Wrong Spot for Him, Write House for Her
Rock star DAVID BOWIE has sold the Beverly Hills condo that he has owned for seven years to rap star HEAVY D for $850,000, sources say.
The British Bowie, 51, and his Somalian-born wife, model-actress Iman, sold the condo, because they have been spending more time in New York and Switzerland, where they have homes, sources have said.
Bowie, whose album “Earthling” was released last year, also played Andy Warhol in the 1996 movie “Basquiat” and had his first solo art exhibition a year earlier in London.
Heavy D hosted this year’s 12th annual Soul Train Music Awards. Heavy D and the Boyz released the album “Blue Funk,” which went gold; and “Big Tyme,” “Peaceful Journey” and “Nuttin’ but Love,” which went platinum. He had recurring roles on the sitcoms “Roc” and “Living Single.”
He became president and CEO of Uptown Records at 28 in 1996. Last year, he left that post but is an Uptown artist, working on his seventh album in New York, where he also has a home, sources say.
The rap star’s Beverly Hills condo has three bedrooms, a sitting room and two fireplaces in 2,300 square feet. Built in 1990, the unit was upgraded after Bowie bought it for $920,000. Iman, who married Bowie six years ago, helped refurbish it, sources say.
Cynthia McPherson and Lou Lollio of Century 21 All-Beverly Hills, Fine Homes and Estates division, were the selling agents, and Betty Rice of Pacific Equity Brokers and June Davies of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, shared the listing, other sources said.
*
Best-selling novelist BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL, author of this year’s “Singing in the Comeback Choir,” and her banker husband, Ellis Gordon Jr., have listed their five-bedroom 3,500-square-foot house in the View Park area of L.A. at $499,000.
They are in escrow to buy a larger house in the same neighborhood.
Campbell, in her 40s, has been described in the national media as “one of the most important African American writers of this century.” In her best-selling “Singing in the Comeback Choir,” she wrote about a successful middle-class black woman who returns to her childhood home in a crumbling, inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood.
Campbell also wrote the 1994 bestseller “Brothers and Sisters,” focusing on racial divisiveness in L.A., and the 1992 novel “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” which won an NAACP Image Award. She is also known for her memoirs “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” and the nonfiction “Successful Women, Angry Men.”
The couple have two children: a son, Ellis Gordon III, and a daughter, actress Maia Campbell, who co-stars as Tiffany Warren with LL Cool J on the TV series “In the House,” which began airing in 1994.
Built in 1934, the couple’s Spanish-style home has been remodeled since Campbell and her husband bought it 13 years ago. The house has a step-down living room and a patio with city views.
Julie Jordan of Celebrity Properties in Beverly Hills has the listing.
*
Villa Durant, the longtime Los Feliz home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historians ARIEL and WILL DURANT, has been sold for $2.3 million in a 10-day, all-cash escrow, sources say. It was listed at $1.88 million. There were five offers, resulting in the over-bids, a source said.
The Durants, who lived in the house for almost 40 years and wrote most of their 11-volume “The Story of Civilization” there, died within two weeks of each other in 1981. The house was sold after their deaths. The current sellers live in Asia, a source said.
Built in 1925, the three-bedroom 5,800-square-foot home on a bit more than an acre has hand-carved woodwork, stained-glass windows, a third-floor rotunda, tennis court, pool, gardens, rolling lawns and city-to-ocean views.
*
Producer JOEL SILVER (“Lethal Weapon,” “Die Hard”) has put the Storer House, his Hollywood home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923, on the market at $5.5 million, including period furnishings and fixtures.
The four-bedroom house of nearly 3,000-square-feet is an example of Wright’s pre-Columbian or early modernist architecture and is one of four houses in L.A. built by Wright of concrete blocks.
Silver, 46, has owned the house since 1984. With the help of Wright’s architect grandson, Eric, he completely restored it, building a pool that was in the original plans and furnishing the house with Wright-designed pieces.
Silver has been building a home, where he plans to move, in another part of the city, sources say. He announced his engagement to producer Karyn Fields in April.
Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, and Peter Kempf, Christie’s Great Estates, have the listing.
*
Dancer-actress BARRIE CHASE, who won fame as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner in TV specials during the late 1950s and 1960s, and her husband, retired businessman James Kaufman, have listed their Holmby Hills home at $7.9 million.
Chase, who was 23 when she first danced on TV with the then-59-year-old Astaire, also appeared in the movies “Daddy Long Legs” (1955) and “Cape Fear” (1962). A 1959 TV special featuring Astaire and Chase won nine Emmys. Astaire died at 83 in 1987.
Chase and her husband have owned their Holmby Hills home for 24 years. They listed it so they can go overseas. “We’re going to travel for at least a year, mostly into the Far East, where I’ve never been,” she said.
Built in 1925 and recently refurbished, their French Normandy-style estate, on about two acres, includes an 8,000-square-foot main house, a detached 2,600-square-foot guest apartment, a 300-square-foot cottage, a motor court, a pool, a greenhouse and extensive gardens.
Joe Babajian of Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills, and Keith Fisher of Sands’ Studio City office share the listing.
