Let's kick off the week with a little celebrity real estate rumor and gossip, shall we? Late last night, while the children slumbered and our resident raccoon ravaged the recycling bin yet again, Your Mama received a covert communique regarding the famous
Wolf's Lair property high above
Beachwood Canyon and Lake Hollywood in Los Angeles, CA.
If the children will put on their thinking caps they'll recall from previous reports and discussions that
Wolf's Lair was built in the 1920s by L. Milton Wolf, one of the developers of the upscale
Hollywoodland community for which the Hollywood sign was erected. By late 2002, the peculiar property had come to be owned by music executive Jay
Faires and tee-
vee talking head Debbie
Matenopoulos who, as we're sure y'all know, got her start in the entertainment world back in the mid 1990s on that tedious tee-
vee gabfest known as
The View. Nowadays, Miss
Matenopoulos can be found on the
E! channel flopping around on red carpets, chit-chatting with celebs and then later
dissin' dresses with campy queens like Peter
Ishkhans and that wacky Jay Manuel from
America's Next Top Model who wears more damn make up than eh-nee of the
ladees working their stuff on the red carpet.
Anyhoo, after 5 or six years of married life
lil' Debbie and Jay-bird decided to do a
dee-
vorce and in May of 2008 they heaved their kooky castle in the Hollywood Hills on the market with the high-
sterical asking price of
$7,500,000. Eventually and slowly the dueling duo came to their real estate senses and in mid-February 2010, after several previous reductions, they dropped the price all the way down to $4,295,000. A few flicks of the well worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's a stunning 57% reduction from the original pie in the sky price tag.
The final chop and drop must have brought a buyer or two out of the woodwork because not long after the price plummeted to $4,295,000,00 the property was placed in escrow, meaning that after a year and a half languishing on the market the seller(s) and a buyer had reached a purchase price agreement. As of this morning, online listing sites still show the property as being in escrow but according to an informant, a gentleman we'll call Spencer
Spillerofthebeans, the soon to be new owner of
Wolf's Lair is Grammy winning musician Richard Hall, otherwise known as
Moby. Mister
Spillerofthebeans also whispered to Your Mama that
minuscule Mister
Moby will fork over a prodigious pile of cash amounting to $3,900,000 and some change.
Early this morning, before the sun had barely cracked in the sky, Your Mama put out a few feelers to some of our better connected sources to see if we could get an amen on this juicy celebrity real estate rumor.
Sho'
enuf, within the hour we heard from Bob
Barksuptherighttrees who confirmed the rumor. Even still, Your Mama has to tell the children that until the property records clear and/or Mister
Moby or some other person connected to Mister
Moby makes some sort of statement regarding his alleged purchase this, technically, remains just rumor and gossip.
Among celebrity real estate watchers Mister
Moby is known to suffer from a serious case of The Real Estate Fickle so only time will tell how long he hangs on to
Wolf's Lair. In the early 2000s, Mister
Moby built a huge contemporary house in upstate New York that not he sold long after completing because, according to a 2009
interview in
Magnet magazine, when he was there alone it, "was big and lonely and weird."
Mister
Moby's next real estate folly was the 2005 purchase of a
quirky quadraplex located in one of the towers of the
Eldorado building on New York City's Central Park West. Records reveal Mister
Moby paid $4,500,000 for the five floor apartment with 4 terraces, 2 bedrooms and 2.5
poopers. This seemed an odd choice for a dedicated denizen of the downtown scene and, indeed, immediately upon finishing the renovation he figured out that he, "didn't really want to live on the Upper West Side," and after more than a year on the market, Mister
Moby sold the aerie for
$6,700,000. As far as Your Mama knows–and we really know so little about anything–Mister
Moby is back downtown, in Little Italy, living in the same
itty-bitty custom fitted studio apartment he's owned since 1991.
Only time will tell if Wolf's Lair will be just another of Mister
Moby's real estate mistakes or if this will finally be the real estate round peg that fits in his square hole.
