There’s ‘Gold’ in Hidden Hills
RUE McCLANAHAN, the Emmy Award-winning actress who played Blanche Devereaux in “The Golden Girls” and “The Golden Palace” sitcoms, has sold her three-acre Encino home and bought a Hidden Hills ranchette.
“It had to be done quickly because she opened last week in previews of ‘After-Play,’ a new Ann Meara play at the Manhattan Theatre Club,” said McClanahan’s manager, Barbara Lawrence. The play opens in New York on Feb. 2.
McClanahan has appeared on Broadway as well as in regional and stock theater, and she was a regular in the 1970s comedy series “Maude.” More recently, she has been a guest star on a number of series, including “The Mommies” last weekend.
She sold her 6,000-square-foot Encino home, on three acres, for close to its $1,995,000 asking price to Robert (Smitty) Smith, president of Frankfort Balkind Partners, a motion-picture advertising firm, and his wife, Dr. Gail Schlesinger, vice president of Medical Diagnostic Imaging Associates, specialists in sports medicine and sports injuries.
McClanahan bought a five-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot house on 1.5 acres for $1.3 million, sources say. Situated in a gate-guarded community, the home, which she calls “a ranchette,” also has a tennis court, pool, spa, stable and corral.
McClanahan also has an apartment in Paris, which she bought about this time last year for slightly more than $1 million, and she has a Victorian farmhouse at Lake Arrowhead.
Ann Cross and David Rambo of Prudential Rodeo Realty, Sherman Oaks, represented both sides of the deal involving the Encino house.
SIR GORDON WHITE, co-founder of the British Hanson Trust and chairman of the group’s U.S. operations, has sold his home in Beverly Park, a gate-guarded community overlooking Beverly Hills, for about $9 million, including furnishings, sources say.
The Hanson Trust became one of Britain’s largest concerns by buying and selling companies on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s.
White bought his newly built Beverly Park home in 1989 for a bit more than $7 million. Shortly after closing escrow, he was said to have spent $3 million more in remodeling and adding a guest house.
In 1992, he bought a Bel-Air home for $6.8 million. The house, a French villa on a four-acre private knoll, had been owned by Abraham Lurie, Marina del Rey’s largest developer before he filed for bankruptcy in June, 1991.
The Beverly Park home was White’s first residence in the United States. He has other homes in London and New York City, sources have said.
The listing agent was Don Ellis of John Aaroe & Associates; the selling agent was Beverly St. Lawrence of Prudential Rodeo Realty.
The buyer has been described as an individual with a residence in Century City.
Comedian YAKOV SMIRNOFF, who moved with his wife and two children to Branson, Mo., about a year ago, has sold his Pacific Palisades home, which he first put on the market last January.
The ranch-style home, overlooking the Riviera Golf Course, was sold for just under $2 million, sources say. Its last asking price was about $2.1 million. The buyers were described as a local businessman and his attorney wife.
The house has three bedrooms plus maid’s quarters in 3,300 square feet.
Smirnoff performs regularly in Branson and plays a zany flight attendant in the N.Y. Skyride, a virtual reality theater due to open officially in February at the Empire State Building.
The buyers were represented by Richard Stearns and Carole Schiffer of Fred Sands’ Brentwood office. The Smirnoffs were represented by Jackie Fronen and Raquel Kaufman at Nourmand & Associates, Beverly Hills.
The Elrod House, designed by the late architect JOHN LAUTNER, has been listed at just under $2 million. The nearly 8,000-square-foot, concrete-and-glass house, on about 23 acres in Palm Springs, was a set for the James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever.”
Built for interior designer Arthur Elrod in 1968, the house, likened to a spaceship, has a circular living room 60 feet across with skylights radiating from the center like a desert flower. The home also has an indoor/outdoor pool and a two-bedroom guest house.
In foreclosure and owned by a bank, the house is listed by Louise Hampton of Prudential California Realty in Palm Springs.
Lautner, one of the greatest American contemporary architects, was still actively working on projects at the time of his death, at age 83, last October.
RICHARD GRIECO, star of the new Stephen J. Cannell series “Marker,” has completed a $450,000-plus renovation just in time for the first anniversary this week of the Northridge earthquake, which had severely damaged the home.
The refurbishing was also completed in time for the debut, this Tuesday, of Grieco’s new series, about a young man who inherits his father’s legacy of helping people who cash in their “markers.”
Grieco, 29, decided to remodel rather than relocate. So, his five-bedroom, trilevel home overlooking the San Fernando Valley underwent an earthquake retrofit while also getting some cherrywood floors, barn-wood walls and mahogany kitchen and bar cabinets.
Grieco, who played the maverick detective Booker in Fox’s “21 Jump Street” before appearing in the TV film “Born to Run” and the USA movie “A Vow to Kill,” is commuting to Hawaii to star in “Marker,” a one-hour mystery.
Susan White of White Design, Corona del Mar, designed the renovation, and Ray Hanna of Hanna Construction, Costa Mesa, completed it.
