Rocking and Renovating
Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has put a Hollywood Hills home that she owns on the market at $829,000.
The pop star marked her 55th birthday in November at an Atlanta concert with another Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Bob Dylan. She also starred in the fall in her first TV special since 1980 and cut the album “Taming the Tiger.”
Mitchell was ready to give up music two years ago, but then she met her daughter, Toronto model Kilauren Gibb, for the first time since giving her up for adoption in 1965. Mitchell has credited much of her new enthusiasm for music to her renewed relationship with her daughter.
The Hollywood Hills home that Mitchell is selling was purchased about two years ago as an investment. She gutted the house, built in the ‘70s, and turned it into a mix of country and contemporary styles with open beams and city views.
Behind gates and up a private drive, the home has three bedrooms, a family room and a bonus room in about 2,500 square feet. On the half-acre grounds are winding tree-lined paths, a fountain and patios. The master suite has a balcony and a wood-burning pot-bellied stove.
Mitchell remodeled and expanded the house but never lived in it herself. She has a home in the L.A. area, where she has lived for 25 years.
Jay Leslie Hofstadter, who has offices in the Agoura area, has the listing.
*
Supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, who held a major fund-raiser for President Clinton in 1996 and traveled with him and the Rev. Jesse Jackson on their 12-day trip to Africa in March, has purchased a nearly completed 50,000-square-foot house in La Jolla for close to $20 million.
Burkle, who last year merged his Fred Meyer chain (including Ralphs and Food 4 Less) with Cincinnati-based Kroger Co. in a $13-billion deal, is expected to maintain his residence at Greenacres, the late silent movie star Harold Lloyd’s former Beverly Hills-area estate.
Burkle, 46, regularly uses Greenacres, site of the ’96 fund-raiser, for events that “span the political spectrum,” he has said, but he is known as a major contributor to Democratic campaigns and entertained Clinton as a house guest in 1997.
The La Jolla house, expected to take as much as $7 million more and a year to finish, was sold by Harry Eberlin, founder of the nationwide Super Shops Automotive Performance Centers. Eberlin owned the 5.5-acre bluff overlooking the ocean since 1991. He spent years getting permits to build; later, he decided not to complete the house for himself.
The La Jolla house, the largest single-family home ever built with a steel frame, has five family bedrooms, four guest suites, a maid’s apartment and a caretaker’s house. It also has a tennis court, wine cellar, billiard and video rooms, a gym and an 8,000-square-foot 30-car subterranean garage.
The sale is the costliest for a single-family home in the San Diego area. The asking price was $25 million. Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland in Beverly Hills represented the seller; Bob Dyson of Dyson & Dyson in La Jolla represented Burkle.
*
Actor Steve McQueen’s former ranch near the Santa Paula airport in Ventura County has come on the market at $1 million. The ranch was his home when he died at 50 in November 1980.
McQueen had purchased the ranch, which is more than 15 acres, in the late 1970s. He spent months working on it before he and his third wife, model Barbara Minty, moved there. They had lived at the ranch for about a year when he died.
“He had just gotten it the way he wanted it when he got sick,” said actress-director Christina Stevens, who owns the ranch now. McQueen had restored the three-bedroom 100-year-old Victorian farmhouse and built a 4,200-square-foot barn for his motorcycles and antique cars.
Stevens bought the property from Chad McQueen, the actor’s son, a couple of years after his father died. Stevens, a pilot, also owns a small plane that had been Steve McQueen’s.
She decided to sell the ranch because she is focusing on a one-woman show, which she wrote based on a film she made about Mother Teresa. The show will debut on April 3 at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colo. “I can’t do that and have time and energy for the ranch,” she said.
As did the McQueens, she keeps several horses on the ranch, which has four corrals, a swimming pond and fruit trees. “What suited Steve was that the ranch was reclusive and private,” Stevens said. “Yet it is a short walk to two golf courses.”
Janet McNamara of Coldwell Banker Town and Country in Ventura has the listing.
*
A 12,000-square-foot house on 1.4 acres in Brentwood has been purchased for close to its $6.5-million asking price. The house, in the Hilton family’s gated development of Brentwood Country Estates, was bought by an entertainment executive.
The seven-bedroom house has a 32-foot-high ceiling in the entry, an art gallery, a lagoon with a fountain and a circular drive in the front. The Moroccan-Mediterranean style house was designed by architect Gus Duffy of Studio City.
Rodrigo Iglesias, a Coldwell Banker Previews director in Brentwood, and Rick Hilton, of Hilton & Hyland in Beverly Hills, shared the listing. The selling agents were Paul Glascall and Linda Starey of Fred Sands’ Brentwood office.
*
Writer-producer Miranda Craig, daughter of the late actress Nancy Walker and the late singing instructor-to-the stars David Craig, has listed her Sunset Strip-area home at $495,000. (Walker played Rhoda’s mother on “Rhoda” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”)
Craig is planning to buy a larger home in the Hollywood Hills. Her current home, which has city views, has three bedrooms in about 2,000 square feet. The house is listed with Rick Chimienti of DBL Realtors, Beverly Hills.
