Melanie Griffith Buys Villa Above Sunset Strip

By Mark David

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – A well-informed snitch and a whole lot of signposts in the digital records point to Melanie Griffith as the mysterious buyer of a modestly sized if hardly inexpensive 1930s Spanish villa just above L.A.’s Sunset Strip that has been sold for a mite more than $3.7 million. Secured behind gates, hidden by a thicket of trees and privet hedging and long owned by TMZ chief Harvey Levin — who sold the property in 2015 for a bit more than $3.6 million — the just shy of 3,000-square-foot pad has three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Intricately patterned and vibrantly colored floor tiles lend authentic architectural embellishment to the long and slender entrance gallery, and the step-down living room offers an exceptionally high ceiling and a huge, beige-stone raised-hearth fireplace. At the end of the entrance gallery, a den has French doors to the swimming pool and privately landscaped gardens. The neighboring dining room is open over a short peninsula countertop to an up-to-date if generically upscale kitchen fitted with ubiquitous white Shaker style cabinets and high-quality commercial-style stainless steel appliances.

Griffith, who has luxuriously bivouacked the past few years in a swanky rental in L.A.’s Outpost Estates nabe, has been on a cross-country real estate whirligig since her divorce from Antonio Banderas. Around the time their split became public in 2015, the former couple sold a lavish Hancock Park estate for almost $16 million to Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos; the following year, Banderas bought out Griffith’s stake in their glamorous spread at the Prasada on New York City’s Upper West Side for almost $2.3 million; and, just last month, the “Working Girl” star sold an almost 7,400-square-foot luxury ski lodge in Aspen, Colo., for exactly $4 million.