Singer’s Gift on the Block

SINEAD O’CONNOR’S Los Feliz home, which she donated to the Red Cross in a December phone call to a TV talk show in Great Britain, will be auctioned Thursday at the Savoy Hotel in London to benefit the international organization’s Somalia relief fund.

The 25-year-old, Irish singer/songwriter weathered a storm of controversy and was even booed off the stage at a nationally televised Bob Dylan tribute concert in New York after she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II in an October appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

Her album “Am I Not Your Girl?,” released last September, includes a poem at the end that she wrote, attacking Western spiritual values. Her 1990 album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” is a collection of introspective songs, which she also wrote.

She had owned the Los Feliz home since 1990, when she paid, sources say, about $900,000 for it. It was on the market most recently at $719,000.

Built in the 1920s, the colonial-style house has five bedrooms and four baths in about 3,200 square feet; a solar-heated, black-bottom pool; a spa, and a terraced yard with a view of Griffith Park, which it adjoins.

“She moved in and painted some partial murals in the house, but then she left some time ago,” a real estate source said. She relocated to London in 1991.

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RICK HILTON, a grandson of late hotelier Conrad Hilton, and his wife, Kathy, are planning to enlarge the Bel-Air home they bought just before Christmas from actress Jaclyn Smith.

Smith, who had owned the home since 1980, had expanded the 1936-era house herself, from 5,400 to about 7,000 square feet. She moved to another Bel-Air home, which she bought last spring.

The Hiltons, who gave their first party in the house during the holidays, are planning to increase their living quarters by another several thousand feet, including new sleeping accommodations and a library/study, sources say. Robert Earl is shown in public documents as the architect. The house, which is on an acre behind gates and has a view from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean, was on the market last year at nearly $4 million.

Hilton, one of Barron Hilton’s eight children, also has an interest in the Hilton family’s 42-estate development in Brentwood, where lot prices start at $2.5 million. Conrad Hilton bought 240 acres for the project before he died in 1979, and it only recently opened sales.

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MICKEY KANTOR, who was confirmed in late January as President Clinton’s U.S. trade representative, has put his Beverly Hills-area home on the market at $2,495,000. It is also available for lease at $11,500 a month.

Kantor--who was a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Manatt, Phelps, Phillips and Kantor--has owned the sprawling, country-farmhouse-style home for six years.

The walled and gated home has four fireplaces in about 6,000 square feet on 1 1/4 acres. The house was built in 1938. Mark Rosenberg and Patricia August of the Enright Co. have the listing.

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“THE WITCH’S COTTAGE,” built by set designer Henry Oliver in 1921 as a film production office in Culver City and moved five years later to become a residence in Beverly Hills, is listed at $2.9 million with Bruce Nelson of John Bruce Nelson & Associates, Beverly Hills.

Oliver designed the building to resemble the home of the fairy-tale witch who tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. The seller is a woman who has owned the home for about 20 years.

The three-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot house has a picket fence of rough-cut, unpainted wood. The lawn is bisected by a moat, and the gable, of cedar shakes, rises into a three-story peak. *

The nationally syndicated TV show “BOB VILA’S HOME AGAIN” has been transforming a 1950s Malibu beach house into a Spanish Colonial Revival-style villa.

The end result, designed by Westlake architect Barrey Robles with interiors by Liaf Fishel, is intended to look something like the former Adamson residence, which is now the Malibu Lagoon Museum.

The Malibu home is a joint venture of Vila’s company--which buys houses, remodels them for his program, then resells them--and Steve Blanchard of Venice. Ellen Francisco at Jon Douglas Co. in Malibu has the listing, at just under $3 million.