Nickelback’s Mike Kroeger Drops Dime on Celeb-Pedigreed Pad in Hollywood Hills (EXCLUSIVE)
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Mike Kroeger, bass playing co-founder of the often critically maligned but never-the-less enormously successful, six-time Grammy nominated Canadian rock band Nickelback, set his 5,000-square-foot bluff-top home on Maui’s spectacular North Shore out for sale last month at $4.88 million and set his real estate sites state-side where he splashed out $3.795 million for a Hollywood pedigreed home in the foothills above Hollywood, California. Tucked behind a high, vine-encrusted wall and an even taller hedgerow, the property offers a two-story main house with four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in 4,568-square feet plus a Regency-inspired pool house with bathroom and a detached, studio-style guesthouse, also with a full bathroom.
Updated to include modern-day creature comforts and luxuries while preserving and re-creating authentic architectural details, the mushroom-colored, vine-trimmed and black shuttered main house was built as a model home for the affluent Outpost Estates neighborhood in 1935 by property developer Charles E. Toberman. The first resident of the home was silent screen star Bela Lugosi — so the scuttlebutt goes he added a pair of winged gargoyles over the entry gates and rather implausibly allowed a pet panther to roam the approximately half-acre property — and late super-agent Ed Limato, who famously represented a red carpet preening army of showbiz heavy hitters including Diana Ross, Richard Gere, Nicolas Cage, Michelle Pfeiffer and Mel Gibson, reportedly occupied the home in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The seller was fintech entrepreneur and former Google CIO Douglas Merrill .
An elegantly proportioned entrance gallery features a switchback staircase with elaborately curlicued wrought iron railing and steps down to a graciously scaled living room with dark, almost black hardwood floors, a massive carved fireplace with black marble hearth and nine-foot-high French doors that open to the terraced yard and swimming pool. A couple of steps up from the entrance hall, the dining room opens to both a double-height loggia along the front of the house and a verdant garden tucked into the steep hillside behind the house while the 1930s inspired black and white eat-in kitchen has a double-wide island with integrated snack bar plus an inglenook fireplace lined in antique bricks and an itty-bitty, cute-as-a-button dining booth lined with a cushioned built-in banquette.
A small study with built-in desk and attached powder room opens discretely off the stair landing and two guest bedrooms that share a vintage Jack ‘n’ Jill bathroom on the upper floor each have ample closets and dressing areas. A third, smaller bedroom with an en suite bathroom is nipped away at the top of the rear stairs that lead down to the laundry room and kitchen and, thus, make it well suited as a nursery, home office, yoga studio or staff suite while, in a wing of its own, the master bedroom is complete with a fitted walk-in closet plus a separate dressing room. The spacious, marble-accented master bathroom as a soaking tub in front of a picture window with hillside view and French doors that open to a slim balcony that overlooks lushly planted gardens and stone tiled al fresco entertainment spaces that incorporate an outdoor kitchen, a curtained dining cabana with fireplace and a swimming pool and spa.
Since its development, the conveniently located Outpost Estates neighborhood has attracted entertainment industry movers and shakers and some of the homes in the leafy, hillside ‘hood are currently owned if not necessarily occupied by Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy, Charlize Theron, Kyle MacLachlan, and Johnny Galecki , whose home was previously owned by both Jason Statham and Ben Stiller.
Listing photos: Douglas Elliman Real Estate
