Brentwood to Backwoods?
ROSEANNE, whose hit ABC sitcom is in its eighth and final season, apparently has decided to leave Los Angeles. She has listed her two Brentwood residences for sale, separately or as a compound.
The Emmy-winning actress--who is also a producer, director and comedy writer--was reported last July as saying that she and her husband, Ben Thomas, were talking about moving from L.A., “maybe [to] a farm in Savannah.”
“I miss having horses and growing things,” she told USA Today at the time. “I liked having a farm in Iowa. I just know that I don’t want to live in L.A. anymore and don’t want to raise my kid here.”
A spokesman for Roseanne said the actress did not want to comment for this story.
Roseanne, 42, has four children over 18 and a son, born last August through an in vitro pregnancy to her and Thomas, whom she married last February.
Roseanne has owned one of her two Brentwood houses since May 1990. She bought the second house, next door, in May 1994, the year she divorced actor Tom Arnold.
The first house is listed at $4.5 million. It has been described as “a Tudor-Alpine chalet” with six bedrooms, a guest house and three fireplaces in a bit more than 6,000 square feet. It was built in 1982.
The second home, built of white brick, is listed at $3.1 million and has six bedrooms and a projection room in about 3,000 square feet. It was built in 1938.
Barbara Robinson at John Aaroe & Associates, Beverly Hills, has the listing.
*
Chinese painter TING SHAO KUANG, who designed the United Nations stamps commemorating the “Fourth World Conference on Women” last September in Beijing, has purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for about $7 million, sources say.
The transaction is the most expensive private residential sale for Beverly Hills during 1995, sources say.
Ting, who was too poor as a child to buy oil paint and so mixed cooking oil with pigments to create portraits of his neighbors, studied art at the prestigious Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing. He became the acknowledged leader of the Yunnan School of Art before moving in 1980 to the United States.
The Beverly Hills home was on the market at $35 million in 1990, when it was completed by its original owner, a builder. The house has at least 12 bedrooms in 36,000 square feet. It also has a two-lane bowling alley and an indoor swimming pool.
The builder lost the house through foreclosure, and a Russian banker bought it in 1993 at a spirited bankruptcy auction for about $11.5 million.
Raymond Bekeris of John Bruce Nelson Associates had the listing. Nicholas Camilleri of the newly established Greystone Properties, Beverly Hills, represented Ting.
*
Another large sale in late 1995 was the $6.2-million purchase by businessman MARK HUGHES of developer William Bone’s Malibu Colony home of 10 years.
Hughes is chief executive of Herbalife, a personal and skin-care products distributor. The company plans to move its headquarters in February from Inglewood to Century City, not far from Hughes’ Beverly Hills home, known as Grayhall. Hughes acquired Grayhall in 1992 through a real estate trade valued at more than $20 million.
Bone, whose firm is based in Palm Desert, was the previous owner of Michael Jackson’s 2,600-acre Santa Ynez Valley ranch.
The Malibu home has seven bedrooms in 6,000 square feet, with 60 feet of beach frontage, sources say.
*
The number of $5-million-plus homes that sold in 1995 doubled to 12 from six the previous year, according to Cecelia Waeschle of the Prudential-Rodeo-Douglas Co. in Beverly Hills. Waeschle has been tracking high-end home sales since 1987.
“The increase in sales for homes priced at over $5 million is attributable to the fact that there were serious sellers willing in some cases to take a 50% reduction from what they had paid for the properties,” Waeschle said.
The biggest purchase on the Westside was made by Barbra Streisand, who bought three houses to form a compound in Malibu. She paid about $12 million for the properties.
*
Restaurateurs HARRY and MARILYN LEWIS have listed their Wilshire penthouse at $4.95 million.
In 1950, the Lewises founded the Hamburger Hamlet chain, which they sold in 1987, the same year they opened Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills. They still own Kate Mantilini and, last year, agreed to buy back the Hamlet Gardens in Westwood.
The Lewises, who also have a house in Beverly Hills, have owned the penthouse since its 22-story high-rise was built in 1982. The 6,000-square-foot condo has 700 square feet of terraces, a den, library, silk-covered walls, three bedrooms and staff quarters.
Mike Silverman, who sold the Lewises their first home in Beverly Hills about the time they opened the first Hamburger Hamlet, and Kay Pick share the listing at Mike Silverman Estates, a Prudential-Jon Douglas Co.
