A Place Fit for a Beauty Queen
Actress Sandra Bullock has purchased a Hollywood Hills home for about $1.5 million.
Bullock, 36, plays an FBI agent who goes undercover at a beauty pageant in the movie “Miss Congeniality,” released in December.
She made her debut as a TV series star playing Tess McGill in the short-lived 1990 NBC sitcom version of the movie “Working Girl.” Her breakthrough screen role was as Annie, the woman recruited to drive the bus in “Speed” (1994).
Since then, Bullock has starred in such movies as “While You Were Sleeping” (1995), “Hope Floats” (1998) and “Forces of Nature” (1999). Bullock, whose late mother was opera singer Helga Bullock, also was a song performer in “Forces of Nature.”
She bought a home with three bedrooms in about 3,000 square feet. Her new home is contemporary in style but uses wood extensively in its interiors. The property also has a pool, spa and city views.
Bullock moved to L.A. from New York City in 1989 but has been living recently in Austin, Texas. She also has a home near Jackson, Wyo., where she was headed in December when she was in a small-plane crash. No one was injured.
Bullock is a native of Arlington, Va., but she also spent much of her childhood in Austria and Germany. Her mother, who died last April, was German. Her father, a voice coach from Alabama, is chief executive of Bullock’s production company.
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Actor Ving Rhames has settled into a Brentwood home he bought before the holidays for just under $5 million.
Rhames, who last year reprised his role of Luther in the John Woo-directed sequel to the movie “Mission: Impossible,” co-starred in the movies “Bringing Out the Dead” (1999), “Con Air” (1997), “Striptease” (1996) and “Pulp Fiction” (1994).
When he won a Golden Globe for best actor in a miniseries or TV movie for “Don King: Only in America” (1997), he surprised the audience by presenting the award to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon, who had starred in “12 Angry Men.”
Rhames, 39, grew up in Harlem but studied at Juilliard before acting on and off Broadway in the ‘80s.
He bought a Mediterranean-style home on slightly more than an acre behind gates, with five bedrooms in about 10,000 square feet. Built in the ‘20s, the home also has a pool, cabana, tennis court and park-like grounds.
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Writer-producer-director David Duclon and his wife, Deborah, have listed their Westlake Village estate at $11.5 million.
He has written and produced such TV series as “The Odd Couple,” “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “The Jeffersons,” “Silver Spoons,” “Punky Brewster,” “Family Matters” and “Malcolm & Eddie.”
The couple decided to sell the home, which they had built in 1995, to scale down.
The chateau-style estate is on 4.5 acres of landscaped grounds in a gated community. A tree-lined drive leads to the house, which is on a hilltop and has golf-course views.
The house also has five bedroom suites and 11.5 baths in 18,000 square feet. Among its other features are an elevator, a formal library with mahogany cabinets and a fireplace; a pine-paneled family room with a fireplace; a pub with fairway views; and a foyer with a sweeping staircase and crystal chandelier.
The master suite is divided into his and her wings, each with armoires and cabinets, marble steam showers and whirlpool baths. His wing also has an office, kitchenette and balcony. Her wing has leaded-glass windows, twin walk-in closets and a chandelier.
The property has an 1,800-square-foot guest house as well as a pool, spa, five-car garage, sport court and motor court with fountain.
Bob Hurwitz, of Hurwitz-James Co. in Beverly Hills, and Mickey Elliot of Prudential California Realty in Thousand Oaks have the listing.
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The historic McAllister-McKenna House has been sold for $1 million, making it the first single-family home in the Old Claremont Village district to be sold for more than six figures.
The Monterey Revival-style house, designed by Marston & Maybury in 1928, was built by Clarence Stover for the A.G. McKenna family.
The McKennas were significant donors to the Claremont Colleges, and A.G. McKenna, who made his money in steel in Pennsylvania, was the force behind the locally known Wednesday Evening Club, a discussion group for men which convened weekly for years in the house. (Claremont Men’s College became coeducational in 1976, and the “Men’s” was changed to “McKenna” to reflect the longtime support of Donald McKenna, A.G.’s son.)
The stucco home with wood trim has a second-story balcony spanning the length of the house. The 4,100-square-foot house has four bedrooms, a library-den, a basement, an elevator, a butler’s pantry and zoned heating with four gravity-flow furnaces.
The house was sold by Helen F. “Jill” McAllister, a Claremont real estate broker who recently remarried and moved to Beverly Hills. The buyers were Michael “Chris” Wahl and his wife, Patti. Their son, Mike, plays with the Green Bay Packers.
The home retains many architecturally significant features and is in excellent condition, but the buyers plan to further restore and upgrade it.
Geoff T. Hamill of Coldwell Banker, Claremont, represented the buyers; McAllister represented herself.
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Show-biz veteran Joe Sutton has listed his Sunset Strip-area home at $699,000. Sutton, in various facets of the entertainment industry for more than 40 years, was a longtime Hollywood publicist with Freeman & Sutton until Mickey Freeman recently retired.
Since 1993, Sutton has had such clients as Oprah Winfrey, Martin Lawrence and Burt Reynolds. He plans to continue to consult with a few clients and to do some more work on radio. During the last couple of years, he hosted talk shows on KYPA-AM (1230), KLSX-FM (97.1) and KIEV-AM (870).
In the ‘60s, Sutton represented such clients as Bill Cosby and the Beach Boys. He became a personal manager for Neil Diamond, Ricky Nelson and Lou Rawls. In the ‘70s, Sutton became an executive in the music division of MCA and started a record company, which he sold in 1981.
He plans to sell his home of 10 years and move to Malibu while maintaining a condo in the Sunset-Doheny area. Built in 1927, the home he’s selling has three bedrooms in about 2,300 square feet. The Spanish-style home also has an updated kitchen and baths, two fireplaces, a terrace, patio, spa and city views.
Deborah Moore of Coldwell Banker, Beverly Hills, and Patti Kashfi of Nourmand & Associates, Beverly Hills, have the listing.
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Did you miss Thursday’s Hot Property column in Southern California Living? Want to see previous columns on celebrity real estate transactions? Visit https://www.latimes.com/hotproperty for more Hot Properties.
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Ving Rhames, David Duclon
