Shonda Rhimes Lists Celeb-Pedigreed Pad in Hancock Park
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Network television primetime titan Shonda Rhimes, ABC’s longtime queen bee who last year switched gears and signed a four-year deal with Netflix rumored to worth about $25 million annually to her powerhouse production company Shondaland, has made one of the four multimillion dollar homes she owns in L.A.’s historic and historically prestigious Hancock Park area available with an asking price of $9,995,000. Presiding over an elevated corner lot of almost half of an acre and obscured behind a high hedge and mature trees, the austerely imposing, mushroom-colored 1920s mansion measures in at 8,298-square-feet with six bedrooms and six full and three half bathrooms.
The three-time nominated “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” creator, writer and executive producer purchased the property for $5.6 million in the spring of 2010 from mononymic indie music mandarin Beck. Veteran celebrity real estate watchers may recall the property was once, and briefly, owned by artist manager Peter Leak and, more significantly, that when sold it to Rhimes he lost a small fortune on the mansion he bought in 2007 for $6.75 million.
Featuring a duotone stenciled checkerboard pattern wood floor, the elegantly proportioned center hall foyer extends clear through to the back of the house where French doors open to the backyard. There are two ample and adjoining living rooms, one with a simple carved stone fireplace and the other with a trio of French doors. A more intimately proportioned office/den offers another carved stone fireplace and French doors to a serene, hedged girdled terrace and the separate formal dining room has eight-pane casement windows hung with ivory silk drapes that balloon into heaping, dust-collecting puddles on the dark hardwoods. Less formal family spaces include a vast great room that spills out to the yard through several sets of French doors and includes a lounge with fireplace, a large dining space and a huge, high-end kitchen that’s arranged around a T-shaped island snack bar and fitted with perfectly ordinary speckled beige granite countertops on probably custom and no-doubt spectacularly expensive but otherwise unremarkably conventional, bone-colored raised-panel cabinetry.
Several of the guest and family bedrooms are en suite and open off a grand, second-floor gallery lined along one wall with French doors that open to wrought iron Juliet balconies that overlook the backyard. Occupying a wing of its own, the spacious master suite comprises a sitting area with large screen projection television system, a separate den or office, two walk-in closets and two bathrooms, one done in smooth, cream-colored stone with a TV positioned for optimal viewing while soaking in the jetted tub and the other giving off an ever so slightly more masculine edge with a shower lined in tumbled travertine tiles.
The back of the house embraces a spacious, sensibly faux-grassed lower courtyard lined with meticulously clipped boxwood hedges and romantic white rose bushes while An upper terrace contains a lap-lane swimming pool. A few steps up from the pool deck atop a detached three-car garage, an approximately 600-square-foot cabana Beck converted to a recording studio has been repurposed into an entertainment lounge with a wet bar and tile-accented fireplace.
Rhimes, who has a professional hand in a healthy handful of currently airing TV dramas including “For The People” and the “Grey’s Anatomy” spin-off “Station 19,” has a well-known real estate thing for the Hancock Park area where her substantial holdings include a 1920s Spanish-style duplex snapped up in 2007 for $1.66 million. In early 2014 Rhimes dropped $8.8 million for an exquisitely restored and updated Elmer Grey-designed mansion of almost 8,400-square-feet on more than an acre of landscaped grounds that had previously been owned by sitcom superstar Patricia Heaton and, the crazy real estate ways of the rich and famous being what they are, last year she shelled out another $4.6 million for a prim and proper five-bedroom and 4.5-bathroom English Country manor house only 1.5 blocks from the former Beck mansion she now up for sale.
Listing photos: Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices
