Mary Parent Sells Hollywood Pedigreed Pad in Historic Laughlin Park Enclave (EXCLUSIVE)
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Über-producer Mary Parent has sold her Hollywood pedigreed home in a historic, fashionable and increasingly spendy pocket of Los Angeles’s Los Feliz area for $8.5 million. The veteran studio executive, currently Vice-Chairman of Worldwide Production at Legendary Entertainment where she oversees the blockbuster “MonsterVerse” franchise, turned a tidy profit on the stately spread she picked up about 11 years ago for $5.89 million from prolific theater, film and television producer John Wells.
Positioned on the high point of a more than half acre knoll-top parcel in the gated and famously celebrity-packed Laughlin Park enclave, the white-stucco and red tile roofed Spanish Colonial/English Tudor mash-up was designed and built by architect William J. Dodd in 1915.
Charlie Chaplin reportedly took up temporary residence in the house before it was sold in 1920 to who built a long breezeway to link the house to his much larger mansion next door, now owned by Angelina Jolie. DeMille used the smaller residence until his death in 1959 as a production office, screening room and guesthouse.
Carefully restored to maintain or re-create original architectural detailing and comprehensively renovated to seamlessly integrate all manner of modern-day creature comforts, the 6,874-square-foot, four-bedroom and 5.5-bathroom residence was daringly decorated in a decadent yet austere, sensuously modern and contemporary art-filled variation on Hollywood glamour.
There are inky black, high-gloss hardwood floors under foot, a variety of conspicuously glitzy light fixtures throughout and several huge and elaborately carved stone fireplaces that look as if they may have once warmed a baronial European manor house.
A vast living room under a cathedral ceiling has huge stained glass accented diamond paned leaded glass windows while an otherwise featureless screening room offers plush lounge seating and state-of-the-art projection and audio systems.
The holiday dinner sized formal dining room was furnished with an eye catching red lacquer dining table under a massive, Vernor Panton-designed capiz shell chandelier and a more intimate breakfast room is filled with natural light due to floor-to-ceiling French doors and a silver-leafed ceiling treatment. Simply but expensively fitted with jet black painted wood cabinets, marble countertops and backsplashes and designer-grade stainless steel appliances, the kitchen opens to an informal dining area with a built-in banquette and five arched windows that provide postcard-perfect, head-on views of The Griffith Park Observatory.
An arched loggia hung with scarlet curtains reminiscent of a vintage movie house gives way to a grassy courtyard with simple rectangular swimming pool and trellis-shaded sunbathing patio. There’s also a more secluded spa set amid citrus trees and, on the other side of the house, a great sweep of generously irrigated and perfectly mown lawn ringed by beautifully trimmed and laced specimen trees.
Along with aforementioned Angelina Jolie, who bought her multi-acre compound over the summer of 2017 for $24.5 million , some of the other high-profile Laughlin Park homeowners include Ellen Pompeo, Natalie Portman, Emma Roberts, Kristen Stewart and married Tinseltowners Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard who last year shelled out $4.3 million for an English Country fixer-upper on one of the prestigious enclave’s largest parcels.
listing photos: Hilton & Hyland (via Realtor.com )
