He’s KOing Walls in Bel-Air Now
Oscar De La Hoya is doing a major rehab of the Bel-Air home he bought for about $3.9 million slightly more than a year ago.
Built in 1990, the contemporary-style house has eight bedrooms in nearly 11,000 square feet. The home is built around a pool and has a tennis court
The World Boxing Council welterweight champ, known as the Golden Boy for winning the 1992 Olympic gold medal in the lightweight division, is knocking out walls and “opening the house to create a flow but not removing anything structural,” according to project designer / general contractor Sandra Costa.
“We’re redoing all of the main entertainment and living areas,” she said. She is also building a 3,000-cigar humidor and 20-foot-long bar for ice cream, cappuccino and beer.
She expects the work to be done by May. Then De La Hoya, 25, will have a screening room, an office where he can watch three TV channels at the same time, a glass staircase surrounding a life-size bronze of the Greek mythical figure Atlas, a thermostatically controlled wine room, remote-controlled window shades and a wall designed for hanging his championship boxing belts.
De La Hoya’s home also will have a 23-by-12-foot, hand-painted fresco on the dining room wall.
Costa ripped out a fireplace that separated the dining room from the rest of the house, and she plans to install an aquarium “with very aggressive fish,” she said.
The boxer has another home in the San Bernardino Mountains, where he trains, and a getaway in Mexico. He is due to fight Ike Quartey, 28, from Ghana on Feb. 13 in Las Vegas.
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Fred S. Beaton, former owner-operator of KIEV radio in Glendale and chief executive of the Southern California Broadcasting Co., has purchased a 210-acre property in the Santa Ynez Valley for about $3.4 million.
The property, Westerly Stud Farms, was once the heart of a 4,000-acre spread owned by Computer Science Corp.’s Fletcher Jones, who was killed in a plane crash near his home there more than 20 years ago.
After Jones’ death, the site was sold and subdivided, but Westerly Stud Farms continued to be ranked as one of the top 20 thoroughbred breeding and training farms in the nation, and D. Wayne Lukas trained many Kentucky Derby winners there.
Beaton, who owned and operated the radio station with his brother, Ron, from 1961 until they sold it in August for $33.4 million, plans to maintain his Glendale home while refurbishing the houses on his Santa Ynez property and reestablishing Westerly as a first-class horse training facility. It has been empty of horses since the former owner sold hers two years ago.
“We’ll take over the manager’s house and then decide with an architect what to do with the five-bedroom main house,” said Beaton, who also plans to move a couple of dozen horses onto the property this month.
“My brother and I have a 25-car collection, so we’ll have plenty of room to put our cars,” he added. Besides the houses, there are several barns, a duplex, lake, airplane landing strip and hangar on the site. He also plans to grow wine grapes there.
Beaton, married with a 3-year-old and two grown daughters, was represented in his purchase by Don Voronaeff, a Santa Ynez real estate broker who also represented the seller.
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Joe Roth, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and his producer wife, Donna, have sold a Malibu Colony home that they once planned to raze.
The selling price was not immediately available, but the last asking price was $3.9 million.
The house was advertised in a flier distributed in the fall issue of Point of View, a publication of the 500-member Producers Guild of America.
The Disney executive, 50, and his wife also had owned a house next door, which they sold earlier for $2.8 million, real estate sources say. The Roths had planned to raze both houses and build, but in April they bought a recently remodeled Malibu home for $7 million.
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Artist Susan Rios--whose Impressionist-style paintings are in the private collections of such celebrities as Andre Agassi, Walter Matthau and Priscilla Presley--has sold her three-bedroom Glendale home, with a pool, for $375,000. The asking price was $359,000.
The house was listed in late November and went into escrow, after multiple offers, three days later. Escrow closed in mid-December.
Rios had lived in the cottage, built in 1924, for 11 years. She decided to sell so she could focus on running and expanding her business. She plans to continue to live in the area.
Fran Vernon and Rowena Emmett of MacGregor Realty, La Canada Flintridge, had the listing.
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David Hernandez, who recently left the Disney Co. in Florida, where he was an artist for nine years, has moved his newly formed film and TV company to Woodland Hills and purchased a 3,200-square-foot home in Los Feliz for $650,000.
Hernandez just sold his screenplay “Honor of the Stake,” a gothic vampire thriller, to producer Gene Corman’s Chateau Productions.
