Yolanda doesn’t watch TV. She also doesn’t listen to today’s popular music. It’s true. We know that some of our posts (quite a few of them recently) have been devoted to Hollywood celebrities, but about 57% of the time we don’t even know who the heck these people are before we give ’em a good ol’ Google.

Random rant: but have y’all noticed how most “primetime” shows seem to start later and later? Back in Yolanda’s day, we remember when all good TV shows ended by 8 PM. Anything later was for fornicators and crackheads. But now you’ve gotta stay up half the night just to catch a glimpse of a zombie decapitation or two. Oh hell no. We will not compromise this face by sacrificing our beauty sleep.

Okay, fine. We do enjoy a tiny bit of TV. One show we definitely TiVo is the excellent How to Get Away With Murder. It’s not so much that we care about the (melo)dramatic plotlines, engrossing as they may be. We mostly just watch to see Viola Davis flaunt her massive, perfectly-honed acting chops. She’s fantastic. If Yolanda loved blogging as much as Ms. Davis clears loves acting, these posts would write themselves. Instead we’re stuck on this chaise lounge dictating to our long-suffering typist Todd. Hey, Todd!

Anyway, HTGAWM was a massive breakout hit of a year or two ago and won Ms. Davis countless awards and nominations including an “Outstanding Lead Actress” Emmy. But don’t get it tangled, she’s a veteran actress. Ms. Davis initially began performing on Broadway back in the 1990s and had her breakout film role with a remarkable (and Oscar-nominated) tour-de-force performance in the film Doubt. And since 2005, she has lived in a rather ordinary and unassuming tract-house style thing way out in Granada Hills, deep in the feared San Fernando Valley.

With a big new show and a big new contract under her Hermes belt, it’s clearly high time for a Ms. Davis upgrade on the residential front.

Although her name does not appear on the deed — the owner is shielded behind something called “The Genesis Trust” — Yolanda happens to know that Ms. Davis and her husband Julius Tennon (and their daughter Genesis) will soon move to a brand-new 7,545-square-foot mansion in the most star-studded little cranny of Toluca Lake. Records show the house sold just about three weeks ago (in August 2016) for a fat $5,700,000.

Here’s what we mean by star-studded. Just two doors away from Ms. Davis’s new abode is a massive mansion that was custom-built recently for Steve Carell and his family. Directly next to that is the home of singer Sia. Next to Sia is a house owned by P. Diddy/Sean Combs/Puff Daddy/whoever and occupied by Kim Porter, his favorite baby mama. Behind Ms. Porter’s house is a large mock-Med mansion that was owned by pop culture hellion Miley Cyrus from 2007 until last year, when she sold it for $6,000,000 to heiress Ariadne Getty. The house, so we’ve been told, is not actually occupied by Ms. Getty but rather by her up-and-coming fashion designer son August Getty.

Next door to Mr. Getty is a house formerly owned by mega-mansion builder Nile Niami, who leased it for a time to pint-sized diva Ariana Grande before selling it to comic book maestro Jim Lee. Behind Mr. Lee’s house is the multi-parcel estate of the late and eternally beloved Bob and Dolores Hope and just over from that is another Toluca Lake house formerly owned by Miley Cyrus and now owned by her parentals.

Imagine how many security cameras are along that little stretch of road? There’s a lot! But we digress.

Listing details call Ms. Davis’s new spec-mansion a “contemporary European masterpiece”. The masterpiece has a somewhat unconventionally-angled front door that’s practically on the side of the 5-bed, 8-bath structure. The double doors glide open to a hardwood-lined, high-ceilinged proper entrance foyer.

The living room has medium-brown hardwood floors, pastel wall colors, and a large fireplace. There’s even bookshelves — real, actual bookshelves! You don’t see that much anymore. Seriously.

Take a gander at the kitchen, which is undeniably luxurious with its 60″ gas range, griddle, Sub Zero fridge, microwave drawer, dual dishwashers, and a butler’s walk-in pantry. All countertops are marble, and the humongous center island has stool seating and some sort of exotic-looking purple ash wood cabinetry. Fancy!

Elsewhere there’s a state-of-the-art theater with a 133-inch screen, projector, and (naturally) surround sound. Marketing materials also say there’s a “media bath with TV”, whatever that is. To Yolanda, a gal who almost never watches TV, it all seems rather like overkill. But we suppose someone who takes their virtual entertainment real serious would appreciate this setup. And who better than Ms. Davis, really?

Upstairs, the master bedroom has rarely-seen wall-to-wall carpeting. Yolanda doesn’t see much carpet on new construction these days, but it looks pretty comfy. A boutique-sized dressing room can easily accomodate all of Ms. Davis’s red carpet gowns.

Nice ‘n shiny marble floors in the master bath. There are separate vanities and a chair for Ms. Davis when her glam squad arrives to get her red carpet-ready.

The light-flooded office is definitely Yolanda’s favorite room in the house. We’d kill to have that leather furniture set and there are more real bookshelves!

Outdoor amenities on the .44-acre micro-estate are numerous and include a large balcony off the master suite and a full outdoor kitchen and Viking BBQ on the stone terrace below. There’s enough grass for a soccer pitch and a saltwater pool with spa. Somewhere lurking out there is also a pool bathroom.

The grey-walled and red tile-roofed mansion also has a long list of other luxury features, including (but not limited to): Lutron lighting control, security cameras, indoor and outdoor speakers and an electric car charging station in the three-car garage for Ms. Davis’s Tesla (if she’s got one, we really don’t know).

Oh dear — we hate to cut this story short, but Yolanda really must dash. We’re late for our nightcap and then it is straightaway and immediately our bedtime. Todd, dear, pack this poor poodle up as best you can.

Todd: Mazel tov on your new house, Ms. Davis!! 

Craig Strong, John Aaroe Group repped both the seller and Ms. Davis in this deal.

Remember that horrible “Selfie” song thing from a couple years ago? The one that was desperately attempting to become the new “Valley Girl“? Except about 100000x more annoying?

Unfortunately, so does Yolanda. Yeah. Although we had blessedly forgotten about it for a little while — until now. Damn you, real estate. You reminded us of that hot mess.

That thing (we refuse to acknowledge it as a song) was released by a band (or a “DJ duo”) called The Chainsmokers. Now, you might’ve thought that such a gimmicky and stupid thing would relegate said band to one hit wonder status. But apparently not. The world has reached the point where one hit wonders no longer exist, which we think is a real damn shame. We miss those olden days when novelty performers would have a quick blip of fame and then disappear into the big blue yonder. So much more fun.

We miss those days of yore. But enough of ol’ Yolanda’s bitterness. We’re here to discuss the real estate. Can y’all guess which not-a-one-hit-wonder is out spending the big bucks?

In the past two years, the Chainsmokers have racked up one top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hit (“Roses“), one top 3 hit (“Don’t Let Me Down“), and they just released a new song called “Closer” which is currently the #1 song in the whole damn USA, at least according to the Billboard chart. Oh, and they also just announced a new duet with Chris Martin himself. In just two years, the band has advanced from novelty gimmick to certified hitmakers. They’re killin’ it. And without question, they’ve made some major bank.

For a time, Yolanda — ignorant ignoramus that she is — assumed The Chainsmokers were women because their songs always have female voices, right? But nope. The group is comprised of two male frat bro-looking DJs from the east coast, Drew Taggart and Alex Pall.

Yolanda recently heard whispers through the real estate grapevine that both band members recently coughed up several million bucks each for their own big new houses in the Hollywood Hills and West Hollywood areas. And indeed, though it took a bit of sleuthing, Yolanda was able to confirm that the pair did indeed purchase two expensive residences, one in the trendy West Hollywood/Beverly Grove area and one in the celebrity-infested Hills above WeHo.

Let’s start with the (slightly) cheaper house, Alex Pall’s fairly remote Hollywood Hills pad. Our Mr. Pall paid $2,695,000 for the property through something called “Villa Moo LLC”. The unique (and architecturally-disjointed) place is located on the very same street as the Lookout Mountain Air Force Base, purchased by Jared Leto a couple years ago.

Located on a narrow street in a difficult-to-access neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills, the unconventional “architectural modern” is completely obscured from the street by a wall of thick hedge bushes and other dense foliage.

A small street-fronting gate leads down a long flight of stone steps to the intricately-carved front door. Yes, that is indeed a tree growing through the front foyer.

Per the listing the 1931 home was “designed for the display of art and those that create it.” The living room sports lots of wall space for hanging stuff in addition to broad canyon views.

The mostly-stainless kitchen has high-end appliances galore, including name brands like Bulthaup, Miele, Sub Zero and Gaggenau. Whew, that’s a mouthful.

The master bedroom has dark stonework underfoot and vertigo-inspiring floor-to-ceiling windows. Overhead is a very unique tin-faced retractable ceiling for stargazing on those warm summer nights.

The stonework continues in the master bath, which has a free-standing tub and an open shower with rainfall showerhead. Also, check out the bidet… and the conventional crapper.

One of the guest suites. Truth be told, Yolanda prefers that green tile-slathered bath to the much starker master bathroom.

We’re not sure who Mary Alma Parker is — she’s listed as the longtime owner and seller of this house — but homegurl clearly had a real thing for gold and animal heads and golden animal heads. And some weird window treatments, too.

Speaking of weird, the outdoor patios are accessed via two full-size glass garage doors. Certainly it’s unusual, but it actually seems fairly practical, right? The door tracks look ugly, but we could live with it.

The yard, dotted with old oaks and cycad trees, looks like the enchanted sort of place where you wouldn’t bat an eyelash if Frodo, Gandalf, and a whole troupe of hobbits went marching by. There’s lots of little corners and crannies for a private moment of reflection, for playing hide-and-seek, or for spell-casting (?).

There’s no pool, but the house does sport an intimate jacuzzi (stainless, of course). And then there’s an unexpectedly massive outdoor lounge with a pizza oven and intricate stone floor detailing. It’s rather magical, dare we say.

See what mature landscaping (and good picture-taking) can do? The lot is only .41-acre and on a very steep slope, but Yolanda would swear it’s at least a solid full acre. All that with a fully-renovated 3,579-square-foot house with 4 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms?! We know the home may not be to everyone’s taste, but at $2,695,000 this place almost seems like a steal to Yolanda.

But we digress. And now for the other Chainsmoker…

Drew Taggart’s new house is a much more conventional affair than his bandmate’s. The new spec-built modern residence is sleek and unabashedly contemporary, with all the bells and whistles any deep-pocketed young buyer would expect. We’d even go so far as to call this place the “millionaire’s quintessential bachelor pad”. But last time we mentioned a bachelor pad on this blog, we got some irate messages from folks who thought we were attempting to pin a sexuality on our story’s subject.

So let us be clear: we admit no knowledge of Mr. Taggart’s sexuality or lack thereof. All we’re saying is that this looks like a house for a single, unmarried, rich young man. Capiche?

As is typical of the many new modern homes in the WeHo/Beverly Grove area, the house has an open floor plan with a whole lot of those itty-bitty fluorescent lights in the roof. Luxe materials abound.

The kitchen has high-end appliances and is trimmed in what appears to be African blackwood or some other exotic wood veneer. A large center island has a raised wooden shelf for drinks or what-have-you. Elsewhere downstairs (just behind the front door) is a wee little office with an attached full bathroom for private selfie-taking.

The upstairs landing has wide-plank (oak?) flooring.

The master suite is comfortable but not oppressively huge, something that makes Yolanda very glad indeed. Not that we’re ever likely to spend a night in here, but many of the homes we’ve discusssed recently have bedrooms that could swallow Nessie herself. And nobody would ever be the wiser!

Oh, there’s also a nifty disappearing glass wall with a wee outdoor patio.

The master bathroom is open to the bedroom and has a rather stunning wall of some sort of blonde wood. There’s the expected glass-walled shower, a soaking tub with fireplace, and a private water closet.

The 4,758-square-foot residence has a total of 5 bedrooms and 5.5 baths. Above are a few of the spare bedrooms/bathrooms/closets.

Unlike many of the newly-built homes in this area, the developer managed to eke out a fairly generous amount of outdoor space on the relatively puny .15-acre lot. The negative-edge pool also has a nifty (if rather silly) mini-waterfall thing going on.

For all this Mr. Taggart paid $3,295,000 (through something called “Mainer LLC”) just about a week before Mr. Pall bought his own place.

So for all of you who keep railing on about how the music industry is in terrible shape, just look at these two. In two years they’ve gone from being a joke to being crowned EDM gods (or something) and spending a combined $6 million on luxury Los Angeles real estate.

As part of this writing assignment, Yolanda listened to all of Mr. Pall & Mr. Taggart’s new hit songs. To their credit — and although it’s not to Yolanda’s old-fashioned tastes — we must say that their newer music is quite catchy and seems to have abandoned the gimmicky nature of “Selfie” entirely for a much more mainstream electronic sound.

Perhaps these two purposely made their first release sound outrageous to get attention? Perhaps! We’d say that’s pretty smart of them, if anyone were to ask Yolanda. Which they didn’t, of course.

Selling agent (Hollywood Hills): Matt Fonda, Coldwell Banker
Mr. Pall’s agent: Mica Rabineau, Nourmand & AssociatesSelling agent (West Hollywood): Alejandro Lombardo, Keller Williams Hollywood Hills
Mr. Taggart’s agent: Jen Winston, The Agency

A recent report by CoreLogic highlighted the fact that even as sky-high home prices in Los Angeles continue to increase, overall sales volume has dropped in the past two consecutive months. Optimistic (some might say greedy) sellers have flooded the market with subpar homes saddled with distressingly outrageous pricetags. And most buyers just aren’t biting. Could prices finally have crested the peak, or is this just a minor pothole on the road to multi-million-dollar shanties?

Who knows. Yolanda certainly does not. But what we do know is that despite the strength of the dollar and the resulting loss of many foreign investors, the ultra-high-end market still seems to be lit (to borrow a phrase from the kiddies). By our personal tabulations, LA County has seen no fewer than 17 sales of over $20 million this year, and we’re still within the third quarter.

Everyone already knows about the record-smashing $100 million sale of the Playboy Mansion and the bonkers $90 million transfer of Owlwood. But right about the same time as those two deals went down, there was another much less pricey but still record-breaking transaction quietly closing on the opposite side of the 405 freeway.

In the latter days of August (2016), a brand-new spec-mansion on a prominent promontory in the high-priced but low-key “Riviera” section of Pacific Palisades sold for a breathtaking $32,500,000. Okay, that’s not anywhere near as ludicrous as a $100 million sale, but it’s still massive for the Palisades. Yolanda is pretty damn sure this is easily the biggest sale ever for that particular neighborhood. The only other one that comes close, we think, is the $26 million that Tom Hanks forked out for his Gwathemy Siegel-designed modern that’s just up the hill from the house we are discussing today.

According to our real estate insider pal Don Juan/Won/Wan, the $32.5 million residence was built by mega-mansion contractor Tyler Development and designed by prolific modern mansion architect Paul McClean of McClean Design. Have a wee look-see.

Details are slim, but Mr. Juan/Won/Wan told us the house measures roughly 15,000 square feet, although Yolanda is uncertain if that number includes the underground garage or not.

There’s a large motor court above the garage and a negative-edge swimming pool and spa that both sport views out to the Pacific and beyond. Looks like there’s a covered patio with outdoor kitchen, too.

Honestly, y’all, though we know this sort of home is the kind that many ultra-rich buyers in Los Angeles are looking for — it’s big and new and glassy and chic and no-doubt loaded with gizmo-tech — we don’t think the design here is one of Mr. McClean’s more inspired creations. Looks like a big square glass box to Yolanda. But that’s just our useless opinion.

Of course, Mr. McClean and his firm have designed some of the most expensive homes in Los Angeles, including the ground-up rebuild and expansion of the old Montalban residence on Oriole Drive in the Bird Streets, which sold for nearly $39 million back in 2012 to legally-embattled fellow Jho Low, an amount that still remains the most ever paid for a house in the Hollywood Hills. Mr. Mcclean also designed a single-story home in the Trousdale Estates neighborhood that sold earlier this year for $38,270,000 to financier Brian Sheth and remains the biggest 2016 home sale in Beverly Hills (as far as we know).

Oh, the big-money buyers? Well, get ready to be shocked because unlike 90% of their peers, they did not purchase the property through an annoying blind trust or tedious LLC. They put their real damn names on the deed! Lord have mercy. Let’s give them a round of applause.

The new owners are Richard S. Hollander and his wife Jackie. Our Mr. Hollander is currently Chairman of Aristotle Capital Management, a Southern California-based investment advisor/hedge fund, and was previously employed at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the now-shuttered investment bank where one of his co-workers — billionaire Michael Milken — did some illegal stuff and eventually got himself sent to the pokey.

Here’s what else we know about the Hollanders: they have three grown children and they are art collectors who in 2013 donated 142 photographs by world-famous snapper Edward Steichen to three different museums in New York City and Los Angeles.

Now brace yourselves because Yolanda thoroughly trawled the depths of property records and we’ve discovered that this is not the only $30 million house Mr. & Mrs. Hollander have owned. Back in 2010, near the height of the economic recession, they sold an oceanfront property on Malibu Road for $30,000,000 to New York developer Edward Minskoff. The house is located just a bit outside the exclusive “Malibu Colony” community and located on what is widely believed to be one of the best strips of sand in the city.

Some of their nearest former neighbors in Malibu included Tom Gores, Alec Gores, Erika Glazer, Sting, Donald Sterling, and Leonardo DiCaprio (who back in 2013 sold his own compound a couple doors away for $17,400,000 to fashion designer turned hedge fund manager Christian Leone and his interior designer husband Malcolm Kutner. But we digress…)

Lo and behold, Yolanda also discovered that Mr. & Mrs. Hollander once (back in 2004 and 2005) bought and flipped a vacant parcel in the cartoonishly opulent Beverly Park guard-gated community in the mountains above Beverly Hills. That vacant parcel is now the site of a Tuscan-ized mega-mansion owned by construction tycoon Ron Tutor (below).

The property-mad Hollanders also lay claim to a large home out in the resort town of Palm Desert (CA). The multi-million-dollar structure — it clocks in at 10,883-square-feet per property records — is located within the guard-gated gates of the prestigious Bighorn Golf Club.

Back in LA, the Hollanders’ current primary residence appears to be a roomy but dated mansion located on a guard-gated road called “Moraga Estates” in a area that’s technically Bel Air but is so far west and so close to the 405 freeway that it actually carries a 90049 (Brentwood) zip code.

The 1979 structure was acquired by Mr. & Mrs. Hollander way, way back in 1985 for just $1,800,000.

And as it turns out, Mr. & Mrs. Hollander’s Bel Air tennis court mini-estate is currently available for sale as a whisper listing with an asking price of $11,950,000. It’s listed with Drew Fenton of Hilton & Hyland.

We’re giving everyone fair warning in advance. This story is old. A year old, in fact. Both these purchases date back to summer 2015. Yolanda has known about them for quite some time but for whatever reason, we just never got around to posting about them. We were lazy, wanted to write about other things, had to get a pedicure, blah blah blah. In fact nearly forgot all about this until we wrote about that other dynamic duo (the Chainsmokers) the other day. Well, better late than never, right? Right?!

We also know that these homes are a bit more modest than the residences we usually profile. Yolanda kindly requests that you not whine, dine, and/or threaten us. We’ll have something big and fancy to suit the needs of you real estate size queens right quick. For now, enjoy this post. Or don’t. Do as you please.

Now quite frankly, kiddies, Yolanda personally does not give a hoot about YouTube millionaires but both we and Your Mama at Variety have written about folks like Jordan Maron and Rosanna Pansino recently and the stories — for whatever reason — generate lots and lots of hits. Apparently people want to read about the homes of folks who sit around and talk, sing, or tell jokes to their video camera all day and Yolanda is all about giving the people what they want.

Rhett & Link are among the most popular YouTube personalities. Their Good Mythical Morning channel — one of several they own — currently sports more than 11 million subscribers. According to Forbes, in the fiscal year ending June 2015 the two dudes hauled in a hefty $4.5 million in pre-tax income, most of it drawn from lucrative sponsored content deals (with big names like Gillette, Toyota, and Wendy’s).

Yolanda, being old, had never heard of the pair so naturally we had to turn to our friendly pal Google for insight. According to Wiki, Rhett & Link both hail from North Carolina, have college degrees in engineering, and are amateur comedians. They’ve also been best friends since the first grade. Aww. That’s kinda cute.

Anyway, the two amigos are now approaching the big 4-0 and have wives and rugrats. And being flush with YouTube cash, the pair recently decided it was high time to settle down and purchase family homes of their own.

Rhett & Link film their show out of a studio in Burbank, but they chose to eschew buying in the nearby and celebrity-heavy Hollywood Hills for the much more low-key and family-friendly neighborhood of La Crescenta, an unincorporated community in the San Gabriel Valley foothills just adjacent to Glendale and La Canada Flintridge and just about 10 minutes from Burbank by car and 20 minutes from downtown LA.

Now, as we’ve previously mentioned on here, Yolanda spent a fairly significant amount of time in her younger days over in the La Canada Flintridge/Crescenta Valley areas of LA and thus we are familiar with the neighborhood where these guys bought. Like we say, it’s hardly a celebrity haven. Trust us that this particular area is nice but very far from fancy or pretentious. In a way, it’s kinda admirable that these two guys decided to pick homes out there when they could almost certainly afford other, more swanky crannies of town, right?

That being said, we’re not sure if we’re down with their particular million-dollar home choices. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves already.

It was shaggy-haired Link (real name: Charles Lincoln Neal III) and his wife Christy who made the first real estate move by forking out $1,265,000 in May (2015) for a remodeled 1960 residence of indeterminate architectural vernacular on .29-acre of land. The rather oddball house sits on a whisper-quiet pine tree-shaded cul-de-sac and appears to be single level from out front but drops down mullet-style to two floors out back.

We’re not fond of the henna-and-yellow color scheme, but it’s certainly different. The double doors open into a hallway with an unevenly pitched ceiling and white tiles underfoot. The living room has hardwood floors and a small skylight overhead, and in one corner there’s a dark grey sofa pushed uncomfortably close to a wall-mounted flatscreen television.

One surprise is the kitchen, which errs on the side of huge and was recently remodeled (according to the listing) with wooden cabinetry, medium-grade stainless steel appliances, quartz countertops, and more white tilework.

Yolanda likes the yellow dining room. No, really, we do! Yellow dining rooms are almost always fab. We also like that there is a large media/game room with a booze-friendly wet bar and an enormous stone fireplace, although we’re not quite sure what to make of the weird and undulating drop-down ceiling.

The 3,638-square-foot structure has 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms plus a commodious master suite with glossy hardwood floors in the bedroom and a soaking tub and dual vanities in the bath. Outside there’s a freeform swimming pool jammed up a bit too close to the house — that thing’s gonna need a safety fence for sure — and peek-a-boo views to valley through the trees.

It appears Mr. Neal may have faced down some stiff competition for the property, as the $1,265,000 he paid through his “402 Blueberry Avenue Trust” is actually a full $70,000 more than the sellers were asking for the home.

Just two months later, Rhett (real name: Rhett James McLaughlin) and his wife Jessie purchased a La Crescenta home that’s only a mile away Mr. Neal’s as the crow flies. Mr. McLaughlin splurged a bit more than his buddy did — he paid $1,425,000 for a similar-sized house (3,214-square-feet) on an identically-sized lot (.29-acre) but with a radically different — ahem — architectural identity.

Listing info refers to the 1978 structure as an “updated modern traditional” but to Yolanda’s eyes the thing looks rather more like a rather nightmarish architectural abomination. Fortunately for the neighbors, the residence is privately tucked up and away from view at the end of a long, steep driveway.

We will say that the inside is not nearly as scary as the exterior initially led us to imagine. There is trendy dark hardwood flooring underfoot, a spacious sunken family room, a formal dining room with peaceful mountain views, a kitchen with granite countertops and medium-grade appliances, an upstairs living room/second family room, huge office, light-filled master suite with valley views, and a large outdoor sport/basketball court plus a pentagon-shaped swimming pool and spa.

The house seems like a great deal for $1.4 million, at least as long as you’re inside and not looking at the hernia-inducing front facade. And apparently other folks agreed the place was a deal, because records show that the $1,425,000 Mr. McLaughlin paid through his “Copper Canyon Trust” was actually $30,000 more than the home’s last asking price.

That’s all, folks. Now please get off this silly blog right quick and head on over to YouTube. Watch every Rhett & Link video you see and make sure you click on all the ads. It’s gonna take more than a minor real estate facelift to get these two gurls camera ready. Yikes!

Selling agent (Link’s House): Ben Kelly, Partners Trust
Selling agent (Rhett’s House): Carrie Grochow, Dilbeck Real Estate
Rhett & Link’s agent: Tricia Harding, T.N.G. Real Estate Consultants

She may not be anywhere near as rich or well-known as her older sister, the mansion-buying Jessica Capshaw, but Sasha Spielberg is still the daughter of a living Hollywood legend who makes do with a modest net worth in the vicinity of 3.8 billion bucks. So it’s really not particularly surprising that when it came time to select her first home — let’s call it her bachelorette pad — Miss Spielberg took a serious look-see at houses with pricetags well beyond the seven-figure barrier.

Before we get to her stylish new Silver Lake home, however, a little background. Miss Spielberg is the fourth of seven children in the blended Spielberg family and the eldest of the three biological spawn born to Steven Spielberg and his longtime wife, actress Kate Capshaw. The 26-year-old Miss Spielberg has appeared in several of her father’s movies, formed an indie band with her brother Theo, dabbled in modeling, and is also an Ivy League graduate.

Though she is the daughter of a multi-billionaire, Miss Spielberg doesn’t automatically get everything she wants. Take this house, for example. The sale price of $1,780,000 is actually a shocking $185,000 more than the seller — who appears to be LA Times fashion critic and jewelry designer Tom Binns — was asking for the property, indicating that Miss Spielberg had to fight, whip, and even snatch weaves from some very fierce real estate competition before she got the keys to her new house.

For the record: Miss Spielberg’s name does not actually appear on the deed for this house. Public documents only list the buyer as something called “Mi Casa LA LLC, as Trustee of the Tree House Trust”, whatever that means. But Yolanda happens to know for a fact that it’s her.

The mid-century modern gem was built circa 1954 by architect Robert A. Pratt and constructed almost entirely from redwood, maple, concrete and steel. Sited on a .29-acre, three-parcel lot in the Silver Lake hills, the property is thickly wooded, affording the house near-complete privacy from the neighbors and the street yet still retaining lovely city views.

A 1,885-square-foot house with 2 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms may be very modest by celebrity (and billionaire) standards, but it’s certainly plenty of house for a single young person. The selling points here are the architecture, privacy, and views. And the home plays quite a strong game in those categories.

And lookie here — we’ve even got a lovely floor plan for y’all to peruse.

The first thing you may notice is that the structure has no garage, just a single-vehicle carport adjacent to the entryway. The floor plan is masterful in its simplicity — kitchen, dining room, living room, and guest bathroom downstairs. Master suite and guest suite upstairs. 800 sq. ft. of deck space.

Really the only awkward thing — besides the cramped kitchen — is the fact that the master crapper is not connected to the master bedroom. Miss Spielberg must leave her inner sanctum and brave the harrowing journey across the hall to access the bathroom.

A narrow and twisty and obstacle-filled pathway leads from the street to the redwood-slathered home’s entryway. Don’t attempt this pilgrimage when tipsy.

Here we have the light-flooded living and dining rooms. Yolanda covets that wooden oval table and that hanging light fixture above it. Miss Spielberg, if you should happen to read this, drop your gurl Yolanda a line and we assure you we can work out a mutually advantageous deal. Or you could just be a dear and donate them to poor little Yolanda, too. Pretty please?

Anywho, the hardwood floors are maple. Nice kitchen pass-through up there, too.

The kitchen is cramped by modern standards but well laid out and entirely functional. While the house has plainly been updated since 1954, most features still retain their original look. With a house this distinctive updating can only alter so much, right?

Both levels have huge wooden decks for parties or simply basking in the oppressive solitude and reflection of our microscopic existence, as we are but a mere dash — a fleeting jolt — of electricity on eternity’s infinite celestial plane. (Sorry, Yolanda had a wee nip of the cooking sherry this morning.)

The master bedroom retains the “treehouse” vibe. Wouldn’t you like to wake up to that view every morning? And we love the ceiling beams that do not intersect the bed. Good feng shui.

As for the master bath, we think the wood could use a staining or replacement or something. But we will say that we adore the unconventional candy-apple-red tiles. We don’t even care!

The previous owner appears to have used the second bedroom as a sitting room. The outdoor lounge is where Yolanda would plant her tushie every weekend with a good murder mystery book or perhaps an assortment of organic crackers and hummus. Don’t judge.

Listing information says the street-to-street lot has ample “room for expansion and additional structures”. There’s also — again per the listing — plenty of room for a cement pond but we really have no idea if the fair-skinned Miss Spielberg is at all interested in undertaking the installation of such.

Of course, the once unfashionable but now expensive, hipster-approved and almost totally gentrified  Silver Lake area — next door to Los Feliz on LA’s Eastside — is home to a healthy handful of other celebrities that include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morena Baccarin, Mark Duplass, and Jorja Fox.

Sad note: Yolanda will be traveling for much of the next two weeks so we may not have enough time to post our normal flurry of stories. We do apologize and beg forgiveness. Yolanda will try her very best to stay regular with y’all. In the meantime, stay cool, don’t act a fool, and don’t cry too much over the Brangelina divorce. It’s just money and houses and not even ours at that. Capiche?

Selling agent: Robert Kallick, Sotheby’s
Miss Spielberg’s agent: Ann Eysenring, The Agency

Last week, Yolanda’s friend Vlad the Revealer over at Celebrity Address Aerial challenged your gurl to uncover the true identity of the buyer of a brand-spankin’-new house in the prototypical suburban neighborhood of Sherman Oaks. For the record, documents show the $1,575,000 house in question was officially sold last month (August 2016) to an opaque entity calling itself “DSPDA Trust”.

Well, although Yolanda still has no idea what “DSPDA” stands for — if indeed it stands for anything at all — we do know that the home’s proud new owner is an 18-year-old lass named Ariel Workman, better known to TV sitcom lovers around the globe as Ariel Winter.

Since 2009, since she was still in elementary school, Miss Winter has portrayed the role of Modern Family‘s  Alex Dunphy, one of Ty Burrell & Julie Bowen‘s onscreen kiddies. The instant and prolonged success of the show has since made the denim-loving Miss Winter internationally famous and also a very rich young lady.

Unfortunately, her fame and fortune has also brought the curvaceous Miss Winter a great deal of time in the harsh glare of the tabloid spotlight. There was a very public estrangement from her mother. Then there have been several instances where Miss Winter has lashed out at online “haters” for alleged body-shaming. Tsk, tsk.

And let’s not forget young Miss Winter’s most traumatic life experience yet. Her child — her adorably precious, cute-as-a-button and baby-kissing Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG was wrecked. But that’s not even the tragedy! Her “whip” then suffered the indignity of after-death torture at a shady body shop off La Cienega! Miss Winter was so appalled, so incensed at the wanton neglect of her baby! In fact, she told her 2 million Instagram followers that the shop’s owners could do like Brangelina’s marriage and bust up into a million angry, spinning particles of regret for all she cared.

But then, the very next day, she mysteriously became BFFs with the shop’s owner again.

The horror! The humiliation! The ridiculous and stereotypical LA fake-ness! It all gives Yolanda a lethal case of secondhand embarrassment.

Good gracious. Yolanda doesn’t judge, kiddies, we really don’t. But we’ve just got to say something here. Why does Miss Winter always seem to have drama with somebody or something?! Either she’s just a very unlucky young lady or there’s something else a-brew here.

Now Miss Winter, take some life-changing advice from your gurl Yolanda and listen up. We know you might love your G-Wagon and think it’s the bomb or whatever you kiddies say. But really, that tank is so out now. Take a cue from the modern Thomas Edison — a sage named Miss Kylie Jenner — and trade that Cold War-era junker in for a new Range Rover Autobiography. We like black over beige. And Yolanda needs a new chauffeur. It’ll change your life. Just sayin’.

Anyway. It’s finally time to discuss the real estate.

The newly-built house is located out there in that tragic no man’s land known as the Valley. Yeah, yeah. It’s big, bad, scary place. Get over it.

A front-facing two car garage has a rather tedious frosted-glass look. Okay, this may offend some folks, but if there’s one design cliche Yolanda dislikes more than the overuse of recessed lighting, it’s those darn frosted glass garage doors. Uglyyyyyy!

From there, a wooden front door opens into a long hallway with 14-foot ceiling and a skylight. It’s perfect for displaying art and we’ve got to say that the entryway is pretty sweet.

One rather odd feature, however, is that chilled wine closet/cellar next to the living room. At first glance Yolanda thought it was a glass-walled shower! And since Miss Winter is still nowhere near the legal drinking age, we hope she or her assistant will fill the closet with organic kombucha or sparkling water or some other horrid-tasting beverage in lieu of alcohol.

Quartz countertops and stainless Viking appliances adorn the kitchen, which opens to the living and dining rooms.

The master suite is certainly luxurious albeit in a rather generic manner. The bedroom has hardwood floors, a stone fireplace, and direct access to the backyard. A master bath with a soaking tub and glass-walled shower (this one actually is a shower, Yolanda suspects) complete the offering.

In addition to the master, the home sports three other bedroom suites including the above. The 3,200-square-foot residence has a total of 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths per the listing.

A .16-acre lot isn’t anywhere near huge but the backyard still has a decent amount of space, though it’s not at all as private as Yolanda would have expected. Maybe Miss Winter will plant some big trees or something.

Outdoor amusements include a pergola-shaded concrete terrace, a brick firepit, an outdoor fridge and a BBQ. No pool but there seems to be sufficient land to squeeze one in, should Miss Winter desire to do so.

Now y’all remember that Yolanda is currently on vacation on the beach on an island in an undisclosed area of the Caribbean. Or something like that, anyway. So don’t bother us with your whining or your foul mouths or anything else, for that matter. Cheerio!

Selling agent: Sahar Khedher, Keller Williams
Miss Winter’s agent: Matt Epstein, Berkshire Hathaway HomeService

Yolanda is wee bit busy today. Travel, accommodations, eyebrow waxing. Fret not, we won’t bore you with the tedious details. So there we were this morning, racking our brain for a quick, wholesome, nutritious story to feed y’all. Just because we’re slammed with boring adult things doesn’t mean we’re about to let our kiddies starve.

We decided to turn to our proven crowd-pleasers. You see, Yolanda has a helpful website ranking that tells her how many clicks any of her posts got on any given day. We’re always curious to know what stories most peeps find interesting.

Many of our all-time most popular posts are pretty unsurprising. Anything One Direction is tops, naturally. Other stories that get hits up the wazoo mostly involve either famous celebrities (Chloe Moretz, Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Capshaw) or infamous shady characters (Kola Aluko, Jho Low).

In our top 10 list there are a couple wildcards, however. The most surprising to Yolanda was our story about Maurice Marciano buying a $20 million house in Beverly Hills’ Trousdale Estates neighborhood. For one, Mr. Marciano isn’t exactly a celebrity and GUESS (the massive clothing retailer he co-founded with his three brothers) isn’t exactly at the forefront of fashion like it was back in the ‘90s or early 2000s. And also, at the time she posted that story, Yolanda didn’t even have photos to share with y’all. (With the exception of the massive front gate, of course.)

So we really have no idea why so many folks care to read about Mr. Marciano and/or his house. But Yolanda is all about giving the people what they want and apparently what they want is more Maurice Marciano. Thanks to our real estate insider pal Don Juan/Won/Wan for providing us with these images of Mr. Marciano’s glam new house.

The property was designed by prolific spec-uber-modern-mansion architect Paul McClean of McClean Design. By Yolanda’s count, there have been 17 sales of $20 million or more so far in 2016. No fewer than 4 of said sales – nearly 25% — have been houses designed by Mr. McClean. Let’s rewind and reflect.

There was the hot new flag lot house in Trousdale that sold for a brain-jumbling $38,270,000 to financier Brian Sheth; then we have the $32,500,000 new build in Pacific Palisades, sold to financier Richard Hollander; our poor Mr. Kola Aluko took a huge loss on a McClean mansion in Bel Air that he purchased for $24,500,000 in 2012 and quietly sold this year for $21,565,000; and finally, Mr. Marciano’s new $20,800,000 Trousdale abode.

Anyway, Mr. Juan/Won/Wan tells us the house measures approximately 10,000 square feet across two levels – one of which lies below ground.

The house is located on one of the main Trousdale streets — also one of the most expensive streets — and some of Mr. Marciano’s new neighbors include Marcus Persson, Jay Stein, Bill Gross, and Ringo Starr.

As is very typical of Mr. McClean’s homes, things get dramatic right off the bat. This one starts with a catwalk (for impromptu fashion shows, natch) that leads to an all-glass-walled living/dining room combo guaranteed to impress the pizza delivery boy (or pizza delivery girl).

Adjacent to the dining/living area is a vast kitchen equipped with every conceivable appliance. There are two Honda Civic-sized center islands, each of which may or may not be slathered in terrazzo to match the floors. Beyond that is a swanky fireplace-equipped living room.

Elsewhere in the upper level is the master suite.

Large walls are perfect for the display of a significant art collection. Mr. Marciano will definitely put those to good use.

The floors switch from terrazzo to a blonde hardwood on the lower level. And Yolanda loves the indoor spa. No need for those arduous treks down to the Beverly Wilshire when you need your hot soak fix.

The home’s lower level is completely devoted to recreational activities and the centerpiece is not the spa but rather a humongous bar/lounge/game room with a wine cellar and an enormous wet bar. Beyond that is a pool table and a large couch that looks the Mercedes S-class of frat boy couches.

Through the glass wall is an outdoor water feature. (A wishing well/pond?)

Our homeboy Mr. Juan/Won/Wan points out that the house has a very tiny pool. Maybe Mr. Marciano doesn’t like to swim much?

It appears the .62-acre property lacks any significant yard space to speak of, which is quite a shame. At least in Yolanda’s opinion. For $20,800,000 we’d like at least enough space for Rufus the Pitbull to have a doggy run.

However, what really most surprised Yolanda was seeing that the house does not have a great city lights view. It doesn’t have much of a view at all, really. Or at least that’s how it appears from the photographs. A short but thick hedge running across the southern end of the property ensures privacy from the neighbors but also significantly impedes the sightlines.

See? You can’t have everything you want. Not even if you’re Mr. Maurice Marciano*. And not even for $20,800,000.

*Yolanda does not claim, profess, or admit any knowledge as to whether Mr. Marciano actually wanted a big view at his new Trousdale Estates house or not.

We know there’s a thousand jokes we could make about the abrupt and already-contentious divorce of America’s Royal Couple (no, Kimye, not you two). But divorce is always extra-hard when there are young kids involved. And there are 47 of them involved in this case. Or something like that. So we’re gonna keep it classy and not delight in the misery of others — at least for today. Schadenfreude seekers, seek elsewhere. But check back tomorrow.

Given that Brangelina owned but a single Los Angeles compound — at least during the latter years of their erstwhile relationship — it surprised exactly no one when the Brit folk over at the Daily Mail confirmed that Ms. Jolie had taken her busload of kids and quietly set up (temporary) house in a fully furnished rental pad.

The crib in question is located way far out in the upper reaches of Malibu, comfortably away from most paparazzi. Specifically, the location is Point Dume. For all you newbies up in here, Point Dume has long been the most celebrity-heavy neighborhood in Malibu. The area is decidedly low-key, but the best blufftop homes here can fetch a sale price of more than $20 million or even $30 million.

Some famous current Point Dume residents include Mrs. Malibu (Barbra Streisand), James Perse, Aileen Getty, Chris Martin, Pink, Kid Rock, Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, Mike Fleiss, Chad Smith, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, and Sean Penn.

And that’s just a small sampling. Another (in)famous resident is director/producer Bryan Singer, who paid $8,500,000 for his Point Dume house back in 2010. It is here, at this house, where Ms. Jolie & co. have set up shop.

The Daily Mail reports that Ms. Jolie is paying $95,000 per month in rent. Now, kiddies, we’re aware this is Malibu and rental prices are thus outrageous. We’re also aware that Ms. Jolie is a very, very rich lady who can afford to pay $95,000 per month for a house and probably a lot more, too. But that figure sounds ludicrously high to Yolanda, to the point of being nearly unbelievable.

For one, it’s the off-season and rents in Malibu always come down when it’s not summer. Secondly, there are several  other properties within walking distance of this house that are listed for rent. None of them are asking anywhere near $95k per month, save for Shaun White’s house (it’s currently asking $65k/month). Finally, Mr. Singer listed this very house two years ago at a rate of $50,000 per month.

But Ms. Jolie was probably pretty desperate for a quick getaway, so maybe she really is paying that much. We don’t think the Daily Mail would randomly conjure up the $95,000 figure, so we’ll take their word for it on this one.

Mr. Singer’s blufftop pad was built in 1958 and is located on Birdview Avenue, a street often considered to be the most coveted road on Point Dume for the magnificent westward views it possesses. Homes on the bluff side have unbeatable, jaw-dropping sunset vistas.

The low-profile and vaguely Japanese-style beach abode has a comfortable (but certainly not huge) 4,409 square feet of living space with five bedrooms and five bathrooms in the main house and a separate one bedroom, one bath guest house with an attached gym. Yolanda imagines the guest house will be occupied either by a bodyguard or a personal assistant/nanny of some sort.

Upon entering the home, a mahogany (?) staircase shows itself. Beyond that is a spacious great room with clear views to the Pacific. Maybe the three little Buddhas on the landing represent Ms. Jolie’s three former husbands? Will she dramatically shatter them on the bamboo (?) floors below? Stay tuned!

Elsewhere there’s a high-grade gourmet kitchen (not pictured), a lovely and square dining room table, and more wood-framed windows that take in the views.

The master suite is small compared to some of the humongous ones we’ve seen in recent weeks, but it’s got a private soaking tub for hot baths, a vanity, and access to a section of the home’s wraparound terrace. Nice outdoor dining table, too.

Ms. Jolie’s rental also comes with a state-of-the-art media room. According to the Daily Mail, our gurl has set up a “war room” where she and her advisors have holed up to deal with the drama and publicity whirlwind surrounding her divorce announcement. Yolanda wonders if this might be the room in question.

Should Ms. Jolie and/or her kids feel antsy in their no-longer-secret hideout, they can always turn to the 1.01-acre estate’s outdoor creature comforts. These include a private lagoon-style pool and separate spa surrounded by tropical landscaping, lounge chairs overlooking the sand and water below, and the aforementioned outdoor dining table.

There’s also a steep stone stairway that leads down the cliff to a locked gate by the public (and often very crowded) beach. But somehow we doubt whether Ms. Jolie and her kids will use that much. They’re laying low, remember?

The house happens to be directly across the street from an estate owned by actor Owen Wilson. Other famous and/or famously rich homeowners on the same star-studded road include Bob Dylan, Shaun White, Yife Tien, Anthony Hopkins, Mary Gerdts, and a whole bunch more that we can’t recall at the moment.

As for Mr. Singer, he makes his primary residence in an uber-modern two-house West Hollywood compound that’s located just above the world-famous Sunset Strip. It is here where Mr. Singer’s penchant for throwing wild pool parties that often featured scantily-clad and dangerously-young men gained him a certain “rep” in Hollywood.

Mr. Singer’s sexual affinity for nubile gents was an open secret in town for many years and was finally brought into the light during a widely-publicized lawsuit. Though the accuser eventually dropped his case against Mr. Singer, the director has since toned down his at-home bashes. He’s also become a father recently — his best friend gave birth to his son and the two are raising him together. These darn new-age Hollywood types, my oh my!

But we digress.

Yolanda would bet that after the smoke has finally cleared and the divorce papers signed in Wiccan blood, Mr. Pitt will stay put in his longtime Los Feliz compound (he’s owned it since the 1990s, after all) and Ms. Jolie will buy a new spread in Malibu or the Hollywood Hills area. Although she could afford any house she wants, we just don’t see Ms. Jolie as a Brentwood or Palisades mansion gal — or even a Beverly Hills gal, for that matter.

We could be wrong, though. Yes, even the great Yolanda gets it wrong on the rare occasion.

Since we just discussed Angie Jolie’s not-so-secret Point Dume hideout yesterday, we thought why not? Darn if it isn’t a hot day. Let’s stay out there where the sea billows roll, where the girls are pretty and the Bentleys outnumber the Camrys 4 to 1. Out there beyond yonder Umbrian hills (the Santa Monica mountains by any other name). But before we depart, wet your whistle with a glass of something cool. There’s nothing like a fresh-squeezed lemonade sold illegally on the side of a public road. Is there?

Now then. As you all know, Malibu is Malibu. And what does a seaside neighborhood like Malibu do? Malibu gets very expensive. So because big money makes noise and we’re nosy Nancys, let’s discuss a big sale that recently went down out there.

Earlier this month, a house on Point Dume sold for the extremely A-list (and rather complicated) figure of $17,753,645. The spendy buyer’s identity is carefully shielded behind a blind trust, but it should be noted that the trustee of said trust happens to be a Palo Alto (CA) based attorney.

Well, kiddies, we can’t tell you how we know. But Yolanda just happens to know that the new owners are a very low-profile (but very rich, duh) Silicon Valley couple named Erik & Julie Swan.

Mr. Swan is the co-founder of a tech company called Splunk. You may never have heard of Splunk – and neither had Yolanda before we did a bit of research on our Mr. Swan – but it’s a publicly traded Silicon Valley tech firm with more than 1,700 employees. The company “produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface,” according to our homegurl Wiki Pedia.

And it’s extremely successful. Splunk hauled in $668 million in revenue last month. Not the sexiest of industries, but clearly the company found a profitable and exploitable niche. For Yolanda’s part, she’s extremely grateful to know that Splunk exists because their name is endlessly fun to say out loud. Especially several times fast. Go on, try it! You know you want to.

Though only in his early 50s, Mr. Swan seems to have retired from day-to-day operations at his company. He serves only as an “advisor” there nowadays. Nevertheless, he is – according to Forbes – the company’s largest single shareholder. Or at least he was back in 2012. Back then, the company’s $35.02 share price gave Mr. Swan’s shares a value of $115.6 million.

Splunk’s stock price closed today at $57.59, which would make those same shares worth somewhere around $190 million, give or take a few hundred thousand Benjamins. Clearly, though Yolanda can’t ascertain Mr. Swan’s net worth with any certainty, he definitely has the dough to afford a $17 million vacation home in Malibu.

Now onto the house. But first, let’s get one thing out of the way here. Although the mini-compound is recently renovated and the lot is a generous 1.01-acre, the real selling point here is the 17 million dollar views. So below are pictures showing the true value of the property.

We know plenty of folks will disagree with your gurl, but we find all those palm trees to be a mite distracting from the ocean view. Yolanda would thin the herd just a tad. Otherwise it’s pure, unfiltered bliss.

The compound is far from huge, but there’s still plenty of space. The main house has four bedrooms and four bathrooms, then there’s a two-story guest house with another bed and full bath. And let’s not forget the detached three car garage with two separate maids quarters. That gives the estate a total of 7 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms, though the listing does not specify total square footage.

In case you think $17 million is way too much money for a house this size, think again. The property next door — similar-sized lot but with a decrepit teardown structure — sold earlier this year for $17,100,000 to Malibu mega-realtor Chris Cortazzo, who happens to be the guy who repped both sides of the deal we are discussing today.

However, kiddies, this not the end of the story. You may want to sit down for this next part. Ready? You see, not only is this not the only residence Mr. Swan owns in Malibu, it’s not the only 8-figure house he owns on Point Dume.

It was only a year ago when Mr. & Mrs. Swan shocked the Splunk naysayers (Splunksayers?) by throwing down $13,340,646 for another house that’s basically just around the corner from their new property.

The Swans’ other Malibu house was sold to them by longtime celeb couple Rande Gerber & Cindy Crawford. It also happens to be located on the very same celeb-saturated cul-de-sac where some of the nearest houses are owned by the likes of Julia Roberts, Chris Martin, Don Rickles, and Chad Smith.

That’s a total of $31,094,291 in luxury Malibu real estate. Not too shabby. More like Splunky!

But if $31 million somehow doesn’t impart the fact that Mr. & Mrs. Swan are really, really rich, Yolanda has navigated the murky depths of property records and we can tell you that the couple also own yet another multi-million dollar residence – this one in the little-heralded city of Truckee, CA, on the Lake Tahoe shore.

Back in 2012, the Swans paid $5,375,000 for the house, which includes 6,352 square feet of living space, 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms, a media room, a gym, and a wet bar for passing the time on those icy winter days.

Let’s end on a warm note — back in Malibu. To be honest, though we’ve heard a couple rumors we can’t say with any certainty what Mr. & Mrs. Swan plan to do with their two pricey homes on Point Dume. Perhaps they’ll renovate the new one and eventually sell the one they bought from Ms. Crawford & Mr. Gerber. Maybe they’ll flip one. Or rent one. Or flip or rent both. What about a teardown? Say it ain’t so!

By the way, kids, the $17 million Malibu house was sold by French-born sneaker tycoon Pierre-Andre Senizergues. If you wanna know more about him or the house he no longer owns, splunk on over to Your Mama’s beauteous write-up over this way. We’re sorry to be so skimpy on the details over here, but this heat wave has got us right addled and we just can’t with anything ever.

But we’ll be back in top form very soon. You can stick that in your ol’ Splunker.

Chris Cortazzo of Coldwell Banker repped both the seller and the Swans.

The eastern portion of LA’s iconic Sunset Strip is a hotbed of tourists and celebrities and assorted debauchery. Nightclubs. Drugs. Sex. Mechanized bulls. Some rather puritanical folks might term it a cesspool of sin. Of course, it’s all one big happy playground for the paparazzi. They’re lurking in every corner out there, foaming at the mouth for a drunken A-list actor to stumble outta the bar or an attention-seeking young socialite to pull up at the Roxy, inadvertently flashing her chonies as she emerges from her low-slung sports car.

Looming over the glittery madness is the seriously legendary Chateau Marmont.

Just behind the ghostly hotel is a steep residential road. They call it Marmont Lane, appropriately enough. As uncomfortably narrow as it may be, this roadway attracts car traffic. A whole lot of car traffic, actually. Not only does it link the Strip with other residential Hollywood Hills roads, it is also the location of several celebrity-owned homes. Kendall Jenner, Jimmy Kimmel and Sandra Bullock all own houses on this lane. Creakkk go the rickety tour buses as they haul a new load of sightseers up the hill every half-hour.

The very first house on this street, the one directly across from the Chateau, is almost always ignored by tourists and residents alike. But because Yolanda enjoys venturing off the beaten path now and again, this is the property we shall discuss today. (The beaten path meaning celebrity houses, natch…)

Maybe a few folks driving by are aware this house was once owned by James Franco. A handful may even know that he completely remodeled and renovated the once-dated residence, endowing it with the slick, chic look it sports today. But most of them simply trundle on by without regard, focused on something, anything, just not this thing.

The few who are observant (or bored) enough to notice the residence may recognize certain fairly odd features of the property — the mountain of semi-concealed security cameras monitoring every inch of the premises, the Tesla SUV with the limo-tinted windows parked ’round back. But this is LA and things that might seem incongruous almost anywhere else are not only common — they are almost expected here. Yolanda thinks that might be why the owner of this house was drawn to the neighborhood.

You see, unlikely as it may be, that house — located smack-dab in the bustling heart of the Sunset Strip — is the current residence of one of the most mysterious people Yolanda has ever encountered.  Her name is Alba di Angeli. And she’s a ghost! No joke.

Now, remember the other day when we discussed an enigmatic woman named Tina Trahan? A lady who hobnobs with a who’s who list of celebrities yet has made herself nearly invisible online?

Compared to Alba di Angeli, Ms. Trahan is a rank amateur in the industry of secrecy.

But we already digress. Let us start where we should always start – from the beginning.

Back in September 2015, Our Mama reported that TV show writer/producer Joe Keenan and his and his husband Gerry Bernardi had put a large chunk of their longtime residential compound on the market. Mr. Keenan, if you didn’t know, is best-known for his work on the gone-but-not-forgotten ratings juggernauts Desperate Housewives and Frasier, the latter of which scored him five Emmy awards. His house — which he owned for nigh on 20 years — is located on a wooded knoll in the Studio City hills.

Measuring a spacious but not massive 5,297 square feet, the 1930s Colonial ain’t at all visible from the street, thanks to an ultra-private lot measuring nearly 1.5 acres.

Among the many creature comforts of the estate are a gym, an outdoor dining area, a galley kitchen with skylight, a double office and a library. And let’s not forget the two guest suites or the fabulous master with wood-paneled walk-in closet. Or that otherworldly master bath! Why, that thing could be the star of its own bathroom TV show. What a personality.

However, the centerpiece of the estate has got to be that beautiful Old Hollywood-style oval pool. Scrumptious. Ever since she was a mere tot, Yolanda has had a strange and unnatural fascination with oval-shaped things. Don’t ask ’cause we don’t know.

But we digress yet again. As we say, the house went up on the block last year for $6,750,000 — a very big number for the Studio City area. By the dawn of 2016, the ask had dipped dramatically to $5,900,000. But then, suddenly, the house disappeared. Yanked off the MLS under the cover of darkness, it was.

Did Mr. Keenan & Mr. Bernardi change their minds about selling? Hardly.

Imagine Yolanda’s surprise when we discovered 1) that the house had very quietly transferred that same month (February 2016) for a neighborhood record-destroying price of $7,400,000 — way, way more than the last official ask — and 2) that the new owner was a mysterious entity calling itself “JA Berry LLC”. Berry, just so y’all know, is the name of the street on which this house is located. But what in the gosh-darn world could JA stand for? Hmmm.

Well, the oddly huge sale price was quickly explained by the fact that the sale included not only the big main house but also the small house next door — a property also owned by Mr. Keenan and Mr. Bernardi that had never been (puclicly) listed for sale. But the identity of the estate’s new owner was much harder to suss out.

Now, kiddies, a sale price of $7.4 million may not seem like all that much to you jaded real estate watchers. But make no mistake, that’s huge money for Studio City — the most ever paid in the area up to that point, like we say. We were also intrigued when we heard that the new owner has stationed 24/7 guards on the estate. Bodyguards are de rigeur in places like Beverly Park, but not so much in Studio City.

Naturally, both Yolanda and Your Mama quickly rallied the troops. We hopped on the horn and reached out to our different hodge-podge networks. “Tell us who bought that house or perish for eternity!” we wailed. Lo and behold, much to Yolanda’s surprise, we both quickly came back with the same name: the name of a woman (apparition?) who — for online intents and purposes —  does not exist. Alba di Angeli.

Try Googling this lady. We dare you! Apart from her association to a bizarrely-named corporation, she’s non-existent. No social media, no apparent family, no pictures, no nothin’.

But there are still scraps available here and there, and we’re here to sort out the puzzle pieces.

As far as we can tell, Ms. di Angeli suddenly appeared in Los Angeles back in summer 2008. She came from nowhere, with nobody. We aren’t certain, but we think she may have emerged from the grey, ghostly old steamer ship that appears out of the mist and docks at the LA port on the same day every year. You know the one. The one with the screaming and moaning from yonder dark, dripping corridors and the lone, withered old man with no eyes who greets Ms. di Angeli when she raps three times on the hidden door in the belly of the beast. That one.

But what we do know is that Ms. di Angeli quickly plunked down $4,000,000 (in cash, apparently) for a privately-situated house located in the celebrity-stocked Hidden Hills community out in the San Fernando Valley. Guard-gated Hidden Hills is, of course, most famous for being the longtime family seat of the kooky Kardashian / Jenner clan.

It should be noted that Ms. di Angeli’s name does not appear on the deed for this property. Nor does it appear on any of her other homes or in any public records database at all. Property records simply show that the house was acquired in July 2008 by something called the “AAHH Trust”.

Scarcely a week after buying her Hidden Hills house, Ms. di Angeli formed the aforementioned bizarrely-named corporation: “FMCMB, Inc.”. Yolanda has no idea what the purpose of this business entity is and we also lack a clue as to what FMCMB stands for. Fill My Chunky Monkey Basket? Might be!

Now then. For some unknown reason, Ms. di Angeli very quickly tired of her Hidden Hills house. Maybe she realized it was too suburban, too laidback, too far from the hotspots of LA. And yes, traffic down that 101 can be a real pain in the tushie. Take it from Yolanda.

Whatever the case, within a year Ms. di Angeli was back on the hunt for a new house. Eventually, as we’ve already told you, she settled on James Franco’s compound just above the Sunset Strip. Ms. di Angeli paid $3,300,000 for that property in February 2010 through her “AMHH Trust”.

There are 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, trendy ebonized wood floors, a pool, a spa, lots of old Hollywood details, and a hideously expensive La Cornue range in the kitchen.

And apparently Ms. di Angeli likes Mr. Franco’s old house, because she’s been living there ever since.

As for the Hidden Hills joint, m’lady dumped it later in 2010 at an utterly bone-chilling $1.2 million loss. Egads!

Hold on a moment and let’s review. Ms. di Angeli appeared out of nowhere in 2008. For all intents and purposes, she’s unGoogleable. Though she is relatively young still — we think — she has no readily apparent family or friends, but a whole caboodle of money. And though she lives in a very public location, she ain’t never been seen. Nobody Yolanda knows has ever laid eyes on this lady, though we talk as if we know her.

Yes, we already know what you’re thinking. Does Ms. di Angeli actually exist? And the question is valid.

The answer is yes. She does exist. But the only reason that Yolanda can tell you that for certain is because there is someone — a living, breathing human being — who knows Ms. di Angeli very well. That person is a West Hollywood personal trainer and part-time model named Johannes Brugger. Yolanda has done her homework and Mr. Brugger is a very real man. He played college football for Duke University, worked as a male model on The Price is Right, was previously married to someone else, and now trains a variety of bigshot and/or celebrity clients in the WeHo area.

Mr. Brugger is a very real man. And he is married, so we’ve been told by Mr. Deep Throat, to Ms. di Angeli. By default, wouldn’t that make Ms. di Angeli a real person, too? We think it would. Marrying spirits has not yet been legalized, after all.

We think – call it an assumption based on vague intel – that it was sometime in either 2013 or 2014 when Ms. di Angeli and Mr. Brugger tied the knot. We only mention that because 2013 is when Ms. di Angeli began upping her real estate spending.

That April, Ms. di Angeli spilled out $1,825,000 for a 1930s duplex building in the central Beverly Grove area near West Hollywood. For the records, the property was acquired through her “104 N Harper LLC”.

Yolanda hasn’t the faintest idea why this property was purchased by Ms. di Angeli (and Mr. Brugger, though she is the one writing the checks). In any case, she extensively renovated the two-unit, 6-bed 4-bath abode and tossed it back onto the market earlier this year (2016). It sold last month for $2,480,000.

Now kiddies, here’s where things get interesting. Back in July 2015, the house immediately next door to Ms. di Angeli’s Marmont Lane crib came up for sale. Several potential buyers fought over the property, and the sale price of 2,155,000 is a significant $155,000 over the ask. According to our Mr. Deep Throat, it was none other than Ms. di Angeli who won the bidding war, though the buyer is carefully cloaked behind another LLC.

Why would Ms. di Angeli expand her Sunset Strip compound — which has now cost her nearly $5.5 million — and then, barely six months later, splurge on a huge Studio City compound? Like most everything about her, the answer is murky at best. All we know is that for whatever reason and/or purpose, Ms. di Angeli currently owns nearly $13 million  worth of luxury LA real estate.

So you’re probably wanting a happy ending to this silly tale. An ending where Yolanda explains away the fog of mystery and tells y’all what’s what. Sorry to disappoint, but we don’t have that. We’ve tried, but the origins of Ms. di Angeli and her sources of wealth remain a secret guarded with Fort Knox-level security. Or something.

Here’s what Yolanda thinks. We think Alba di Angeli may not actually be the name on this lady’s birth certificate. Names can be changed, babies. People do it all the time for all sorts of legitimate reasons. Yolanda’s high school Italian is a mite rusty, but we’re pretty sure Alba di Angeli roughly translates to “dawn of the angels”.

It’s worth noting, however, that both the Studio City compound and the Sunset Strip compound are both registered to a New York City-based wealth management firm. According to their website, one of their main client group happens to be inheritors of wealth — wealth from “a trust created by a parent, the estate of a loved one, a divorce agreement, a judgment or the lottery”.

In any case, it’s just another mystery. A history! The dawn of a new oddity among many oddities in the city of angels, just a blip in this horrible, wonderful, spinning world.

Selling agent (Studio City compound): Heidi Lake, Sotheby’s International Realty
Alba di Angeli’s agent: Brett Lawyer, Hilton & Hyland

Believe it or not, kiddies, but Yolanda first heard whispers of this from our friend Vlad the Revealer over at Celebrity Address Aerial more than two weeks ago. Our Mr. Revealer contacted us out of the great blue yonder to snitch about everyone’s favorite makeup maven. You know who. Little Miss Kylie Jenner. Lord have mercy, kiddies. The dam has broken; hell hath frozen over, thawed, burned to a crisp and then been iced out again. Yolanda is writing about the Kardashians. Again!

Anyway, and as you may know, Yolanda’s favorite Kardashian is Kylie Jenner. (Yeah, yeah, she’s not technically a Kardashian but who’s splitting hairs up in here?) So naturally we were all ears when Mr. Revealer told us that Miss Jenner — who despite her very mature looks is still a teenager — was soon to be the top-secret new owner humongous and brand-new Hidden Hills mansion that was (at that time) in escrow with an asking price of $12,426,000.

Know what Yolanda did when we heard that?

We laughed. Yes, we admit it! We laughed and laughed. Then we laughed some more. We were so, so foolish. You see, we couldn’t fathom that young Miss Jenner — who only just turned 19 — would want a gargantuan $12 million house in the very same gated community where she already owns a $10.5 million compound just a couple streets away. And she just bought that compound a couple months ago! Come on. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?

Listen, kids, the Kardashians are by definition absolutely ridiculous. We know. But even that sort of blatant real estate gluttony is utter lunacy. Even for them. Yolanda knew the story Mr. Revealer told us just couldn’t be true. Never.

Well, today Yolanda is devouring a supersized platter of crow or humble pie or a large hat (?). Whatever you prefer. Wanna know why? We’ll tell you anyway! Because that huge new mansion, the very one Mr. Vlad the Revealer fingered as Miss Jenner’s latest acquisition, sold about a week ago for $12,050,000. And we can exclusive tell y’all the buyer is…

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

LOL keep waiting…

Kylie Jenner.

You see, after we had slapped ourselves a few times to quell the guffaws from our initial reaction to Mr. Revealer’s bit of gossip, we told ourselves “What the hell? Let’s just make sure and ask someone who knows.” We turned to our luxe-living new friend Hidden Hills Hannah, who said she didn’t know.

But then, just last night, we received word from Ms. Hannah. Our gurl told us that she had talked to one of the HOA’s security guards who just couldn’t resist spilling the beans on Miss Jenner’s undercover purchase.

In light of this shocking development, we approached our pal Deep Throat, the ultimate final word on anything and everything. It took him a hot minute but eventually he thirded the motion previously put forth by both Mr. Revealer and Ms. Hannah. According to all three of our best snitches, kiddies, Miss Jenner really did drop a baller-style $12,050,000 for yet another gigantic mansion in Hidden Hills.

Ms. Hannah told us that there are several pictures and video thingamajiggys out there on social media. She helpfully pointed us to the below photo, which came from Miss Jenner’s Instagram feed and shows an outdoor living area that very clearly matches her $12 million house. It’s also worth noting that this picture was posted on the very day last week that this house closed escrow. Jolly good and helpful of Miss Jenner to post this, we say.

Now then. It’s estate picture storytime!

The house in question looks almost bizarrely identical to the other two Hidden Hills houses she already owns. Our Miss Jenner apparently does not care to venture out of the style groove to which she has accustomed herself, which is a right shame if anyone were to ask Yolanda. Couldn’t Miss Jenner go for something a bit sexier than this very fancy but slightly banal house?

The house is rather optimistically described in marketing materials as “Cape Cod” in style. Hmm. We’ve seen Cape Cod houses before, babies, and we think those lovely lasses would take (justifiable) umbrage at the implication this bloated beached whale – luxurious and pricey as it may be – is related to them.

Let’s just say it’s a newly-built palace with a decidedly traditional-esque architectural. There are 13,200 square feet of living space with 8 bedrooms and a total of 9.75 bathrooms. Let’s not forget the 6-car garage and 1.43 acres of land.

The house’s front door opens to an airport hangar-sized entrance lobby with an industrial-sized staircase. Stairs are topped with a trendy dark hardwood. Everything else is off-white, with the exception of the blondish hardwood floors underfoot. (Are they birch? Ash?)

Oh and remember — those stairs are for HOV’s and the upper landing is for loading/unloading only!

As you’d probably imagine, the mansion includes a spacious living room, family room and dining room. Sliding walls of glass bring the outdoors inside (or vice versa)

The house also has a private gym (not pictured) and a massage room with his-and-hers tables. Lucky bastard, that Tiger (or Tigger or whatever the heck Miss Jenner’s unemployable rapper boyfriend calls himself.)

The master bedroom has its own mini living room (that’s probably bigger than the living rooms in most “normal” houses.) And let’s not forget the master bathroom. Like most other rooms in the house’s it’s just this side of gigantic and includes a marble- (or some other stone-) slathered floor that could probably double as a spare ballroom, so vast is the space.

There’s a negative-edge saltwater swimming pool and a prairie-sized swath of green lawn. Outdoor terraces include several lounge and eating areas. Thankfully, most are covered and thus sheltered from the sweltering San Fernando Valley sun.

The property lies on “Hidden Ridge Road,” a newly-developed street within the Hidden Hills community that will soon be completely dotted with mega-mansions like Miss Jenner’s new one. Some are even larger!

Oh, and in case you think Ms. Jenner overpaid like crazy for this house, think again. A similarly-sized spec mansion directly across the street sold just a couple months ago for $14,595,000 to a very rich healthcare CEO named Richard Gonzalez.

The burning question on everyone’s mind is why Miss Jenner would purchase three houses in Hidden Hills? Yolanda wondered that herself.

We talked to Mr. Deep Throat about it. He told us the properties were investments – her makeup line has been so lucrative and successful that she’s looking for place to park the cash.

But our Ms. Hannah told us a different story. She said she heard that young Miss Jenner purchased the big new house as a crash pad. That’s right, kiddies, a $12 million crash pad. According to Ms. Hannah, Miss Jenner plans to tear down not one but both of the other two Hidden Hills houses she already owns – both of which are brand-new – and build herself an enormous mega-compound befitting a proper celebrity with A+ list cash.

So we guess the proper answer is that the jury’s still out. Yes?

Yolanda really doesn’t know what else to say about this. It’s a 19-year-old spending $22,575,000 on luxury real estate. That’s massive money to everyone but billionaires. That’s Beverly Park money. What else is left to say that we haven’t already said.

So we’ll say it all again.

Miss Jenner — Yolanda has a few last words just for you. We hate to get so philosophical on y’all this early in the week, we really do. But dear Miss Jenner, your life has us puzzled. You’re still a teen and you’ve already got the mansions, the cars, the clothes, the jewels, the business empire, the jetset lifestyle, the fame, the (allegedly) purchased hot body. Now what?

You’ve conquered every aspect of this material life. What else is left for you out there? For the remainder of your many decades of life, Miss Jenner?

Maybe when you’re 60, when you’ve just purchased your latest $100 million mansion, maybe you’ll momentarily pause. You’ll close your eyes and recall a different time forty years ago… the ancient days. Back in 2016! You’ll remember. There was still time back then. You could’ve fixed it all. Think back! You can see the crowd, your 73 million followers on that long-forgotten Instagram app. In your reflection, you’re still there now! You can change it, you can save them all, save yourself. You can warn them all about the horrid, cynical future. Just lock down this place, this time, hold on and make it last forever. Step out into the light, Miss Jenner. You’re young and free and about to burst…

Yes, Miss Jenner. You’ve done it again. Let those Hidden Hills gossip queens will hiss and moan, of course. “There she goes again,” those old hens will cackle. “That Jenner gurl. Too much damn money.”

But let them burn, Miss Jenner. They are left to watch as you go. You’re home now. For now!

Selling agent: Marc Shevin, Berkshire Hathaway HomeService
Kylie Jenner’s agent: Tomer Fridman, Ewing Sothebys

This next story makes Yolanda Yakketyyak very happy. We’ve been carrying a bit of secondhand sadness, you see. Poor Miss Camille Grammer. Our cold, dark heart bleeds for the gal. Dumped by her cheatin’ hubby, beat up by her underhanded ex-bf, forced to sell her big ass (and very beautiful) “Chateau de Grace” estate in the legendary Serra Retreat. Downgraded to a sad mock-Med in a luxurious but rather unheralded gated community.

Damn! You see? Even really rich folks suffer too.

As you may or may not recall, it was Yolanda who revealed that Ms. Grammer’s old house was purchased by her very-rich neighbor Wendy Hughes for $12,940,000. Ms. Grammer quickly laid out $3,282,000 for a much smaller house in a different community near the Paradise Cove and Point Dume areas of Malibu. It’s a far cry from her old spread, that’s for certain.

What a downgrade!

But don’t count our gurl out yet. Yolanda just happens to know that Ms. Grammer is determined to spend the big bucks again. To that end, she just laid out $6,550,000 through something called “The Sea Life View Trust” for an original 1950 house on Malibu Road, one of the city’s most desirable stretches of sand.

Ms. Grammer, so it would seem, plans to keep a family home up in the hills and a beach home down by the shore. That’s a pretty baller lifestyle, especially when the two residences in question cost a total of $9,838,000.

Unassuming is an understatement. This is about as humble-looking as any $6.5 million house you’ll ever see. A straighforward two-car garage and a wooden fence (both poop brown) make up the front facade. An overgrown ficus (?) tree overwhelms the small front courtard.

The house also sports one of the most unconventional front entrances Yolanda has ever laid eyes on. A door leads directly into the courtyard. Down two flights of wooden stairs, there’s a terrace with painted brick and a wood-framed glass door that we believe is actually the main access point to the house.

Indoors is a bit retro with that tile/brick surrounding a built-in shag carpet.

Okay, so it’s admittedly very dated and not necessarily in a good way.  But there’s potential here! Nearly floor-to-ceiling windows. Spacious rooms.

Good Lord. Yolanda half-expected to see our gurl Tiffany Case to saunter out of that bedroom and glamorously tumble down the carpeted stairs and into James Bond’s lap. By the way, 007 should not and hopefully never will be a lady. This is James Bond we’re talking about! That’s just sacrilege. (Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people?! But we digress…)

The master suite is unexpectedly gigantic. In fact, it encompasses the entire second floor of the main house. The bathroom is riotous ensemble with some sort of granite or marble countertops that valiantly vie for retina-shredding dominance over the red tile and the wonderfully heinous wallpaper.

In addition to the 2-bed, 1.5 bath main house there’s also a detached guest suite located off the courtyard. A wee bedroom and a three-quarter bathroom with cobalt blue tiles are shoved up in there. The mini-mini-mini compound totals 2,043 square feet on a minuscule .14-acre lot.

Of course, the real value in the property is not in the house or the land itself but rather the location and the spectacular views. Malibu Road has long been one of the most desirable stretches of sand in the city. And it likely always will be — that is until the Big One allows the ocean to reclaim its long-lost territory.

In addition to Ms. Grammer’s $10 millon property portfolio, Yolanda has one other secret tidbit to share.

You see, Ms. Grammer went down to see her new house this weekend. Just to check on everything, make sure the locks were locked, the bolts were bolted and the waves were still waving, you see. Typical stuff.

It was a sunny Saturday. A old Ford pickup went rumbling across the scorched desert that is the Pacific Coast Highway. The Allman Brothers were blasting on the truck’s stereo, the high fade of dust kicked up by its rattling wheels. Camille sat in the driver’s seat, one arm hanging lazily on the window, cigarette dangling off her lip, one boot up on the dash.

Camille got to her new Malibu shack. She sauntered in the courtyard door, slid down the stairs, kicked open the front door. She’s Camille Grammer, after all. No rusty hinges are gonna stand in the way of our Malibu real estate queen.

She creaked up the creaky stairs. Then she gasped audibly. Out there in front of her, laid out on the bed, draped in furs, was her old dancin’ pal Tiffany Case. Tiffany half-opened her deep brown eyes. She looked over. A slow grin crept across her face.

“Tiff,” Camille breathed. “That you?”

Tiffany flicked open a half-empty pack of Marlboros and stuck one in between her bone-white teeth. “In the flesh, Cammy,” she said, lifting her right leg off the bed, her mink coat parting to reveal her naked porcelain-colored limb.

“Wh-what… who let… how’d you get in here?” Camille stammered.

Tiffany half-raised her right arm, snapped her fingers, and cocked her delicate left eyebrow. “Baby, that ain’t the issue in the world today. Don’t question this truth. Just believe. I’m gonna take you back to the top, baby.” she cooed. Gesturing to the house around her, she added, “Oh, and I’ve made some minor renovations to this box of bones.”

Tiffany pointed to the new chrome stripper pole out by the balcony, glinting in the Malibu sunlight. “Made in Taiwan with the sturdiest stuff. Have at it, babe. Show Kelsey what he’s missin’.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” stuttered Camille, still more shaken by seeing her co-worker from the Dancing Showgirls strip club in Dallas after so many long, dreary years than by the new stripper pole. “You do it. Show me that ray of sunshine I crave.”

Sighing, Tiffany swung her lithe legs over to the carpeted floor. As she stood up, the furs fell away to reveal her true attire — a skintight satin cocktail dress cut dangerously close to her hip. She slipped on her Loutoutins, marched over the pole, threw down a routine that would’ve made Miley Cyrus salute.

Camille nodded her head, glassy eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses and said “Yeah baby, that’s the stuff, that’s the stuff. You still got it. Stick with that routine and you’ll be on Club MTV before you know it.”

Tiffany raised an eyebrow. “Cammy, babe, you know that Club MTV hasn’t been on in twenty-four years, right?”

Camille frowned momentarily, her thoughts adrift in time. “Really?”

Tiffany lit her cigarette, still intact and clenched between her teeth. “Yeah baby, not since 1992. You believe that?”

Shuddering, Camille shook her head. “Man, I thought ’86 would never end.”

Tiffany exhaled a weary billow of smoke. “You and me both, kiddo. You and me both.”

Selling agent: Susan Cosentino, Sotheby’s International Realty
Camille Grammer’s agent: Janice Burns, Pinnacle Estate Properties

After chatting about Camille Grammer, we decided to continue on with our ex-Real Housewives stars today because, well, why not. Lea Black, as you may (or may not) know, was the unofficial matriarch on the short-lived Miami franchise. We never watched that particular trainwreck — thank goodness — but we hope Mrs. Black got a few slaps and more than a few f-bombs in for fond remembrance’s sake. Ahh, sweet memories.

Although they have long primarily resided in Miami, Mrs. Black and her prominent attorney husband Roy — who has represented high-profile clients such as Justin Bieber, Kelsey Grammer, and Joe Francis — have owned a contemporary vacation home just above LA’s iconic Sunset Strip since 2004, when they purchased the 2,582-square-foot hillside house for $1,760,000.

FYI for those interested, Mrs. Black —  a former waitress from Dallas or something — met the Miami-based (and very rich) Mr. Black during the trial of William Kennedy Smith. Mr. Black was the defense attorney, Mrs. Black was on the jury duty. Now they’re married and preside over a fortune estimated at $100 million or something like that. No more waitressing for Mrs. Black.

See, kids? Sometimes it really does pay to follow the law. Obey that damn jury summons. And don’t forget to preen.

Anyway, maybe the Blacks are planning on spending more time way out west or maybe they just wanted a bigger and better crash pad because they’re really rich. We’re not sure. But either way, the couple have splurged the big bucks on a very done-done-done new crib that’s only about a half-mile from their current house (as the crow flies).

The brand-new spec-mansion sits on a .32-acre double lot with “explosive jetliner views” of the city lights.

A gated front drive off a quiet (and extremely narrow) cul-de-sac leads to the front of the modern crib. Inside, there’s roughly 1.65 billion fluorescent or LED recessed lights and French white oak flooring underfoot. A marble-surround fireplace warms the otherwise stark dining room/family room combo. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls give a vertigo-inducing view of them ol’ peasants far below.

The interior sports fancy-schmancy Lutron & Nest systems, along with tons of other tech gizmo-try.

There’s a sleek uber-modern kitchen with an Italian marble-covered island and some rather awkwardly-places but top-flight appliances.

The master suite is smaller than one might normally expect in a brand-new $6 million spec-house, but it’s lavishly equipped with marble and diamond-encrusted glass and wood from Marie Antoinette’s personal rainforest. Probably.

In addition to the master, there are three guest/family bedrooms and bathrooms.

The lot is extremely steep (much appears unusuable). We gotta say, the developers appear to have done a good job squeezing a 4,200-square-foot house on there. Let’s just hope for the Blacks’ sake that it stays there once the Big One finally decides to hit.

The listing says the outdoor patio sports full audio & lighting, a “Porsche design barbecue”, a firepit, and a “designer” rose garden. Can you imagine the indignity of poor Mrs. Black having to make do with an ordinary Hyundai-design barbecue and non-designer rose garden? Heavens no!

Yolanda assumes without any direct knowledge that Mr. & Mrs. Black will soon unload their old Sunset Strip house, which is located on dangerously twisty (and partially semi-permanently closed) Sunset Plaza Drive.

In addition to their two LA properties, the Blacks maintain not one but two lavish residences in Florida. Their primary home is located in Coral Gables and features 6 bedrooms and just 4 bathrooms in 8,176-square-feet of historic (built in 1924) living space.

The couple also lay claim to an investment property on Miami’s celeb-studded Star Island, where some of their neighbors include Gloria Estefan, Sean “Puff Daddy Duddle” Combs, and Mrs. Black’s former Real Housewives co–star Lisa Hochstein and her hubby, “boob god” Leonard Hochstein.

Mr. & Mrs. Black bought their Star Island estate back in 2007 for $7,107,500 and are currently having a real devil of a time unloading the beotch. They first attempted to unload it back in October 2015 for $17,990,000. The ask was eventually cut in April (2016) to $16,996,000. But still — no takers as of yet.

The 1981 house is of indeterminate architectural heritage and has 10 bedrooms and 10.5 bathrooms in 10,598-square-feet of possible teardown space. Seriously, the current listing features not a single interior photo, which means the ol’ gurl’s chances of survival are probably slim to none. And based on the outdoor pics, we’d call the estate  a very large and expensive but rather fugly dump, if we’re being honest.

Was that rude? Sorry — Yolanda didn’t get her daily glass(es) of wine in yet today. We’re a bit grouchy!

Selling agents: Jason Oppenheim, The Oppenheim Group; Paul Lester, The Agency

It was a long, hard, dusty road laced with many tears and the gnashing of teeth. Even the scent of bitter almonds, too. But Yolanda can exclusively reveal that international music superstar Pink (or P!nk, if you prefer) has very quietly and at long last sold her expensive pad in Malibu’s celebrity-soaked Point Dume neighborhood. And she didn’t do nearly as bad on the transfer as Yolanda was expecting.

You see, we were all set for Ms. Pink to take a big loss. Not so.

Let’s explain. The Grammy-winning Ms. Pink — who for a decade or more has been one of the world’s top-earning musicians — paid a hefty $11,850,000 for the landlocked house back in October 2010, way more than Yolanda thought it was worth. She first (unsuccessfully) attempted to unload it beginning in June 2015 with an asking price of $13,995,000. With no luck, she delisted and gave the ol’ real estate rodeo another go this February (2016) with a new and improved ask of $12,995,000.

Listen, kiddies, we like Ms. Pink (real name: Alecia Moore). Although we don’t care much for her music (except for “Just Like A Pill”, which is fantastic), there’s no denying she’s both a very talented and very hard-working lady. Seriously, have y’all seen that acrobat shit she does at her shows?!

So we like her. But we don’t like her Malibu house. And we never thought anyone would pay more than $12 million for this pile. But after more than a year, it’s finally happened. The lucky Ms. Pink (and her hubby, retired motocross racer Carey Hart) have scored a big-time $12,500,000 for the walled and gated 1.2-acre estate.

Now listen, y’all. Yolanda doesn’t mean to sound spoiled or jaded, but we are having a real tough time writing about this particular house today. It’s not that it’s horribly ugly or offensive — Lord knows we’ve written about much, much uglier houses — it’s just so damn ordinary. A lot of brown and slip-cover staged furniture and stucco. Meh.

How about this? Instead of trudging through another set of our dreary commentary, we’re gonna be lazy (and kind to y’all) and just throw all the pictures on here sans our sassy interpretation. Feel free to make your own personal judgments on the house. Capiche?

Sorry Charlies, we just can’t with it today.

Although public records clearly show the house has 5,218-square-feet of living space, current marketing materials put the square footage at a much more substantial total of 7,450. We’re not sure what caused the discrepancy, but we are pretty damn certain there are 6 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms on the property.

Other features and amenities of the vaguely Hawaiian-themed crib include a 5-car garage, tons of off-street parking, a huge saltwater infinity pool w/ spa, a gourmet kitchen with two islands and top-fleet appliances, hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, a koi pond, and a large stone terrace with peek-a-boo views of the Pacific Ocean.

Best of all, the house transfers with a highly-coveted key to the locked gate that leads to all-but-private (and gorgeous) Little Dume Beach.

And then there’s all the celebrity neighbors. Just a few of the folks within sugar-borrowing include Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, Chris Martin, Barbra Streisand, and James Perse, and so many more.

But who could the big bucks buyer be? Angelina Jolie? Kylie Jenner? (Just kidding!)

Well, y’all may be surprised when we tell you that he is not a big fat Hollywood celebrity at all. Rather, he is a Frenchman named Matthieu Pigasse. Despite his rather unfortunate surname, he’s a very well-respected fellow.

You may have never heard of Mr. Pigasse, kiddies, but in the world of international finance he’s a bonafide damn rockstar. Since 2009, he has been the CEO of the France arm of international investment bank Lazard. He is also — or was — the Vice-Chairman of Lazard Europe and he was profiled by the Wall Street Journal last year at a time when he was the key advisor to the Greek government about its debt deal with the Eurozone.

Apart from his prominent position in banking, Mr. Pigasse has also broadened his financial interests to include the media business. He owns or is a major shareholder in French newspapers, magazines, and radio shows, as well as the French versions of the Huffington Post and Vice. Additionally, and for what it’s worth, Mr. Pigasse was once married to or at least romatically partnered with French media personality Marie Drucker. (Yolanda is not certain if a marriage ever took place, but Mr. Pigasse has been married to a lady named Alix Etournaud since 2010.)

Our gurl Wikipedia says Mr. Pigasse, despite his vast wealth, owns neither a car or a house. Well, obviously he’s got the house now, and Malibu’s not a very bike- or walk-oriented place so Mr. Pigasse will eventually have to purchase a car, we expect. You see? They all come around eventually.

As for Ms. Pink, Mr. Hart, and their young daughter Willow, the trio now primarily reside on their 200++ acre ranch/vineyard estate in a semi-remote area of the Santa Ynez valley, up near beautiful Santa Barbara. The couple paid at least $12 million for their three-parcel estate a few years ago. The property features a massive vineyard with Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache Blanc, Grenache Noir, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec grapes, according to the listing. There are pastures for horses and cattle and other livestock.

The main house was built in 1992 and weighs in at 6,392-square-feet with 4 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms. Other features of the estate include a 2,500-square-foot guest house with 2 beds and baths, a 12-stall barn, an infinity pool, and a private lake. And then there’s that — ahem — unappetizing interior decor. That’s one way to keep folks out of the house and workin’ on the ranch, we suppose.

Pink’s agent: Lily Harfouche, Compass
Matthieu Pigasse’s agent: Shen Schulz, Sotheby’s International Realty

A large Tuscan-style blufftop mansion in the coveted and celebrity-infested “Point Dume” neighborhood of Malibu sold a few weeks ago for a stupendous $27,250,000. As far as your gurl knows, that’s 2016’s second-biggest Malibu sale, after the massive “Lady Malibu” transfer. And Yolanda has been meaning to write about this one for awhile. But as you can see, we got a bit sidetracked with poignant, touching stories about Real Housewives and Kardashians and many other Nobel Prize nominees.

Anyway, the obviously enormously wealthy buyer’s identity is carefully cloaked behind a boringly-named LLC, but the trail leads directly back to a renovated house in the historic Los Feliz area of Los Angeles that’s owned by a young lady named Julia Lebedev (or Julia Lebedeva, as is the correct spelling) and her husband Jonathan Moss. Our Mr. Moss is a corporate litigation attorney, and Ms. Levedev(a) is a 33-year-old up-and-coming film producer who also happens to be the elder daughter of a Russian billionaire oil trader named Leonid Lebedev.

Ms. Lebedev — a USC graduate — and her father have partnered together to create Code Red Productions, through which they’ve bankrolled somewhere around a dozen feature films, including the critically-heralded Dear White People and an Orlando Bloom vehicle called The Good Doctor.

Yolanda has never seen or previously heard of either of those films, truth be told. But then again, despite this blog we actually live under an entertainment rock. It’s more like a boulder, really — a boulder the size of the one in that Indiana Jones movie. We can’t remember the last time we saw a film in the theater. So don’t take it personal, Ms. Lebedev. Yolanda’s just an ignorant lass.

The seller of the Point Dume estate was another semi-mysterious LLC, a known front for a young couple named Nathaniel & Cory Redleaf. Our Mr. Redleaf, who is currently 31 years of age, is an associate at a prominent hedge fund in New York called Luxor Capital Group.

For what it’s worth and in an odd coincidence (or perhaps it wasn’t), it was young Mr. Redleaf’s boss — fashion designer turned hedge funder Christian Leone — who with his husband Malcolm Kutner paid $17,350,000 in late 2013 for Leo DiCaprio’s house over on Malibu Road.

If it still seems odd that a 31-year-old associate at a hedge fund can afford a $27 million house — well, you’re right. Yolanda hasn’t told you the full story, see. Young Mr. Redleaf’s daddy happens to be a guy named Andy Redleaf. The elder Mr. Redleaf is a titan in the hedge fund world. His Minneapolis-based firm Whitebox Advisors has about $4 billion in assets under management — so bviously, the Redleaf family is hugely rich. The elder Mr. Redleaf was ordered to pay $141 million in a divorce settlement, just for starters.

Anyway, Mr. & Mrs. Redleaf paid a man named Ken Panzer a fat $26,500,000 for the house back in a September 2014 off-market deal.

Mr. Panzer, in case you didn’t know, is the guy who forked out $24,000,000 for Heidi Klum’s multi-acre compound up in guard-gated Brentwood Country Estates. (For what it’s worth, Mr. Panzer and his second wife Deborah embarked on some major renovations to Ms. Klum’s already-renovated house. That’s just what really rich folks do when they buy a new home, kiddies. Even if it already looks great, there’s always something — or a lot of somethings — that could be changed.)

But we digress. Anyway, as we already mentioned, the Redleafs decided to sell after only only two years and got $27,250,000 from the corporate entity with clear links to Ms. Lebedev. That’s $750,000 more than what they paid in 2014, but all that profit evaporates quickly when you factor in the enormous agent commissions, taxes, holding costs, closing costs, maintenance, time value of money, etc etc etc. Technically the Redleafs lost money on this property, Yolanda suspects.

Built in 1995, the Mediterranean compound sits on 1.2 acres and weighs in at a mansion-sized 9,130 square feet with 6 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms. These numbers include the tiny one-bed/one-bath guest/staff house near the front gate.

Speaking of the front gate, it and a large fountain are the only property features visible from the street. The house is hidden behind tall hedges for maximum privacy, and the long driveway passes the palm tree-surrounded tennis court before ending at the motorcourt and three-car garage. Naturally, there are cameras and security system(s) up the wazoo.

A double-height entrance foyer has stone floors, a wrought-iron chandelier and neutral colors. The mostly-open floor plan includes a living room, which sports a row of three sets of French doors and a fireplace that looks big enough to host a tea party for the entire offensive line of the LA Rams.

Okay, maybe it’s not quite that big, but it’s close.

Across the hall is a gourmet kitchen with a surprisingly small center island, granite countertops, top-line appliances, and and a wrought-iron chandelier. The kitchen opens to a dining room with an enormous wood slab dining table made out of white oak (or some other expensive material) and capable of seating 12. There’s also a nearby wine dellar (with wine barrels!) and a tiled family room with another fireplace and yet another wrought iron chandelier.

Based on the looks of this house — particularly the master suite — we don’t think the Redleafs performed many (if any) renovations during their brief ownership. While quite comfortable and luxurious, the whole place has a distinctly late-90s flavor to it. The master bedroom sports a large custom fireplace with a wrought iron chandelier within a domed ceiling.

The walk-in closet and marble-slathered master bath are huge but rather dated, as is the decidedly outré wall-to-wall beige carpeting that runs through much of the suite. The master also has three sets of French doors that lead out to a sitting area overlooking the properly amazing view.

Also upstairs are three more suite-style bedrooms, all with wall-to-wall carpeting (we’re guessing. One of ’em is pictured above). There’s also a wood-paneled sitting room/library with marble-surround fireplace and a hardwood-floored media room with a serious projection system, some heavy-duty wood ceiling beams, and yet another fireplace.

Paver stone terraces overlook the busy beach below. The pool ain’t one of them new-fangled infinity-edgers but with a backdrop like that, who cares? Talk about potential overkill.

This particular street — Birdview Avenue — is often considered to be the most desirable on Point Dume for the unbeatable westward sunset views it provides.

As we mentioned, Ms. Lebedev and her hubby Mr. Moss primarily reside in the pricey east LA neighborhood of Los Feliz, where back in June 2014 they paid $2,805,000 for a fully renovated 1931 Mediterranean with approximately 4,000-square-feet of living space.

Like their Malibu house, the property is walled, gated, and has a professional security system with cameras galore. Possibly a force field, too. Gotta keep those undesirables out.

As already mentioned, their new Malibu house sits on the ultra-pricey Birdview Avenue where some of the nearest big-bucks neighbors include Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, legendary legend Bob Dylan, businessman Yife Tien, businesswoman Mary Gerdts, Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, and leading man Owen Wilson, among others. Also on the same street is a house owned by X-Men producer (and alleged pedophile) Bryan Singer, who recently leased it to that crazy lady Angelina Jolie and her gaggle of children.

One happy final note. Immediately next door to Ms. Lebedev’s posh new pad is a property that was for many years owned by Kim Howe, the lady unfortunately killed in a Malibu car crash involving a distracted Caitlyn Jenner. The late Mrs. Howe’s dowdy and long-vacant Tudor-style pile was sold last year for $9,400,000 to a not-famous buyer who has since renovated, painted and generally brightened up the once-abandoned ol’ gurl. The weeds are gone, the hedges trimmed, the grass is green once again. Now she sits happy and proud, glory no longer faded.

Mr. Redleaf’s agent: Chris Cortazzo, Coldwell Banker
Ms. Lebedev’s agent: Brett Lawyer, Hilton & Hyland

Take a look at this house. Ain’t it gorgeous? Isn’t she lovely?

Designed by Vantage Design Group, it’s got some of the most spectacular waterworks we’ve ever seen. There’s an outdoor movie theater, awe-inspiring walls of glass, huge motorcourt and an underground garage. Baller views! Panty-dropping firepits! The perfect house in a fantastic location. For $32 million, It almost seems like a bargain, no?

We joke, of course. You can’t get all this for the low, low price of $32,500,000. That house you see above only exists on digital renderings. What you get for $32.5 million is this:

Don’t like it? Too bad. Shut up. It’s better than that hot, sticky, STD-infested mess over on Charing Cross Road! Shoot. Now that’s a $100 million junk heap if we ever saw one. But as always, we digress.

The Trousdale Estates house — an obvious teardown — sold for $32,500,000 in the last days of September (2016) to an anonymous corporate entity (BH Propco LLC). In its current form, the property includes an un-pedigreed and rather run-down-looking 1965 mid-century modern structure with 5,265-square-feet of living space. The two parcels that make up the property span “nearly two acres” according to listing information, but Yolanda suspects that less than one acre of that is actually usable land.

So who’s the billionaire buyer? Yolanda heard from a wee little birdy that the new owner might be Bernard Arnault, but as of now we are unable to personally confirm or deny this. But we’re working on it, so don’t despair. And stay tuned.

Anyway, Mr. Arnault — if indeed he is the buyer — is currently the world’s 14th richest person (as per Forbes) so he can certainly afford a $32.5 million teardown. Probably several $32.5 million teardowns, actually. As the Chairman of LVMH, which controls Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, Sephora and Tag Heuer, Mr. Arnault presides over the world’s largest luxury brands empire.

Even though he has never previously owned a house here, Mr. Arnault is certainly no stranger to Beverly Hills. Earlier this year he paid $122 million (in cash) for the iconic yellow House of Bijan store on Rodeo Drive. A few years before that, he paid $85 million (also in cash) for another Rodeo Drive storefront. Arnault and/or LVMH are believed to already have five properties — or maybe even more, Yolanda doesn’t know — along that one highly-coveted street.

For even the “ordinary” millionaires among us, it may seem absolutely insane to pay $32.5 million for a crappy old house on less than two acres (a significant portion of which is unusable hillside land). And it kinda is. But in Trousdale Estates, it’s perfectly within the norm.

Take a look at the house next door. In April 2010 (during the height of the economic recession), Oakley sunglasses billionaire Jim Jannard paid $19,900,000 for the sprawling 1960s abode there. He promptly razed the thing and spent several years replacing it with a scary-looking fortress.

In June 2013, the house on the other side of the Jannard bunker — owned for many years by entertainment staples Burt Sugarman and Mary Hart — sold for $27,000,000 in an off-market deal to Saudi Sheikh Mohammed bin Salem Al-Marri. In a rarely-seen preservationist-worthy move, the Sheikh apparently decided not to knock the house down. It’s still standing and our boy is using it as his residence whenever he’s in LA.

Before buying this fusty traditional house, incidentally, the Bugatti-driving Sheikh Al-Marri leased a big modern pad up in the Bird Streets. It was here, tragically, where his family was robbed at gunpoint and a unknown amount of money and valuables were abducted in the heist. It’s not known by Yolanda if the thieves were ever caught.

But we digress.

Just around the corner, at the end of a wee cul-de-sac called Alexis Place are two adjacent teardowns that recently sold for a total of $27,000,000 to the same buyer, a mysterious off-shore corporation with clear links to a Austrian fellow named Thomas Graf, the eldest son of gambling billionaire Johann Graf.

Other parts of Trousdale are just as pricey. Certain folks seem to have cut all tethers to the rational world. They’ve just severed them all and floated up to the loony bin in the sky with the way they’ve sunk ludicrous amounts of money into their personal compounds.

Take hedge fund honcho David Kabiller, who has spent more than $50 million on two adjacent teardowns.

And then there’s DreamWorks bazillionaire Jeffrey Katzenberg, who in 2011 forked over $35,000,000 for a teardown that he long ago razed to construct a new mansion. Yolanda heard through the grapevine that the interiors of the new house alone cost Mr. Katzenberg another $20 million. We wish we were joking, but we pinky-swear it’s the honest truth.

And finally, let’s not forget our friend Markus Persson, whose $70,000,000 cash splurge currently holds the record for biggest sale in Beverly Hills. Ever.

So you see now, dontcha? A $32.5 million teardown in Trousdale Estates is no big brassy breadsticks. It’s like a crocodile playing an organ in the middle of a blizzard. A bit unexpected, perhaps a bit awkward the first few times it happens. But after that, once it becomes a regular thing, it’s really nothing to squawk about. (We’re only squawking now because Yolanda’s a real estate yenta and yentas squawk about everything.)

Heck, if you look at it from certain angles, Mr. Arnault (or whoever) kinda almost maybe sort of got a good deal on the place. Not really, of course, but you could at least make the case for it.

We’ve told you all before that Yolanda lives under a rather large boulder, at least when anyone in the entertainment world comes a-knockin’. Don’t judge us, but we swear we’d never heard of this Chris Hardwick fellow before last year. After a spot of research, however, Yolanda discovered that he’s got a very prominent Adam’s apple and he’s also a very successful comedian — the founder of Nerdist Industries. Which is kind of a big deal.

The only reason we researched him is because he’s recently married to the wealthy young newspaper heiress Lydia Hearst. And Ms. Hearst (along with Mr. Hardwick, allegedly) purchased a historic and very large Los Feliz home for a record-shattering $11 million about a year ago.

Anyway, after his wife paid the big bucks, Mr. Hardwick decided to unload his old bachelor pad in Bronson Canyon. In case you didn’t know, Bronson Canyon is a small (canyon) neighborhood that lies between Beachwood Canyon and Los Feliz. Some of the prominent residents there include Brad Pitt — who’s lived in the neighborhood since the 1990s — Moby, Flea, and Craig Ferguson.

Mr. Hardwick’s home was put up for sale with an optimistic asking price of $4,050,000. Although it took a few months, the house eventually sold this May (2016) for $3,477,000 in an off-market deal.

Though we’re unfamiliar with Mr. Hardwick’s professional work, Yolanda does like his house and thus we were mildly curious as to the identity of the new owner. Unfortunately, property records unhelpfully show the residence was acquired by something called “Alice I LLC”, a mysterious offshore corporation with roots on a notorious island tax haven in the Caribbean Sea. Yolanda asked everyone and tried all her usual tricks, but we were unable to uncover the buyer’s true identity. Eventually we lost interest, chalked it up as a loss, moved on and proceeded to plum forget all about the property.

Well, kiddies, sometimes God feels generous or has an odd sense of timing. As luck or good fortune would have it, last week we stumbled across the truth — and completely by accident. The home’s new owner — who has since moved in — is Saudi royalty. She is a photographer and a noted art gallery owner and patron, and her name is Princess Reem Al Faisal.

Princess Reem, for those who may not be familiar with all 15,000+ members of the Saudi royal family, hails from one of the most prominent, influential, and wealthy arms of the Al Saud dynasty. She is a granddaughter of the late King Faisal, who ruled Saudi Arabia for more than a decade until his assassination in 1975. Her father, Prince Mohammed bin Faisal, is one of the pioneers of Islamic banking. Her uncle, the recently deceased Prince Saud Al Faisal, was the world’s longest-serving foreign minister.

But enough of our babble. Let’s talk about the Princess’s new palace. It’s not exactly what we’d expect of Saudi royalty, for starters. But actually, we love it. And we wouldn’t mind living here at all. Maybe our gurl needs a new housemaid? A food taster?

Naturally, the first concern Her Highness might have is about the property’s security. Good news, m’lady. The 1924 house is completely secure. All walled and gated. There’s also a security system with lots of cameras to monitor the riff-raff who might want an uninvited word with Your Ladyship (or even an unwelcome selfie). Banish the heathens!

Another good thing is that the house is exceptionally low-profile from the street. To folks driving past appears to be a simple sub-2,000-square-foot single-story abode. What those infidels don’t see is that the house — in epic mullet style — drops down to a staggering four full floors out back with and packs in a mini-mansion-sized 5,000 square feet of living space. That’s quite big for this tightly-clustered area of town.

So although the house sits hard up on the street and makes do with a meager — and steeply-sloped — .27-acre parcel of land, it’s private as can be.

The washed-out grey exterior opens up into a Chinese red-hued entrance proper entrance foyer with hardwood floors. The open-concept living/dining room area has an airy vaulted ceiling with exposed beams.

The fully-renovated kitchen also sports a vaulted ceiling and plenty of windows for light and ventilation. All the cabinetry is 100-year-old antique wood, and the appliances are high-end Viking models. Next to the kitchen is a more casual dining area with access to a slim outdoor terrace with views of the Bronson Canyon hills and peek-a-boo sightlines to the downtown LA skyline.

A smallish courtyard has a rather unusual feature: a Tortuga tile mosaic bath with a 200 year old faucet for meeting your outdoor bathing needs. Over in the family room is an enormous black tufted leather couch. Yolanda is ordinarily not fond of the looks of tufted leather couches — and this one is no exception — but they sure are fun to sprawl out upon.

A wide flight of stairs lead down to the bedroom level, where one of the guest rooms has been converted into a library. Instead of those tedious real bookshelves — so dust-catching and moth-friendly — the room has wallpaper bookshelves to give the appearance of scholarly-ness. Or something. Actual books are so passe these days, ya know?

The master bedroom’s ceiling has thin strips of wooden beams. There are French doors that lead to a private outdoor terrace, and the bathroom has an original reglazed clawfoot tub, steam shower, dual vanities and expensive Grohe fixtures.

Yolanda thinks the log cabin-style look on the home’s ground floor may be original to the nearly century-old abode. Contrary to current Hollywood sensibilities, Mr. Hardwick prominently displays his antique gun collection as well as his (hopefully faux?) wall-mounted moose head and polar bear rug.

Other diversions downstairs include an upright piano, a foosball table,a small living/sitting area, and a blue British telephone box used as a doorway to a compact gym. Beyond all that, however, Yolanda thinks this “hunting lodge” looks like it just smells great. Can you imagine it? Is that weird?

Taxidermy moths/butterflies give us a creepy Silence of the Lambs vibe. If they transferred with the house, we pray Her Worshipfulness disposes of them.

Out back there’s a forest-surrounded picnic table and terrace overlooking the steep hillside.

Over the years, Princess Reem has received notice for her commitment to photography and the arts. She owns galleries in Paris and Dubai, and she even has her own website. Her particular branch of the Al Saud family has also been credited with bringing many gradual secular reforms to the once-rigid (and still strict) Saudi society.

This is not to say that Her Highness’s family have been without controversy. Her father (HRH Mohammed bin Faisal) and her aunt (Princess Haifa bint Faisal) were two of four prominent members of the Saudi royal family expressly targeted by a recent United States lawsuit over the 9/11 tragedy. The allegations included that the Saudi royals directly funded terrorism with contributions to Al Queda or to people directly connected to Al Queda. Although the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue the named Saudi royals (and the country of Saudi Arabia), POTUS Obama later vetoed it.

Speaking of family, Yolanda happens to know that Her Highness was — for several years prior to buying Mr. Hardwick’s house — living in her late uncle Prince Saud bin Faisal’s massive compound (actually, it’s more like a palace) up in the Beverly Hills Post Office neighborhood that was built by him way back in 1983 and continues to be owned by his heirs.

Just off Coldwater Canyon, the crab-shaped (or is it scorpion-shaped?) house weighs in at more than 15,000 square feet, per property records. Yolanda suspect that His Highness — who died in 2015 at an undisclosed location in Los Angeles — spent his final days in this house.

The mega-compound also lies on the very same celebrity-filled street where other residents include Milla Jovovich, Bill Maher, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett (yes, kiddies, those last two — who are recently divorced — both quietly bought homes on the very same street. How’s that for amicable? But we digress…)

However, Mr. Hardwick’s Bronson Canyon home is not Princess Reem’s first solo property purchase in the US. Several years ago, she owned a 18th-floor pied-a-terre in the iconic (and idiosyncratic) Sierra Towers apartment building in West Hollywood. For the last couple years of her ownership, she leased the apartment to a couple of our favorite nutty Tinseltown stalwarts.

You know who we’re talking about, right? Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.

The Osbournes — with Her Highness’s approval, we imagine — hired Martyn Lawrence Bullard to glam up the space shiny black floors, chrome, white paint, stainless steel and etc. It’s his signature motif, after all.

Incidentally, the poor Princess got publicly flogged on her Sierra Towers flat. She bought back in 2008 for $3,500,000 and — despite the pricey Bullard interior renovation — sold it in the early days of 2013 for a mere $2,400,000. That’s a stupendous loss of 1.1 million bucks, not counting taxes, real estate fees, closing costs, blah blah blah.

Let’s hope she fares better with the old Hardwick house, if and when she decides to unload it.

The internet says Princess Reem also maintains residences in Paris and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but we confess we know nada about those.

Oh! Speaking of Martyn Lawrence Bullard! In addition to his work on the Princess’s former Sierra Towers apartment, he also did up the interiors of Kourtney Kardashian’s shopping-mall-slash-mansion out in Calabasas. And Yolanda is oddly mesmerized by this weird video that Miss Kardashian and Mr. Bullard filmed for Architectural Digest. Seriously, we watch it almost every day.

But don’t ask us to tell you why we watch it — we just do. It’s sorta like a dog whistle.

Mr. Hardwick’s agent: Sharon Hills, Kobeissi Properties
Princess Reem’s agent: Juliette Hohnen, Douglas Elliman

It wasn’t so long ago that Venice was considered a real rough-and-tumble location. (We refer to the seaside neighborhood of LA, not the sinking town in Italy, of course.)

Although parts of the district remain somewhat gritty, the trendy (and high-priced) Abbott Kinney shopping strip has brought sweeping gentrification to the neighborhood. And that rapid gentrification has beget skyrocketing real estate prices, the likes of which have left Yolanda pretty damn slack-jawed.

Seriously, the pricetags here are enough to put many houses in Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, or even the A-list town itself (Beverly Hills) to shame.

For example, take this non-oceanfront, non-canal-front property we shall discuss today. Last sold this June (2016), it transferred for a whopping $4,640,000. That’s flying close to $5 million! Think that isn’t crazy? The .12-acre lot is positively puny! And the house is but 2,817-square-feet! That means the buyer paid more than $1,600 per square foot! Come on now. That’s big, BIG money.

Anyway, the fat cat buyer is shielded behind a corporate cloak calling itself “Brillow Pad LLC”, so kudos on the creative name. Naturally, Yolanda just had to know who it was and it wasn’t long before we discovered that the proud new owner is a famous young English actress named Emilia Clarke.

Miss Clarke — who just turned 30 this year — stars on that wildly successful TV show called Game of Thrones. Yolanda has never seen that show, of course, but even we — residing under a boulder as we are — have most certainly heard of it. It’s pretty much the biggest thing on TV, after all.

We’ve heard there are lots of swear words and violence and nudity in the show, which makes us wonder why we’ve never bothered to watch it. Goodness, it sounds like just the ticket for Yolanda!

Since 2011, Miss Clarke has portrayed the role of prominent character Daenerys Targaryen, a name that is unnecessarily hard to spell and pronounce. Good grief, lassie. Anyway, Miss Clarke has won numerous awards for her performance and last year she was even named by Esquire magazine as their “Sexiest Woman Alive“.

Yeah yeah, Miss Clarke, you may have been the queen bee last year. But you’d better watch your back. Yolanda is coming for that crown in 2016. Wait, it’s already 2016. Did they already choose a different sexiest woman? (Is it too late to audition?)

But let’s quit digressin’ check out the very rich young Miss Clarke’s new house.

Appropriately named the “Milwood Residence” (after the street on which it sits), the architectural modern box was designed by Culver City-based architects Abramson Teiger and completed in 2009 for the previous owners, two non-celebrity gentlemen.

Naturally, the property is securely walled and gated for Her Ladyship’s utmost privacy. It’s a bit of a necessity in Venice. Despite the rapid gentrification, rough edges remain and the throngs of tourists can prove a wee bit unnerving.

For a sub-3,000-square-foot house, the living/dining room combo is really quite massive. Bookshelves (real bookshelves!) filled with books (real books!) line the wall and reach nearly to the tippy-top of the vaulted ceiling. At the end of the room — which spans the entire length of the house — there’s a supersized wall of glass and beyond, a smallish stone terrace surrounded by 80-year-old olive trees.

And check out those lavender loveseats/couches. Yolanda has never considered purchasing a lavender loveseat (or couch or whatever) but the shade is really rather fetching. If Barney gets a tan, he’d better watch his back. Yolanda will sic poachers on him. No lie.

An unusual soapstone material covers the countertops in the open-concept kitchen. The cabinetry looks exotic, although Yolanda is not exactly sure if indeed it is.

The yard is understandably compact — the property’s footprint is barely 5,000 square feet, after all — but it manages to not feel (or at least appear) cramped. A covered outdoor lounge has built-in modern light fixtures and a lap lane pool runs runs up next to a leafy hedge for maximum privacy.

Back indoors, the family rooms connects to the kitchen and sports views of the courtyard. An epically-long wall of wooden cupboards makes for plenty of storage and also provides plenty of space for the beginning contemporary art collector.

The master bedroom has glossy ebonized hardwood floors and overlooks the pool and petite yard below. A bit unexpected is the master bath’s built-in carpeting (bathroom carpet in a modern house?! Heavens no!). The walk-in closet has plenty of room for crowns, gowns, birthday suits, and whatever else Miss Clarke wears on Game of Thrones.

(Note: what Yolanda initially thought was carpet in the master bathroom is — upon closer inspection — actually some sort of mosaic tile. Thanks to commenter Mark for pointing this out. We blame the red, red wine.)

Her Royal Highness’s bachelorette pad has a total of just two bedrooms and three full baths. Here’s the guest bedroom suite.

Let it be known that Venice is not Yolanda’s particular cup of residential tea. It’s a bit too crowded, a bit too tourist-y, a bit too far from our favorite LA haunts. But had we $5 million to spend on a house in the area, Miss Clarke’s palace would be near the top of our list. Really, that bookcase sealed the deal. Swoon.

And don’t be begrudgin’ Her Highness an expensive castle in Venice, either. It’s not easy wearing the crown. Knowing that any day some young punk of a screenwriter can just write out your character without warning. Not only must you then suffer a cheesy beheading on cable TV, but then the massively overweight producer tells you your contract suddenly don’t include residuals! And you go from living in the big Bel Air mansion to that Valley Village studio apartment. It burns!

Trust us. Yolanda knows. But it’s all a part of The Plan, right?

“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done…”

Selling agent: Jennifer Hughes, Bulldog Realtors Inc.
Emilia Clarke’s agent: Juliette Hohnen, Douglas Elliman

Yesterday, a little birdy sent Yolanda an unexpected query about a spiffy-looking flipper situation in the trendy and celeb-friendly (and expensive) Los Feliz neighborhood that recently sold for $2,300,000. A wee bit of consulting with listing information and property records reveals that the house was transferred to an anonymous blind trust in what clearly appears to have been an all-cash deal.

With a wee bit of poking and prodding, Yolanda discovered that the property was quietly purchased by a fellow named Steven Yeun and his fiancee. Our boy Mr. Yeun is perhaps better known to the public as Glenn Rhee, one of the main characters on The Walking Dead horror-drama AMC series. AKA the world’s highest-rated cable TV show. Ever.

Of course, Yolanda has never seen the show. But we have heard about it, of course, and apparently it follows a group of “survivors” as they navigate through a post-apocalyptic world overrun with zombies. Yes, zombies!

Oh good grief. Zombies again? Why? If it ain’t zombies, it’s always vampires. How about television comes up with something original for once. Like, say, a wedding dress-wearing Lindsay Lohan chasing a bunch of eligible young men through the streets of LA! She’d have a bottle of booze in her left hand, a marriage certificate in her right, a ciggie danglin’ out her mouth. It’s a hit waiting to be made! And way scarier than zombies.

Forgive us, la Lohan! We miss you. But we also digress.

Mr. Yeun is reportedly engaged to be married to Joana Pak, a professional photographer with more than 22,000 followers on her Instathing doohickey. So we suppose it’s really no big surprise that the couple would buy a house for settlin’ down. As far as we know (and what do we really know?) this is Mr. Yeun’s very first property purchase.

The (mostly) flat-roofed 1970s is single level out front and drops down mullet-style to two floors out back. The rather tiny .15-acre lot won’t win any size queen awards but does have front and rear lawns and room for a pool, per the listing.

Perhaps unfortunately, the 3,324-square-foot house — it was originally sort of a stucco-meets-post-and-beam that’s more like a modern-meets-post-and-beam or something now — backs up to an alleyway that is shared with a long row of not-particularly-fancy apartment buildings and multi-family houses. Not so great for zombie security. Who knows what could be lurking out back, right?

Anyway, the residence was purchased by a flipper this past February (2016) in its original, unvarnished state. Property records show Mr. Flipper paid $1,230,000 and gave it a quick — and some might say rather generic — contemporary facelift complete with those ubiquitous frosted-glass garage doors and black-frame windows and doors.

Mr. Flipper then flipped his flip house back onto the flop market with an asking price almost exactly double what he had paid six months prior. Along came Mr. Yeun and Ms. Pak, who paid him the aforementioned $2.3 million in what appears to be an all-cash sale.

In the home’s original iteration, there existed a wall separating the entrance hall from the living/family rooms, but that is no longer for this world. RIP. The hardwood floors are also all-new, replacing a rather hideous tile setup.

The vaulted ceiling has a skylight and there’s a small fireplace for chilly nights. A bunch of mismatched furniture is a welcome break from the usual flipper white couch motif. You know what we’re talking about.

Another essentially all-new feature is the kitchen, which bears little resemblance to the cramped and closed-in ’70s setup previously. The Viking appliances are all top-of-the line and the island is Caesarstone. Another skylight gives the room an airy feel.

There doesn’t appear to be a formal dining room — as far as Yolanda can tell — but there is an informal breakfast nook area just across from the kitchen. We also spot nary a single television in the home. Well done!

The large-ish master bedroom opens directly to the grassy backyard. Can’t hide those rather low ceilings, however. The master bath is all-new and has — as you’d expect — a glass step-in shower and a free-standing soaking tub. Not sure if there’s a walk-in closet, but perhaps not.

One of the other three bedrooms (the property has a total of 4 beds/3.5 baths) has been transformed into a minimalist home office.

It wasn’t too many years ago that any house in this particular pocket of Los Feliz — way out east by the 5 freeway and uncomfortably close to a very busy boulevard — would never sell for anywhere near the $2 million mark. But now it’s commonplace. Times, they are always a-changin’ and we must learn to cope with that in this  new real estate world.

A post-apocalyptic real estate world, as is more like it.

Listing agent: Dorothy Carter, Keller Williams Los Feliz
Mr. Yeun’s agent: Andrew Rhoda, Compass

Yolanda has a Romanian pal named Vlad the Revealer who runs the Celebrity Address Aerial website. Mr. Revealer, as he is wont to do, randomly got a bee in his proverbial bonnet. My oh my. You see, he stamped his calfskin-clad foot and demanded we sort out the ownership of a number of houses. Not just any old homes, mind you. Homes that were recently sold to suspicious-looking (and on the surface, impenetrable) entities.

(We tease, Mr. Revealer. You know Yolanda loves you.)

As we’ve told y’all before, Yolanda is always up (or down) for a challenge, so we were only too happy to oblige. We powdered our nose, tugged on our hair-net, removed our Lee Press-On Nails, rolled up our sleeves and dug in.

Among the addresses Mr. Revealer provided, one in particular caught our eye. It’s no secret that the Studio City neighborhood — once maligned by all the pampered and preened Platinum Triangle snobs — has seen a surge in popularity among a certain set of very rich folks. We’re talking about Hollywood celebrities, kiddies. They love this shit. It’s got easy access to Hollywood, Burbank, and (generally) tons of space and privacy to boot. And they’re willing to pay millions to live here. Remember, this is still technically the Valley. It’s a very dark and scary place. Horrors!

The house in question is a brand-new spec build that sits in a quiet and leafy pocket of the Studio City flats. It’s tucked in and bordered by the 101 freeway to the north and Ventura Boulevard to the south. Laurel and Coldwater Canyon Boulevards lie to the the east and west, respectively.

Listing information refers to the 5,500-square-foot mini-mansion as “Spanish-style”. Hmmm. No shade, y’all, but this is not what Yolanda pictures when she imagines a Spanish-style house. Apart from the red roof tiles and white paint, we really don’t see much inside or out that’s Spanish. We’d call this place a very nice and luxurious modern take on a Traditional-esque structure.

But we digress. And we fear we make much ado about nothing! Spanish style it is.

This residence sits on one-half of what used to be a large .52-acre ranch-style property. That sprawler was sold to a developer a couple years ago. Mr. Developer razed the old house, split up the property into two .26-acre parcels, and built the spec-house you see above (and another remarkably similar one next door that just sold for $3.1 million to a Hollywood score composer).

Anyway, the new homeowner here faced a good bit of competition for their new pad. The house was listed with an asking price of $2,995,000 in July (2016) and sold in less than a month for $3,075,000. For you non-math geeks out there, that’s $80k over the ask.

Though the house is technically owned through a blind trust, the new occupants are an actor named Miles Teller and his live-in girlfriend, model Keleigh Sperry.

Mr. Teller may not be a household name in the vein of perennially A-list stars like Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck or George Clooney, but over the past few years he’s quietly been hustlin’ his way to stardom. His feature film debut came in 2010, in the critically-acclaimed (but little-seen) Nicole Kidman production Rabbit Hole. Since then, he’s starred in an eclectic array of box office titles that include Divergent, War Dogs, That Awkward Moment, and The Spectacular Now. His most recognizable roles, however, are as Mister Fantastic in Fantastic Four and as drummer Andrew Neiman in 2014’s Whiplash. The latter role brought him critical acclaim and a BAFTA nomination.

As for Ms. Sperry, she’s a model signed to a major agency and sports nearly 90,000 followers on that Instagram contraption.

The “Spanish-style” casa has two garages – a two-car and a single-car – and a brick driveway that wraps around for easy passenger drop-off and loading.

A step-up front courtyard door with wooden slats leads to the walled, grassy courtyard area with a big upright stone giving the middle finger to all who dare pass.

The interior keeps it cool and trendy with a pleasingly neutral color palette. Both the front door and the sliding courtyard door open into the the formal dining room, which has a glass-enclosed (and cooled?) wall that decoratively flaunts the owner’s booze collection. We imagine Mr. Teller and Ms. Sperry will soon tire of their guests saying the obligatory version of “My, what a big wine lover you must be!” upon initially entering their abode.

Also, if you ask Yolanda, the wine barrels suspended on the wall are nice but seem a bit superfluous. It’s only our useless opinion but we think the whole thing would look much better without those two tacked-on warts. Yes, we’re a mite OCD. Can you tell?

Across the hall is the spacious living room, which features recessed lighting and direct access to the backyard and kitchen.

As you’d expect for a newly-constructed multi-million dollar house, the aforementioned kitchen features a whole yacht-load of high-end appliances. Wolf, in this case. Check out the glass refrigerator, which probably costs more than the housemaid’s brand-new Toyota Yaris.

We appreciate the kitchen’s a perfectly unusual, vaguely farmhouse-inspired wood ceiling, but the persnickety Yolanda notes the room seems a wee bit dark. Perhaps it could do with some more natural light? We’re not sure if those wee little light fixtures are up to the task.

The media room is small and features nary a wet bar, sadly. You mean Yolanda’s gotta carry her own booze from the kitchen to the theater when Mr. Teller invites us over for his housewarming party and we want to watch our Golden Girls re-runs?! Say it ain’t so, Blanche.

The master bedroom gets unexpectedly funky with a vaulted ceiling and an unusual exposed faux beam treatment. Looks like the ceiling’s center piece might flip open like a sunroof, but we doubt that’s the case.

Anywho, the master bathroom is more conventional with its soaking tub, dual vanities, and glass-enclosed shower. There’s also a walk-in closet (not pictured). And the bedroom — if you didn’t notice — has a super-slim terrace overlooking the backyard. The 5-bed/5.75 bath house also four more full guest/family suites.

Speaking of the backyard, there’s a covered patio that leads to a whole bunch of grass. Perfect for your furry friends, be they named Rufus or Buddy or Squished Up Pile of Dirty Khaki Pants (?). In the southwestern corner of the property there lies an itsy-bitsy structure with an open-air cabana and fireplace. Attached is a private full bathroom so nobody need take their soaking-wet selves traipsing through the main house to perform their ablutions.

Other famous Studio City residents include (but are certainly not limited to): George Clooney, Bruno Mars, Chloe Moretz, Clayton Kershaw, Joel McHale, Teri Hatcher, Julie Bowen, Allison Janney, Geoff Johns, and Lana Del Rey.

We’re feeling strangely sweet today so Yolanda and our very own Rabbi Hedda say Mazel Tov to Mr. Heller. Enjoy your big new house, and continued success to you and yours.

Selling agent: Avi Barazani, Coldwell Banker