer CHRIS TAYLOR, have put their Sherman Oaks home on the market so they can move nearer to Columbia Studios in Culver City, where she plans to open her offices in September.

“They’re looking in Brentwood and the Palisades for a home,” said listing agent Kathy Villa of Asher Dann & Associates, Beverly Hills.

Their Sherman Oaks home is a two-story contemporary with a pool and decks with mountain and city views. The asking price is $799,000.

Singer/actress ANNA MARIA ALBERGHETTI, just back from Italy where she’s refurbishing a 17th-Century house, has closed escrow on a new home for herself in Bel-Air.

“It’s much smaller,” she said by telephone last week, comparing it to the 6,800-square-foot Benedict Canyon home that she sold for $1.5 million before leaving for Europe in June. “But it’s a great house, an architectural dream, very modern with glass looking out everywhere at the trees.”

She had been apprehensive about living elsewhere, after spending 28 years in her former home, an English Tudor with heavy beams. But now that she’s in her new home, she loves the change, she said, adding, “It’s a reflection of how you can grow inside.”

Alberghetti bought her new home for about the same amount as she received for her former residence, she said. Micheline Swift, a friend of Alberghetti, and Craig Blanchard, both of Rodeo Realty, represented her in the purchase and sale.

A turn-of-the-century Bel-Air mansion that was once the home of film star CLARA BOW is being turned into a design-showcase house to benefit the Venice Family Clinic.

Among the more than 40 architects, interior and landscape designers participating in the project, which will be open to the public in October, are singer Dionne Warwick, whose Dionne Warwick Design Group was formed nine years ago, and Van-Martin Rowe, who will create what he terms “a Celestial Observatory” to satisfy a dream of the homeowners, entertainment attorney Charles Sweet and his wife, Cheryl.

“It has been their dream since they read about the concept in one of his rare books on ancient astronomy,” Rowe said.

The observatory will be created on a deck off the master bedroom, where the Sweets can watch the movement of the setting sun. There will be a metal sculpture on the deck that will function as a railing while tracking and recording the movement of the planets.