Harry Styles Slashes Price on City View Sunset Strip Villa
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – British pop music phenom Harry Styles has, for the second time, lopped half of a million dollars off the asking price of his Los Angeles residence, bringing the price tag for the city view property down to $7.495 million. The One Direction superstar, who made his well received silver screen debut in the 2017 war film “Dunkirk,” purchased the sleek modern villa in a surreptitious, early 2016 off-market deal valued at $6.87 million and tossed it back on the market just 1.5 years later with an in-hindsight unrealistically high $8.45 million price tag that dropped in early 2018 to an apparently still too tumescent $7.995 million. In addition to the new and lower price, Styles replaced his original real estate agent with one of the Platinum Triangle’s heaviest real estate hitters. Secreted up a winding, fearsomely narrow cul-de-sac just above the Sunset Strip, where it is secured behind a forbidding driveway gate, protected by a comprehensive security system and completely invisible behind a thick bamboo hedge, the two-plus-story contemporary has four bedrooms and five bathrooms in 4,401-square-feet.
Previous reports indicate the few but notable changes that Styles made in his brief ownership includes adding glistening, snow-white floors throughout the living and entertaining spaces that also have an integrated audio system and floor-to-ceiling windows that frame expansive views over Los Angeles. Anchored by a minimalist-minded fireplace, the combination living/dining room spills out to a broad terrace with panoramic, over-the-treetops city lights view; The kitchen maintains a strict black-and-white palette with lustrous black countertops on unadorned white cabinetry; And a plush, professional-quality home theater features a state-of-the-art wide-screen projection system, plum-colored walls and comfy, eggplant-colored sofas. A long driveway leads to a small motor court and two-car garage at the front of the house and, tucked up under the terrace outside the living/dining room, a small curtained cabana offers a convenient indoor bathroom and outdoor shower area alongside a curvaceous swimming pool and spa set against a sweeping wall of bamboo.
The two jumbo-sized price chops don’t bode well for Styles who reportedly resides mostly in London and New York and hasn’t had the greatest luck with his real estate endeavors in Los Angeles. In 2014 he paid exactly $4 million for a five-bedroom contemporary mini-compound on gated, famously celebrity-lined street in the rugged yet ritzy mountains above Beverly Hills that he sold in mid-2016 for $3.175 million , a pocketbook punishing $825,000 loss not counting carrying costs, improvement expenses and real estate fees.
When the One Direction star was just 18 and rocketing towards the molten apex of his international boy band über-fame, he was reported to have shelled out around £3 million — just over US$4.8 at the time — for a triple-story white stucco residence in North London’s tony Hampstead Heath area and in 2016 he paid a bit more than $8.7 million for a three-bedroom and 3.5 bathroom condo in a discreet, seriously swanky New York City building that bills itself as paparazzi proof and, hence, is filled to it’s perfectly preserved rough-hewn rafters with famous folk who include J ake Gyllenhaal , Jennifer Lawrence, Meg Ryan and Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel . Among the building’s newest high-profile residents are 22-year-old supermodel Bella Hadid and musician The Weeknd who together rent a triplex penthouse that was last listed at a pearl-clutching $60,000 per month.
Listing photos: Westside Estate Agency
