Newlyweds Ace Las Vegas Home
Tennis great ANDRE AGASSI bought a Las Vegas house for just under $2 million shortly before his wedding April 19 to actress BROOKE SHIELDS. It will be one of their first homes as a married couple, local Realtors say.
Agassi, 26, won the 1992 Wimbledon title, the 1994 U.S. Open, the 1995 Australian Open and the 1996 U.S. Olympic gold medal. Last year, he also won two other titles. His career prize money totals more than $12 million. He has been playing tennis since he was 4 and has been a professional player for a decade.
Shields, 31, stars in the NBC sitcom “Suddenly Susan.” In 1995, she played Rizzo in the Broadway musical “Grease” and appeared as a guest star in an episode of “Friends.” She was a model from the age of 1.
She moved from her native New York to California to work on the sitcom. At first, she stayed with friends, but for the last few months she has been renting a house in Los Angeles.
Agassi, who was born in Las Vegas, has owned a home there for some time. He still has that home, a compound in a gated community, but he recently sold some land and then bought the additional house for $1.9 million, local sources say.
The house has four bedrooms in 6,000 square feet plus a guest cottage. It’s on an acre in an established part of the city. Built in the early 1960s, the house was owned at one time by Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones, sources have said.
The house is expected to be renovated and redecorated to suit the newlyweds.
Producer-director JOHN LANDIS, who has been developing a TV series based on the hit 1989 movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and his wife, Deborah, have sold their Beverly Hills home, formerly owned by actor ROCK HUDSON, for $9 million, industry sources say.
Landis, 46, has been the executive producer and occasional director since 1990 of the HBO sitcom “Dream On,” and he was executive producer of the Fox sci-fi series “Sliders.” He recently signed a multiyear, first-look pact with Disney Television and plans to produce the movie “Blues Brothers 2000,” starring Dan Aykroyd, Jim Belushi and John Goodman.
Landis directed “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978), and he wrote and directed “The Blues Brothers” (1980) and “An American Werewolf in London” (1981).
Landis sold his home to a computer executive, say sources not involved in the deal.
Rock Hudson had owned the home for years before he died in October 1985. Landis purchased the house in a 1987 probate hearing for $2.89 million, $60,000 more than the asking price.
Landis spent several years remodeling and expanding the house, which was originally built in 1942. He even bought an adjacent lot for extra privacy. He, his wife and their daughter moved into the house in 1990. Until then, they lived in their former home in the same neighborhood.
The house Landis just sold has been described as a “quintessential hacienda” that is also “a walled fortress” with seven bedrooms and eight baths in more than 8,000 square feet. It is on about three acres on a hill, with a view from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean.
The Rancho Santa Fe mansion where 39 Heaven’s Gate cult members committed suicide in March has been taken off of the market, and owner Sam Koutchesfahani plans to completely rehab the house, then live there himself, according to real estate analyst Randall Bell, the owner’s spokesman regarding the house.
Bell denies earlier media reports that two Rancho Santa Fe property owners had stepped forward with offers to buy the house, listed at $1.6 million, and demolish it. “Those reports were false,” he emphasized.
Bell, whose Bell & Associates has offices in Laguna Niguel and Santa Monica, was hired to do an appraisal of the property for the bank holding the first trust deed and the insurance company.
The house will be “torn down to the shell and totally refurbished,” he said. “Even the custom, inlaid carpeting will all be torn out.”
Built in 1983, the six-bedroom, 9,200-square-foot house, on slightly more than three acres, has a sauna, library, office, tennis court, putting green, limo garage as well as a three-car garage and a view to the ocean.
Pop songwriter DIANE WARREN, who bought multimedia mogul David Geffen’s Hollywood Hills home for about $2.6 million in 1995, has sold her former Sherman Oaks home to forensic psychophysiologist ED GELB and his wife, DEE GARDNER GELB, an actress who also has a jewelry business.
Ed Gelb is a polygraph expert who has been involved in such high-profile Los Angeles cases as O.J. Simpson’s. Gelb also has been a regular on a TV show with attorney F. Lee Bailey called “Lie Detector.”
Warren has written such songs as the Celine Dion Grammy-winning hit “Because You Loved Me,” from the Robert Redford/ Michelle Pfeiffer movie “Up Close and Personal” (1996).
She had been leasing the house to the Gelbs since their Sherman Oaks hillside home was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake. They are still waiting for a settlement from their insurance company, a source said.
The Gelbs bought Warren’s house for $700,000, sources have said. Liz Nifoussi of the Prudential-Jon Douglas Co., Studio City, handled both sides of the transaction.
A beachfront Malibu property with an 8,700-square-foot main residence completed in 1995, an older guest house, a tennis court, three-hole golf course and stables, all on two lots or about six acres, has been sold for a record Malibu price of about $14 million, real estate sources say.
The seller was the owner-builder of the main residence. The buyer was a limited partnership.
