Adam Levine Cashes in on Sale of Max Mutchnick’s Former Mansion to Ellen DeGeneres
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo have sold a baronial Beverly Hills mansion with an illustrious chain of ownership for a reported $45 million to and . The mainstream radio rock star, who, it was announced Friday , will not to return as a coach on “The Voice,” and the Namibian-born Victoria’s Secret model only acquired the one-ish acre spread, with its spectacular oval swimming pool and lighted tennis court, just over a year ago from “Will & Grace” co-creator and entertainment attorney Erik Hyman in a clandestine, off-market deal valued at just over $33.9 million . No strangers to high-end property gossip columns or glossy shelter publications, Mutchnick and Hyman had acquired the posh property in 2008 for not quite $17 million from tennis great Pete Sampras and gave the elegant shebang a full facelift later featured in Elle Décor .
Levine and Prinsloo, who sold their previous home in the mountains above Beverly Hills in early 2018 for $13.4 million to John Mayer and for a few months in 2017 and ‘18 owned a fixer upper in Holmby Hills they bought and lickety-split sold for the exact same $18 million price, appear to have almost immediately come down with a raging case of the Celebrity Real Estate Fickle in regards to their newly acquired mansion in Beverly Hills. After a reported $7 million renovation and almost $32 million spent to buy Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s sprawling compound in a particularly plummy pocket of Pacific Palisades, the freshly rehabbed Beverly Hills manse was popped back on the market in mid-April (2019) with an eye-catching and unquestionably Brobdingnagian but, as it turns out, not entirely out of the question $47.5 million price tag.
With more than 10,000 square feet and grandly positioned on a slight rise behind a high wall and forbidding gates, the stately 1930s English Tudor manse has five bedrooms and an astonishing 12 bathrooms over three floors. Sumptuously proportioned public entertainment spaces are luxuriously complemented by a professional quality screening room and a 2,000 square foot master suite plus a one-bed/one-bath apartment for guests or staff. The Prinsloo-Levines were represented by Kurt Rappaport at Westside Estate Agency , as were DeGeneres and de Rossi.
The notoriously itchy-footed DeGeneres-de Rossis, who maintain considerable residential holdings in the Santa Barbara area and who buy and sell high-dollar homes more often than most people change the oil in their car, are well known for their sometimes inexplicable but often lucrative merry-go-round real estate ways. They surreptitiously sold a modestly proportioned mid-century modern villa in Beverly Hills last fall (2018) for a noteworthy $35 million — they’d bought it about three years earlier for not quite $16 million — and right about the same time plunked down $15 million for a glamorously re-furbished, showbiz pedigreed Hollywood Regency pavilion in the Trousdale Estates area of Beverly Hills that they now have up for grabs at $17.95 million . In early 2014 they paid almost $40 million for a stunning, A. Quincy Jones-designed architectural tour-de-force in the fancy-pants Holmby Hills ‘hood they sold after just six months for $49.5 million to billionaire techster Sean Parker and later that same year coughed up $8.75 million for a low-slung architectural residence in the Hollywood Hills they sold in 2016 for $9.9 million and that DeGeneres had, curiously enough, previously owned and sold in 2007, along with a neighboring residence she also owned, for a total of $10 million.
Notably, this is not the first time DeGeneres and de Rossi have purchased a Los Angeles property directly from or, as in the most recent case, previously owned by Mutchnick and Hyman. In fact, it’s not even the second time. It’s the third. In 2003, DeGeneres paid Mutchnick $6 million for a home hidden in a wooded glade in the Laurel Canyon area of the Hollywood Hills — it’s now owned by Will Ferrell, who picked it up from DeGeneres in 2006 for $9 million — and in 2007 DeGeneres and de Rossi paid Mutchnick and Hyman almost $30 million for a secluded compound above Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills, where they were married the following year. The then newly wedded couple bought up several surrounding properties and razed and replaced one residence with a private park before they sold the whole kit and caboodle in 2012 for $36.5 million to Ryan Seacrest.
As for Mutchnick and Hyman, late last year they plunked down just about $14.5 million for an 8,000 square foot mansion on a discreet and coveted Beverly Hills street. The rambling, 1920s English country house had undergone a lavish and aggressively austere makeover not too many years earlier by one of its previous owners, televised talent show tycoon Simon Fuller, but the real estate and design savvy couple has nonetheless subjected the residence to another, ongoing and presumably very costly overhaul. Given the rare, almost alarming alacrity at which DeGeneres-De Rossi trade one home for another and their repeated predilection for homes owned and re-conceived by Mutchnick and Hyman, one has to wonder if this one, too, will soon catch the peripatetic pair’s ever wandering real estate eye and, at a some point in the not too distant future, pass through their perpetually in-flux portfolio. Time will tell.
