Katie Holmes Looks to Shed West Coast Home
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – New York City-based actor and style icon Katie Holmes has put her West Coast residence in L.A.’s expensive and celeb-packed if not exactly fashionable far-western suburbs on the rack at just over $4.6 million. Tucked into an affluent, guard-gated community chock-a-block with famous folk, the “Kennedys After Camelot” star, set to appear on the silver screen in the horror film “Brahms: The Boy II,” purchased the property a little more than five years ago, amid oceans of rumors and reports she was romantically entangled with Jamie Foxx (they’ve since broken up ), for not quite $3.8 million .
Little changed since she bought it and described in listings held by Scott Cort of Sotheby’s Int’l Realty as a “Contemporary Grand European Manor,” the slightly more than 6,000-square-foot, stone-accented home sits privately at the end of a short cul-de-sac on almost half an acre at the base of an extensively engineered hillside. Configured around two courtyards, one that opens to the pool and another that serves as a hidden motor court and family entrance, the H-shaped house offers five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms plus a separate guest casita with another bathroom.
Cleared of personal belongings and staged for selling in a generically luxurious manner, interiors feature dark, faux-distressed wood floors and high ceilings throughout the sprawling residence that opens to a double height foyer with lofted library area. Formal living and dining rooms are filled with natural light though over-sized multi-pane windows, the family room spills out to the backyard through three sets of French doors and the adjoining, open-plan eat-in kitchen is expensively fitted with top-end finishes, designer appliances and a large pantry and laundry area.
A handful of guest bedrooms and a second family room on the upper floor are joined by a spacious master suite composed of a private lounge that spills out through French doors to huge terrace, plus a fitted walk-in closet and spacious, generically luxurious, travertine-tiled bathroom. Just outside the family room and kitchen, a heated, al fresco dining loggia opens on one side to a sport court and on the other to a flat, grassy yard shielded from neighboring homes by tall hedgerows with an outdoor kitchen and a swimming pool and spa complex with a cleverly integrated sunken fire pit.
Some of the other high-profile folk who own homes in the same suburban enclave include a couple of Kardashians, Gary Sinise, Ken Jeong, Travis Barker and Michael Jackson’s mother Katherine Jackson.
For the last handful of years, Holmes has lived primarily in New York City where, in the white-hot, heavily publicized aftermath of her divorce from Tom Cruise, she rented an apartment at the Chelsea Mercantile building in Chelsea but later moved to a larger, $25,000 per month duplex penthouse, also in Chelsea.
