$3M Villa Hits Right Notes
Oscar-winning singer/songwriter LIONEL RICHIE has purchased a Sunset Strip-area home for about $3.7 million, sources say.
The pop star, whose first album for Mercury Records is due out in early 1994, won his Oscar, five Grammys, 13 American Music Awards and a Golden Globe before he took a career break that lasted almost six years.
After he won the best song Oscar in 1986 for “Say You, Say Me” (from the film “White Nights”), Richie, 43, took a hiatus that lasted until last year, when his retrospective album “Back to Front,” was released, completing his contract with Motown.
“It was time to address the personal side of my life,” he said then. During the hiatus, which lasted years longer than he had planned, Richie was divorced after 17 years of marriage, and his father died during the same period. Richie also had some throat polyps removed.
He has been leasing a Beverly Hills-area home and will continue to live there until he completes some refurbishing on his new residence, sources say.
Built in 1979, the contemporary villa has five bedrooms, 6 1/2 baths and four fireplaces in about 6,000 square feet, all on one level. The estate also has a guest house, pool and tennis court.
Richie looked at the home several years ago and “loved its ambience with its 80-foot-long pool lined with olive trees,” a Beverly Hills realtor said.
Richie bought the home, which had been listed at $4.1 million, through probate court.
The Rancho Mirage estate of late baseball great DON DRYSDALE and his widow, Ann Meyers-Drysdale, has been put on the market at $1.85 million.
When the Hall of Fame pitcher and Dodger broadcaster died at age 56 in July, he left his widow, a four-time All-American basketball player at UCLA, and three young children.
Their home, priced at $1.85 million, has five bedrooms and 6 1/2 baths in about 8,000 square feet. Other features are a trophy room and pool with a waterfall. Gina Sullivan and Tom Ogle of Rodeo Realty at Prudential California, Palm Desert, share the listing.
The longtime Las Vegas home of the late, legendary filmmaker ORSON WELLES has been sold by his daughter, Beatrice, who had lived there off and on with her folks for years.
“It was the only permanent home Beatrice knew as she was growing up,” said listing agent Debra Duke of American Group, Realtors on Paradise Road in Las Vegas. “You couldn’t go in the house without being reminded of Orson Welles. There were so many pictures of the family in Spain, at the bullfights, with celebrities, at the Oscars.
“Beatrice adored his memory as a peaceful, loving man. But she has no remorse about selling the home. The new owners, attorneys Virginia Hunt and Arnold Weinstock, and their two little boys love the house, and Beatrice is happy to be getting on with her life.”
Beatrice Welles, who is in her 30s, and her husband, Christopher Smith, have rented a home about a mile away for a year, and they have a townhouse in Sedona, Ariz.
She is the youngest child of Welles, who died in 1985, and she is his only child with his third and last wife, the late Paola Mori, an Italian countess and actress to whom he was married for 30 years.
The five-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot house, built in 1971, sold for its latest asking price of $295,000, reduced from $345,000. It is in an equestrian community.
Two unusual, high-end home tours will be held today and Thursday.
* The San Marino Estates Tour, today from 2-5 p.m., by appointment only, will feature four homes that are on the market from $3.2 million to $4.95 million. The homes include Gen. George Patton’s parents’ former residence: a four-story, 25-room mansion with a five-room basement; elevator, tennis court and 7,000-square-foot, subterranean garage.
The mansion was owned by the Patton family from the time it was built in 1910 (a year after George Patton Jr. was graduated from West Point) until 1972, a year after the general’s sister, who had been living there, died.
Among the other homes on the tour are two Italian villas designed by Wallace Neff. Viewings may be arranged through Kim Atkinson-Melin at Prudential Rodeo Realty, San Marino, or John Tartaglione, Barbara Kahn or Bob Peterson at Douglas Properties, San Marino.
* The Celebrity Estates Interior Design Tour, Thursday starting at 5 p.m. with champagne and hors d’oeuvres and concluding with dessert and coffee, will feature slides of the homes of disc jockey Rick Dees, actress Jean Simmons, producer Garry Marshall and actor Walter Matthau, as well as the private hotel suites of actor Warren Beatty and Ronald Reagan.
Sponsored by the Decorative Arts Council of the L.A. County Museum of Art and organized by council member Bret Parsons, the photo tour will be held at the Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood. Tickets ($25 and $20, for museum members) can be bought at the door.
CLARIFICATION: Clippers Coach Bob Weiss was represented in leasing his Brentwood home (Hot Property, Oct. 3) by Penny Negrin-Duarte and Carolyn Gillespie of Fred Sands’ Pacific Palisades office.
