Alex Rodriguez Slashes Price of Sunset Strip Bachelor Pad
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Just days after he revealed via Instagram he is to be Jennifer Lopez’s fourth husband, former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez has radically slashed the asking price of his celeb-pedigreed bachelor pad above L.A.’s Sunset Strip by a pearl-clutching $1.25 million. Although still priced profitably above the $4.8 million the legendary slugger paid leading lady Meryl Streep in August 2014, the new and lower $5.25 million asking price is a hefty amount under the too sanguine $6.5 million the property was first saddled with in late 2018.
Originally built in 1954 as the Honnold and Rex Architectural Research house and redesigned and reconfigured in recent years by L.A. designer/builder Xorin Balbes with four bedrooms and four bathrooms in about 3,700 square feet, the boxy and clean-lined, masculine-appearing grey concrete contemporary is slightly softened by a short row of carefully manicured privet hedging planted atop a concrete retaining wall and enhanced with a giant slatted screen over huge picture windows that obscure views into the house from the street. Light-filled open-plan living and entertaining spaces feature a variety of bespoke built-ins, double height ceilings and walls of glass that look into serene garden patios. Full height glass sliders open the living room to the front yard where there’s a zero-edge swimming pool and ample sunbathing terrace plus a lounge area arranged around a fire pit with several outdoor televisions mounted to a high privacy wall.
Both property gossip column staples long before they coupled up in early 2017, A-Rod and J-Lo have together made a notable couple of multi-million dollar real estate deals on both coasts over the last year or so. In early 2018, the deep-pocketed pair plunked down just over $15.3 million for a three-bedroom and 4.5-bathroom condo in an exceptionally tall and frightfully slender ultra-luxe tower in Midtown Manhattan they tossed back the market just after the first of this year for $17.5 million . They also recently shelled out $6.6 million for Jeremy Piven’s beachfront home along one of Malibu’s most exclusive stretches of sand.
Rodriguez maintains a sprawling, art-filled über-contemporary mansion he custom built in Coral Gables, Fla., while property-mad Lopez owns an eight-acre spread in the Stone Canyon area of L.A.’s Bel Air community that she bought in 2016 for $28 million from Sela Ward, a multi-acre estate in the Hamptons she picked up in 2013 for $10 million, and a mansion-sized duplex penthouse just north of Manhattan’s Madison Square Park that is now available at just under $25 million after first coming for sale in the about 1.5 years ago for not quite $27 million .
listing photos: Westside Estate Agency
