In honor of Independence Day, Yolanda decided to venture off the beaten celebrity real estate path. Let’s weave a story web about one of our many international neighbors who came here to experience the opportunities available in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or, more likely, came here because Beverly Hills is a nice place to have a $15 million vacation home.

Our boy Nile Niami, whom we have discussed many a time on this blog, has been unusually quiet on the real estate front this year. Maybe it’s because he’s hard at work completing his $500 million spec-mall beast, or maybe it’s because he’s engaged in a nasty divorce with his soon-to-be-ex Yvonne. But he did find time to shed a big house in the prime Beverly Hills Flats for a whopping $15.6 million.

Keep in mind that this house is not a ground-up Niami creation like his STD-filled Opus spec-mansion in Trousdale Estates, currently listed at a sanity-shredding $100 million. No, this house was built way back in 1986 — a year of dubious architectural integrity if there ever was one. Still, this place isn’t really so bad. More like just a tad boring.

Anyway, Mr. Niami bought this “French Country” house for $11,900,000 back in August 2014 and quickly gave it one of his slick makeovers. Transformed into a “French Modern” estate, the house now looks sexy — if a starkly minimalist contemporary look is what turns you on, of course. In July 2016, Mr. Niami tossed it back on the market with an asking price of $17,950,000. After a long eight months, he finally unloaded the beast for the afore-mentioned and still-impressive $15,600,000.

Naturally, the big-bucks buyer’s identity is shielded behind a mysterious corporate entity calling itself “Amplitude of Blessings LLC”. Yolanda initially suspected the buyer was a tech person from Silicon Valley because the LLC links to a San Francisco address, but turns out that is not the case. The new owner, Yolanda happens to know, is an obviously very wealthy lady from Indonesia named Judith Soeryadjaya, founder of the Credo Group.

Yolanda’s intel indicates that the house is not intended as Ms. Soeryadjaya’s primary residence but is rather mainly for the use of a young woman named Angelica Nathania Tan. Below is a photo of Ms. Tan, who we think — but are not 100% certain — is Ms. Soeryadjaya’s daughter.

Anywho, time for a peek at Ms. Tan and/or Ms. Soeryadjaya’s big new $15.6 million mansion in one of the Flats neighborhood’s best pockets, just a quick skip south of Sunset Boulevard.

A comparison of prior and current listing photos reveals that Mr. Niami made precious few changes — beyond a new coat of paint — to the exterior of the home, which public records says measures 9,200-square-feet with 7 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. Those stats mean this is a bonafide mansion, y’all.

Mr. Niami did, however, relandscape the whole kit-and-caboodle. He also repaved the driveway and removed the old north/south facing tennis court to add a big grassy backyard, an expensive undertaking but one that Yolanda applauds. One of our (many) pet peeves is seeing some of these mansions with sport courts and pools crammed up against the main house. It’s just so gosh-darn tacky!

What was once a very banal and classically overwrought ’90s interior has been pared down to the max. We love the trendy ebonized wood floors and the marble fireplace, but if you ask Yolanda it’s just a bit too austere for our personal taste. We’d like a bolt of color, a dash of pizazz, but we are not finding it here.

The hardwood floors continue into the kitchen, which has also been redone to the point of being utterly unrecognizable. There are new top-grade appliances, new cabinetry, and a new center island with bar-style seating and a wooden countertop. The formal dining room seats eight.

The master bedroom features the same blacks/greys/whites interior motif as the rest of the home and comes equipped with another marble fireplace and a sitting area. Elsewhere there is a giant, glass-enclosed and temperature-controlled wine cellar.

Mr. Niami allowed the pool area to remain mostly unchanged through his renovation, but those gorgeous olive trees are all-new. The more than half-acre lot is double-gated out front and also gated at the rear (for access to the back alleyway). Naturally, the property is equipped with a litany of smart home and security features/systems.

For some reason, this western part of the Beverly Hills flats has long been particularly popular with wealthy Indonesian power players. Almost directly across the street from Ms. Soeryadjaya’s new pad is a much larger 20,000+ square-foot mega-mansion that has been owned since 2007 — when he bought it for $17,500,000 — by Franky Widjaja. And just around the corner on Sunset is a large tennis court estate that was purchased back in 2012 for $14,520,000 by Aldo Brasali. That’s just to name a couple.

Oh, one more thing. Y’all kiddies are probably wondering where Ms. Soeryadjaya gets all her money from, right? Well, Yolanda is gonna tell you. But only if you sit up straight and pay attention, okay?

Our Ms. Soeryadjaya is the youngest child of the late William Soeryadjaya, a billionaire who is widely regarded as one of Indonesia’s all-time most successful businessmen.

William Soeryadjaya’s bio reads like a cheesy Hollywood film script: orphaned at an early age, he dropped out of school in his teens and struggled to survive in his 20s by selling anything he could, like, say, mattresses. He served a prison term in his 30s and in that time became extremely religious, as he would remain for the rest of his life. It wasn’t until he was 35 that he founded Astra International from scratch and built it into what is currently Indonesia’s largest conglomerate.

Mr. Soeryadjaya passed away in 2010 and we’re not sure what his daughter’s exact net worth is, but it is most assuredly well into the nine figures. Her older brother Edwin is listed on Forbes with a reported $780 million to his name.

Amplitude of blessings, indeed…

Listing agent: Drew Fenton, Hilton & Hyland
Judith Soeryadjaya’s agent: Juli Udem, Regent Brokerage Co.

One of the (many) reasons why Yolanda loves real estate is because every neighborhood has its own unique vibe, its own personality. Take the fancifully-named Mt. Olympus ‘hood in the Hollywood Hills, where all the streets have names like Hercules and Achilles and Electra. Although this area is conveniently located just off the base of busy-busy Laurel Canyon Boulevard, above Hollywood, and many of the homes have marvelous views, the area has never been particularly popular with celebrities. Blame the somewhat — ahem — “taste-specific” architecture. Most of the homes were built in the 1970s and tend to err on the gaudy side.

Rather than celebrities, Mt. Olympus has long attracted a well-to-do international crowd of buyers, particularly those that originally hail from the former Soviet Union.

All the same, there are celebs here and there. Billionaire heiress/producer Megan Ellison famously owns the most expensive home in the neighborhood, a $30 million beast that she is widely rumored to be planning to raze, ostensibly to make way for something much more grand.

Anyway, rumors surfaced a couple months ago (courtesy of our friends at The Real Deal) that Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor Jeremy Piven was considering a move to the area, and indeed he reportedly even entered escrow on a rather butt-ugly $2.25 million residence in the ‘hood. But it seems the Real Estate gods had other plans in mind! For whatever reason, Mr. Piven wisely lost interest  — so it would seem — and quickly moved onto something much more grand.

You see, Yolanda happens to know that Mr. Piven — through a strangely-named blind trust — has just shelled out a fat $6,800,000 for a very contemporary house near the tippy-top of the neighborhood and just a couple doors down from Megan Ellison’s mega-compound. Better get to borrowing that sugar, quick, Jerry — mama Ellison’s not gonna be up here much longer.

Originally built in 1980, the concrete/glass/steel structure was purchased back in 2014 for $2,655,000 by a couple of developers who took the shapely ol’ girl — her silhouette kinda reminds us of a humpback whale for some reason — down to the studs and completely rebuilt her into a sexy, contemporary goddess worthy of Mt. Olympus. Or something like that.

The house is large but not particularly huge — 4,824-square-feet with 4 beds and 5 baths — and the lot is not especially sizable — .29-acre — but it is clear that the views are the real star of this show and the reason for the king’s ransom sale price of $6.8 million.

Naturally, the property is walled and gated for complete privacy. The entryway, which features a double-height ceiling, a dramatic floating staircase and white oak flooring, is clearly meant to wow guests. The kitchen is sleek and minimalist, and the dining room area features a unique geometric chandelier, but it’s obviously the view that will draw everyone’s attention here. Seems like the skyscrapers of Downtown LA are just a reach away (on a clear day, natch).

Reinforcing the bachelor pad theme are the master bed and bathroom, which take up most of the home’s second story. Yolanda likes the bathtub, even if it slightly reminds us of a melted giant teacup like the ones y’all might find at Disneyland. The bathroom has dual vanities and the bedroom has a fireplace and private balcony that is large enough to host a sizable private party.

If the balcony is not enough space for Mr. Piven’s entourage (get it?), however, a short flight of stairs connects that outdoor space to the top of the flat-roofed structure. Hopefully none of his guests have vertigo, or that could be trouble. Eh?

Disappearing walls of glass connect the indoors to the glassy infinity-edged pool. Despite the wide open, unimpeded views, the backyard remains almost totally private from prying eyes, as the hillside directly across the way lies undeveloped and Mr. Piven’s neighbors are screened out thanks to evergreen trees and hedges.

Can’t get enough of Ari’s new home? Watch this video!

Mr. Piven continues to own his longtime oceanfront home on Malibu Road (above), currently available for purchase with an asking price of $10,495,000. The three-story structure also contains 4 bedrooms and 5 baths. Plus there’s a spa and a sauna. And 50 feet of beach frontage. But pity about that lackluster decor — should’ve paid Lloyd to pick out the furniture.

Listing agent: Sally Forster Jones, John Aaroe Group

Nearly 55 years after her death, O.G. bleach blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe remains a major pop culture icon, her image emblazened on expensive art, her movies still watched, her quotes still plastered across social media by today’s schoolgirls (and schoolboys). Thus, it’s only natural that the only house she ever owned remains steeped in mystique.  Heck, the Brentwood house even has its own Wikipedia page! So you know it’s legit.

In 1962, Ms. Monroe very (in)famously died at the age of 36 inside this very house, less than a year after she purchased it. Although official inquiry into her death has long been closed and the matter was ruled a probable suicide, various conspiracy theories still loudly persist.

Those theories — at least those involving some sort of cover-up — were perhaps given more credence due to the fact that a subsequent owner of her property made a rather baffling discovery. While performing a remodel of the home in the 1970s, married actors Michael Irving and Victoria Hamel discovered a sophisticated wiretapping system hidden in the walls of the structure. Who installed it — and how — remains a mystery to the public, but it is well-known that Ms. Monroe had a fling with John F. Kennedy not long before her death.

Over the ensuing decades, the house came to be owned by a long line of non-celebrities. In 2010, it was acquired for $3,850,000 by a prominent attorney, who sold it just two years later in a secret off-market deal for a fat $5,100,000. The buyer at that time was a low-profile (but prodigiously wealthy) divorced lady named Donna Kaplan. Our Ms. Kaplan, you see, is the ex-wife of trailer park land baron Jeffrey Kaplan, who currently resides in a mega-beast of a Bel Air mansion christened Chateau Des Fleurs that weighs in at somewhere around 60,000-square-feet of living space.

Oh dear, but we digress. Anyway, it appears Ms. Kaplan made few (if any) renovations in Brentwood during her five years of ownership, but she put the property up for sale in April 2017 with a ballsy $6,900,000 ask. Sounds like a huge wad of cash, right? Especially for a 2,624-square-foot house.

Well, you might want to sit down for what Yolanda’s about to tell y’all. The property closed escrow barely a month after being listed — and for $7,250,000. Yes, kiddies, that’s nearly $2,800 per square foot and a full $350,000 more than the asking price, a clear indicator that there was a fierce competition for Marilyn’s house among some very wealthy contenders.

The winning bidder’s identity is screened behind a bizarrely-named corporate identity, but Yolanda just happens to know the new owners are a married couple named Dan Lukas and Anne Jarmain.

Mr. Lukas is a bigshot partner at LA-based hedge fund Ares Capital Management, so he rest assured he can easily afford a $7+ million house. As for Ms. Jarmain — well, we’re not quite sure what she does, but she is a graduate of USC so there’s that. The couple also have two young children.

What did all that money buy? Well, even discounting the Marilyn Monroe factor, Mr. Lukas and Ms. Jarmain have themselves quite an interesting property. Located in the Helenas, a collection of uber-tiny cul-de-sacs sited between Sunset and San Vicente Boulevard, the lot is completely walled and gated for maximum privacy.

There’s also the benefit of a current celebrity neighbor — the much larger home immediately next door is owned by Scottish hunk Ewan McGregor, who by the way has been quite good lately in Fargo. Oh dear, but we digress yet again.

Remarkably — given that this is teardown-prone Brentwood, after all — the 1929 Spanish-style casa remains remarkably intact and original details abound. Of course, it has been renovated over the years, but there are still the same vaulted ceilings with exposed, unvarnished wooden beams in the kitchen, still the same terra cotta floors, and original tile work.

The backyard is both impressively large and remarkably private, shrouded behind thick hedges and mature trees. Out back there is a red brick terrace and sizable swimming pool plus a petite guesthouse with a tiny porch shaded by thick vines.

Mr. Lukas and Ms. Jarmain currently reside somewhere down in Venice (CA), where they’ve been located for quite some time. Back in 2009, they paid $2,100,000 for a newly-built and very contemporary structure designed by noted architecture firm Marmol Radziner. They quietly sold the structure in an off-market deal for $2,800,000 back in late 2014.

To be honest, kiddies, Yolanda isn’t quite certain where the Lukas/Jarmain family has been living for the past 2.5 years but like we say, they remain in or near that area.

A cautionary note: the listing for this property somewhat ominously mentions that this is “the largest parcel in all the Helenas” which Yolanda takes as a subtle hint that the .53-acre spread could easily accommodate a much larger and more family-friendly mansion. And the stark contrast in the looks of Mr. Lukas’s Venice house to this place makes us worry that the land value is what may have attracted him and the missus to purchase this mini-estate.

Look, kiddies, we’re all for personal property rights and blah, blah, blah. But a house like this is really a part of history and should be treated as such, limited architectural significance be damned. Yep, we said it. Yolanda just laid it out like that and that is how we’re gonna leave it.

Let us hope Mr. Lukas and Ms. Jarmain have the good sense to preserve this treasure. Otherwise, hun buns, Ms. Monroe’s legions of fans will come a-knockin’. And 55 years after her death, she still has plenty. Icons are blessed like that.

Listing agent: Lisa Optican, Mercer Vine
Dan Lukas & Anne Jarmain’s agent: Richard Stearns, Partners Trust Brentwood

Today’s story is gonna be short but oh-so-sweet. Sorry, everyone, but Yolanda has got an early morning appointment at our local LA courthouse. You see, our second ex-husband George has apparently been running his mouth all over town. Talkin’ ’bout some nonsense such as how we “stole” his 32-karat diamond ring and his mother’s diamond-encrusted brooch. Now he’s suing us for their return! The nerve.

Our lawyer has cautioned us against it, but Yolanda is going to publicly respond to these hurtful accusations right here and now. First off, it’s not “his” ring and not “his mama’s” broach. Those belong to Yolanda. Secondly, we never stole anything. They were gifts — gifts of the kind that wealthy gentlemen regularly give their wives. Stealing is just tacky. Yolanda would never.

Lastly, it ain’t a 32-karat ring. We got this thing examined over in downtown and damned if this rock isn’t 18 karats. On a good day.

That cheap bastard!

But we digress. Excuse our language, and back to the subject at hand. As y’all should know, the LA real estate market is flaming hot right now, particularly in the tony coastal areas of town. In the past year alone, the sale price records have been broken in Malibu ($85,000,000 courtesy of Dodgers owner Mark Walter), Pacific Palisades ($32,500,000 courtesy of financier Richard Hollander), Hermosa Beach ($15,000,000 courtesy of investor Jean Marc Chapus) and Venice ($14,600,000 courtesy of tech entrepreneur Brendan Iribe).

Now Manhattan Beach — long the city of choice for sports stars and other rich fitness buffs — has officially joined the record-breaking real estate madness. Just last month, the single-family home price record was shattered when a house on the coveted Strand area of town transferred for a mind-bending $21,000,000.

What makes this sale all the more spectacular is that this place is not some fancy spec-mansion. Nor does it enjoy a significant amount of acreage. This house is a architecturally ho-hum Craftsman — some might even say it’s clunky-lookin’ — and it was built way back in 1922. The lot is a modest .11-acre.

At 5,967-square-feet with 9 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms, the big blue house is definitely large, but as y’all can see, it ain’t exactly pretty. A row of garages that can accommodate five cars in all greets street-side passers-by. The house does sit on a dazzling strip of sand, but even so — $21 million?! That’s a ton of cash!

So who could the mysterious buyer be? Well, here’s where things get interesting. Their identity is, of course, shielded behind a strangely-named corporate entity. But a deep dive into records reveals that this entity is directly connected to a local woman named Jennifer Greenberg Messer.

Ms. Greenberg Messer isn’t anyone most folks have ever likely heard of before. But she is very, very rich. Make no mistake about that.

This lady, you see, happens to be the only daughter of Robert Greenberg, the entrepreneurial whiz who founded the Skechers shoe company back in the 1990s and built it into what is today a $3.1 billion revenue (per year!) retail giant. Today, it is (by far) the largest employer in Manhattan Beach, where the company is still headquartered. The family — Robert Greenberg and his five adult sons and one adult daughter (that would be Ms. Greenberg Messer!) — still control the business, from what Yolanda can tell.

To be perfectly honest, kiddies, Yolanda is unsure whether Ms. Greenberg Messer bought this house herself, or whether the buyer is one of her brothers and she’s just a convenient front. Whatever the case, it was clearly one of the Greenbergs who plunked down the big bucks for this ol’ beotch.

Records reveal that the Greenberg family quietly owns a massive amount of luxury LA real estate. In addition to their new $21 million beast, there are also following properties:

— A 1,938-square-foot house on the Manhattan Beach Strand, bought in 2011 for $6,500,000
— A 1,569-square-foot house in Hermosa Beach, bought in 2015 for $3,750,000
— A 3,282-square-foot house on the Hermosa Beach Strand, bought in 2016 for $7,400,000 and sold four months later for the same amount
— A 4,352-square-foot house on the Manhattan Beach Strand, bought in 2010 for $7,500,000
— A 5,327-square-foot house on the Manhattan Beach Strand, bought in 2004 for $4,365,000
— A 2,829-square-foot house on the Manhattan Beach Strand, bought in 2016 for $14,000,000
— A 2,574-square-foot house in Manhattan Beach, bought in 2010 for $4,000,000
— A 4,266-square-foot house in Manhattan Beach, bought in 2010 for $6,000,000
— A parcel of vacant land in Hermosa Beach, bought in 2015 for $3,750,000
— A 4,000-square-foot house in Hermosa Beach, bought in 2012 for $2,500,000
— A 1,224-square-foot house in West Hollywood
— A 7,008-square-foot house in Beverly Hills, bought in 2008 for $6,995,000
— A 5,418-square-foot house in Los Feliz, bought in 2015 for $2,995,000
— A 5,820-square-foot house in Beverly Hills Post Office, inside “The Summit” guard-gated community, bought in 2015 for $8,550,000

There’s much more Greenberg luxury real estate, of course, but Yolanda really must dash. Diamonds are forever, kiddies, and so is real estate. But not oceanfront real estate. And the diamonds might go away, too, if we don’t skedaddle on out of here. Wish us luck!

Listing agents: Robert Schumann, Real Estate West; Victoria Beck, RE/MAX Estate Properties
Jennifer Greenberg Messer’s agent: Robert Schumann, Real Estate West

Yesterday Yolanda did a quick story down in Manhattan Beach. So since we’re now well into July, Yolanda thought we should continue the trend and keep things beachy today. We want to help y’all cool off from this blazin’ heat, after all. Let’s depart The Strand and head north by northwest, up to the amazingly expensive communities of Malibu and Pacific Palisades.

Now, this may seem bizarre to y’all, but despite the fact that the ‘Bu and the Palisades neighbor each other, many super-rich folks — the .00001%, if you will — own homes in both locations. Many wealthy people don’t want to deal with the long trek down PCH every day, so they live in the Palisades during the week and Malibu on the weekends and holidays. And if you can afford it, why not?

However, Yolanda would personally prefer a place on the sand in the Caribbean where we can sink our toned footsies into the sand and splish-splash in the warm (!!!) ocean water. Can’t do that in Malibu. But we do appreciate the geographic convenience of this beach location. And we digress!

Today we are going to discuss a couple that has so much cash they basically don’t know what to do with it all. So they have amused themselves by dropping a total of $26,000,000 over the last couple years on significant homes in both communities (Malibu and PP).

Before we get started, however, we are gonna need y’all to step into our commodious time machine and travel back to the early 1980s. Did you know that in the midst of all the big hair, neon tracksuits, and E.T. there was an actual, real international scandal involving the US and Saudi Arabia? Well, not really a scandal — more like a major crisis, if you will. And it was all kickstarted by one willful young man. It’s a case of once upon a time…

Once upon a time, in the early 1980s, there lived a fella named Tarek Abdulhadi Taher. Our Mr. Taher was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, where he enjoyed a ultra-privileged upbringing. His father Dr. Abdulhadi H. Taher was governor of Saudi Arabia’s General Petroleum and Mineral Organization, which basically means he had gazillions of bucks in oil money. He was also frequently described as one of the most powerful figures in all of Saudi Arabia, perhaps only behind the most prominent members of the Al Saud royal family.

As a young man, Tarek Taher was sent by his father to university in the United States — UC Santa Barbara, to be precise. And it was not long before the spoiled Saudi youth ran afoul of law enforcement officials.

It seems our boy Mr. Taher had a penchant for racing very expensive automobiles around town. He received a multitude of tickets, but reportedly paid them no heed. That’s what y’all can do when your family has oodles of money. Eventually, however, Mr. Taher was caught racing his Ferrari on the 101 freeway, was convicted, and — in late 1981 — was sentenced to 45 days in the slammer.

Forty-five days in jail is nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but would you flee the country over it? Because that’s just what Mr. Taher did. He vanished soon after his conviction and was not heard from again until 1985, when he was arrested in Boston. Once out on bail, however, Mr. Taher fled the country yet again.

After having fled the country not once but twice, one would think Mr. Taher might stay gone, right? But there were other outside complications.

Alfred Tennyson famously once said “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” and so it was for Mr. Taher. Sometime in the early-to-mid ’80s, the Saudi youth fell in love with an American lass — a beautiful blonde from Pacific Palisades named Janet Brown, to be precise. The couple married and had a daughter by the name of Renna Brown-Taher.

Yolanda is quite certain that most folks back then probably thought the wild Saudi and his American wife would be headed quickly for an end with buckets of tears. But somehow, it was not to be!

Here we are 30+ years later and Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown are still married, still living together. Ain’t it sweet?

Perhaps Ms. Brown and their daughter tamed Mr. Taher. He returned to the United States in 1989 with his tail in between his legs. He turned himself in and willingly served his time behind bars. Nowadays, he is still rich and still drives fancy cars. But he has turned his racing aspirations to horses. Mr. Taher is now an accomplished and respected equestrian with multiple horses of his own.

Oh, and Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown’s daughter — the aforementioned Renna Brown-Taher — was recently married! Congrats. Her new hubby is Michael Tisch of the multi-billionaire Tisch family of New York. They own the New York Giants and are one of the very wealthiest Big Apple-based clans.

Cha-ching! Well, not like she needs the cash. Our Ms. Brown-Taher’s parents can easily play in the billionaire real estate arena, too. Let’s take a look at their holdings, shall we?

Way back in 2004, Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown paid $2,330,000 (through a corporation) for a comfortable but not huge house in the lovely (if a bit tightly-packed) Alphabet Streets area of Ms. Brown’s hometown — Pacific Palisades. The Traditional-style structure was completed in 2003 and has 5,000-square-feet of living space with 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms.

The house is crammed on a tiny .12-acre lot — see what we mean when we say tightly-packed? — and as such there are only tiny slivers of front and back yards. The property has no pool (nor does it really have any place to put one).

The Brown-Tahers also own a second house in the area — this one a 2,781-square-foot tract house-lookin’ thing originally built in 1995 and up in the breezy (and somewhat geographically removed) Highlands section of the Palisades. It appears from property records that this house was inherited by Ms. Brown from her mother, a lady named Ann Allen. Our Mr. Taher’s name also appears on the deed.

Yolanda finds evidence that Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown briefly listed this house for sale in 2015 with an asking price of $2,175,000 before it was yanked off the market and rented to an unknown tenant at a rate of $7,000/mo.

In the meantime, Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown have been extremely busy on the real estate front. A couple years ago, y’all see, they decided to majorly upgrade their residential circumstances in Pacific Palisades.

In January 2015, to be precise, Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown forked out a righteous $17,500,000 for a huge (and historic) blufftop house in the super-prime Huntington area of the Palisades. In case y’all care, the Brown-Tahers purchased the .7-acre mini-estate through an entity calling itself “Endurance Horses LLC”.

The 6,273-square-foot residence was never officially listed on the MLS, but it had been not-so-quietly shopped around off-market by one of the premier real estate agents in town. Called the “Mccormick Estate” in marketing materials, the property has a properly chi-chi history.

Built in 1929 as the vacation home of Mary Mccormick — an heiress to a substantial manufacturing fortune — the Spanish/Santa Barbara-style architecture was courtesy of the noted Pasadena-based Garret Van Pelt. The home towers far above busy Pacific Coast Highway and features awe-inspiring sightlines of the Pacific, up the coast to Malibu, and down the coast to Palos Verdes and Catalina.

In all, the home features 7 bedrooms and 6 baths. It is also one of the only homes along this bluff to features its own private swimming pool — kidney shaped, in this case.

Naturally, there is a formal living room, a formal dining room, and a solarium. According to the listing, all formal rooms feature original moldings, light fixtures and casement windows. The master suite sports a marble shower and radiant heated floors.

Though the home’s landscaping is exquisite, Yolanda actually saw this house around the time it sold. It was apparent to us that the structure itself needs a bit of TLC/renovations/maintenance. Perhaps that is the reason Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown scored a major discount on the estate — though the historic house had an off-market asking price of $23 million, the couple paid only the aforementioned $17.5M.

Still, that number was still big enough for this to be — at that point — the biggest sale ever in the Huntington Palisades. However, that record was broken just a few months later by the larger house immediately next door, which sold for $21,000,000 to NBC/Universal chief Steve Burke in April 2015. (But we digress yet again!)

Not content with their three expensive homes in Pacific Palisades, Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown headed out to Malibu, where they wrote a fat $8,500,000 check for a house out on the celebrity-infested Point Dume neighborhood.

Built by Griffin Enright Architects in the mid-2000s, the swoopy contemporary sits privately behind the big wooden front gates and a massive hedge. It has a sizable (but not mega) 5,618-square-feet of living space with 4 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms. Although the property is not oceanfront, it sits high on a knoll that gives the enormous second-floor master suite panoramic views of the Point Dume basin and the Pacific, down towards Palos Verdes.

The home features a large rectangular pool, spa, temperature-controlled wine cellar (with space for 1,500 bottles!). Other nifty features are the two outdoor firepits, limestone walls, and polished concrete floors.

The house was originally owned by insurance mogul Michael Thaxton, who had the house featured in the New York Times during his ownership. Our Mr. Thaxton sold the house in a secret off-market deal for $8,000,000 back in early 2012. The buyer at that time was a rich guy named Kevin Young, who is a bigwig exec (COO) at biotech company Gilead Sciences. It was Mr. Young who sold the property to Mr. Taher and Ms. Brown.

Some of the Brown-Tahers neighbors on Point Dume include a whole slew of celebrities — Shaun White, Julia Roberts, Chris Martin, Matthew Mcconaughey, and Bob Dylan. One of Mr. Taher & Mr. Brown’s nearest neighbors is the $50+ million compound of Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, who is currently in a heap of trouble right now for his role in the 1MDB international money-laundering scandal. Oh dear!

Listing agent (Pacific Palisades): Drew Fenton, Hilton & Hyland
Listing agent (Malibu): Jordan Ott, Keller Williams
Tarek Taher & Janet Brown’s agent (Malibu): Jill Reeder, Coldwell Banker

Our BFF Your Mama over at Variety magazine already let the proverbial kitty cat outta the bag, but Yolanda is about to throw her useless opinion about this transaction into the ring because it’s Friday and this is an easy story. Come on, y’all, cut this ol’ gurl a break. We’ve been slaving away on here all week!

Although the deal has yet to be officially recorded, Yolanda happens to know that teenage makeup tycoon and social media superstar Kylie Jenner has quietly done sold her Calabasas starter house. The agreed-upon price is $3,150,000, which is significantly less than the downright greedy $3.9 million originally requested by Miss Jenner. However, that figure is still a fat $550,000 more than the $2,600,000 paid by Miss Jenner just over two years ago, in March 2015. Oh, to be all of 17 years old and have $2,600,000 to drop on a suburban mansion! But we digress.

The buyer, Yolanda happens to know, is another raven-haired young lady whose wealth also derives from the beauty industry. Coincidence or not? You decide.

Nikki Eslami is her name. She is the co-founder of Bellami, a very successful company that supplies a full range of branded cosmetics to thousands of salons across the country. Hair care products, lip liners, eyeshadows, and much more. The company is primarily known, however, for its ultra-popular line of wigs and hair extensions.

Say, doesn’t Miss Jenner’s money also come from makeup? By golly, it does! (Well, that and the TV show all the other random products/crap she shills.)

The house is located in the guard-gated and mock-Med mansion-filled “Oaks” community of Calabasas, that fancy (if a bit nauseatingly suburban) city in the San Fernando Valley. Situated on a fairly tight .36-acre lot, the 2006-built structure packs in 5,100-square-feet of living space with a family-sized 6 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms.

Miss Jenner gave the place a thorough makeover in the form of a ton a black and white paint. While some of you young’uns might find it glam and fabulous, Yolanda finds the contrast-contrast-contrast scheme rather dull and uninspiring. But we can appreciate that though this place is not to Yolanda’s tastes, there are many folks who probably feel this is the height of style.

A gated entryway leads directly to a petite courtyard equipped with a firepit. Gleaming ebonized hardwood floors begin in the living room and continue through the most of the home’s public rooms. (Those floors are so shiny, y’all, that Yolanda would not dare to stand on them while wearing a skirt without our bloomers on. But we digress.)

Naturally, the kitchen sports high-end Viking appliances and a quartz counter top.

The massive master suite includes a walk-in closet, a mirror-lined master suite, and a seating area with television set.

There is also a rather hokey-lookin’ screening room, and out back there’s a massive outdoor dining set under a covered patio, an outdoor bar and full BBQ, and a rectangular plunge pool with inset spa. Despite all that, however, Yolanda can’t help but feel that the backyard is rather depressing for $3.15 million. All that money in Calabasas and you get barely any land and no views? Meh!

Now, a $550,000 profit in two years on a $2.6 million house is quite impressive. But keep in mind that Miss Jenner clearly spent a significant amount of moolah renovating this entire place top-to-bottom.

And also, $550k is chump change to Miss Jenner. She may be only 19 years old, but she tools around town in a limited-production Lamborghini Aventador SV Roadster (price: $530,075 before options, taxes, and the inevitable dealer markup). Not to mention all her other supercars and assorted luxury vehicles.

Anyway, Miss Jenner has long since departed Calabasas to the yonder northern Hidden Hills community. She’s got a $10,525,000 compound situated down a super-private flag lot, but she doesn’t actually live there. Oh no. Miss Jenner actually lives in her $12,050,000 Hidden Hills mega-mansion a few streets away. It’s got 13,000+ square feet of living space. And let’s face it, what 19-year-old social media hound doesn’t need all that room?

Don’t forget, kiddies, Miss Jenner is rich enough to live in Beverly Park if she so choose. Don’t underestimate those krazy Kardashians’ pocketbook power.

Kylie Jenner’s agents: Tomer & Isidora Fridman, Compass
Nikki Eslami’s agent: April Lopez, Re/Max Traditions

A big sale recently went down in the celebrity-soaked Malibu Colony guard-gated community. In fact, the transfer price — a crazy $36,000,000 — means this is the most expensive house ever sold in that enclave, in fact. Let’s discuss, shall we?

The multi-billionaire buyer — as has already been correctly identified by our friends over at The Real Deal — is hedge fund titan Stanley Druckenmiller and his wife Fiona. They purchased the property through a corporate entity named after their beloved dog Axel. Because why the hell not, right?

As for the seller, she is a lady named Wallis Annenberg, who happens to be one of LA’s foremost philanthropists. Now in her late 70s, Ms. Annenberg has funded and slapped her name on just about every building in the city. There’s the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, The Annenberg Beach House, The USC Annenberg School of Communication, and the Annenberg Space for Photography. On and on it goes.

You can afford to do things like that when you’re the sole family heir to the fortune of multi-billionaire publishing tycoon Walter Annenberg, kiddies.

Anywho, Ms. Annenberg purchased the Malibu Colony house back in 2006 for $22,750,000 and straightaway enlisted LA-based architect Fred Fisher to overhaul and expand the existing abode into a 6,900-square-foot, high-style contemporary mansion with 70 feet of ocean frontage and off-street parking for up to 10 cars. That latter feature is a very rare thing in Malibu Colony, where the homes sit cheek-to-jowl and the guest parking situation is often grim.

The house is currently an eye-catching and unusual combination of slate gray stucco, glass and fancy Ipe wood siding. Indoors, Ms. Annenberg hired Rancho Mirage-based decorator Sam Cardella to dress the ol’ beotch up with some fiendishly expensive contemporary furnishings. The result of all this, as y’all can see below, is pretty damn impressive.

In addition to the master suite, which features walls of glass and a private terrace, there are four additional bedrooms plus a separate “guest apartment”. More importantly, however, the house is one of only a small handful of oceanfront Malibu Colony residences that sports its own private pool. This one happens to be heated, so y’all can enjoy it on those freezing California winter nights (yeah right).

While she owned the place, Ms. Annenberg had the house published in at least two high-nosed lifestyle publications: (Town and Country via Curbed, C California Style). Go ahead, click on them links if you want even more photos of the Annenberg-cum-Druckenmiller abode.

This, however, is not the only house in Malibu Colony owned by Ms. Annenberg. Around the same time she acquired this property (back in 2006), Ms. Annenberg laid out another $6,000,000 for the smaller structure directly across the street that she apparently used as staff/guest quarters. This landlocked house measures a paltry 1,080-square-feet and has 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms plus a detached garage/apartment, a pool, and plenty of off-street parking. Records indicate Ms. Annenberg continues to own this property, though Yolanda imagines she would be very open to selling. But only for the right price, natch.

Although neither house was never officially listed on the MLS, it’s no big secret that Ms. Annenberg has been trying to unload her Malibu compound for some time. The two-house estate was first floated as an off-market listing back in 2013 with a rumored asking price of $49 million. A couple years later, the big house was being shopped around by itself with a $39 million ask. Eventually, Mr. Druckenmiller came around to take the beast of Ms. Annenberg’s gold-flaked paws.

Ms. Annenberg resides primarily in Century Woods, a gated community of multi-million dollar townhouses in LA’s centrally-locaed Century City area. Our gal has owned her 6,736-square-foot mansion-sized townhouse for a very long time — since 1991, in fact.

As for Mr. Druckenmiller, he and the missus are currently attempting to sell their palatial 20-acre estate in Greenwich, CT for a breathtaking $31,500,000. That’s a lot of money, of course, but Yolanda wonders if the couple will make any profit at all once everything is said and done. For Pete’s sake, they paid $23 million for the property way back in 2004 and have totally remodeled the main house and built an accessory garage/staff quarters.

But we digress. In addition to their Connecticut compound and new Malibu mansion, the Druckenmillers also keep a luxury apartment on E. 72nd Street in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, just a couple blocks from Central Park. Then there is a 6,800-square-foot house in The Hamptons — on the shore of Lake Agawam in Southampton, to be precise. Yolanda also discovered that the wildly wealthy couple also own a fairly modest multi-million dollar house in North Palm Beach (FL).

Back on the West Coast, Mr. Druckenmiller’s nearest new Malibu neighbors are some of the richest folks in all of LA. In addition to Ms. Annenberg’s other house across the street, there’s Chrome Hearts owners Richard and Laurie Stark, entrepreneurs Michael Lewis and Lizanne Falsetto, private equity pasha Michael Tennenbaum, well-compensated action star Jason Statham, and 25-year-old Herbalife heir Alexander Hughes. Further away but also in the Colony are billionaires Jerry Perenchio and Sheldon Adelson, who each own at least six houses apiece scattered throughout the exclusive gated community.

Listing agent: Linda May, Hilton & Hyland

As you might have heard, perennially headline-hogging couple Jay-Z and Beyonce are apparently buying a house. Not just any ol’ house, of course, but a massive $90 million spec-calamity compound in Bel Air. Heck, it’s got 30,000-square-feet of living space — nearly enough for two supersized egos!

By now, it’s all over the town and on every agent tongue.

Well, could it be true? It could! There is no doubt Bey & Jay are among the very wealthiest folks in the entertainment industry. But when it comes to these two and their real estate moves, Yolanda is going to suspend belief until we see a signed grant deed that proves Mr. and Mrs. Carter did, in fact, purchase the property. We’re not hating, we are just saying. This couple has been **allegedly** **trying** **to buy** nearly every mega-priced mansion in town for years now, and they still ain’t forked over the dough. (wink, wink)

No offense, kiddies, but Mrs. B and Mr. Z seem to be the sort of folks who — despite all their amassed riches and fame — still crave constant attention. See what we’re gettin’ at? Yolanda smells an elaborate publicity stunt up in here, y’all.

Oh dear. We digress.

Anyway, before we transition to more serious stories, we thought it might be fun to do a quick run-down of all the biggest sales of 2017. It’s shaping up to be another banner year — we’ve had at least 28 single-family residential properties break the $20 million barrier. And it’s worth noting that four of the five most expensive sales went down out in Malibu (CA), that historically high-priced but sleepy seaside locale. Coincidence or something in the water? You decide.

Oh, and Yolanda did her best to give all the real estate agents involved the credit they deserve.

1. $85,000,000 — Malibu

Though he’s currently dealing with a particularly nasty spat of workplace drama, Dodgers owner (and Chairman of Guggenheim Partners, a $240 billion investment management firm) Mark Walter found time to easily shatter the Malibu record with his slam-down for David Geffen’s longtime compound. Five parcels, multiple structures, a pool, reflecting pond, grassy lawns, a movie theater, and much more. All on a huge amount of Pacific ocean frontage.

Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency had both sides of the deal.

2. $69,900,000 — Malibu

The third-largest sale ever recorded in Malibu, and easily the largest ever for a non-oceanfront property. The 15-acre blufftop spread includes (in addition to multiple accessory structures) a 15,000+ square foot Spanish-style mansion originally built back in the early 1990s by a real estate developer and his wealthy wife. Billionaire Hong Kong heiress Karen Lo and her hubby Eugene Chuang snagged the estate from Mexican investor/flip maestro Mauricio Oberfeld. The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky had the listing.

3. $65,000,000 — Beverly Hills

The second-biggest residential sale ever in Beverly Hills, Gilbert Chagoury’s prominent (but hideously ugly) palace in trendy Trousdale Estates went to billionaire heir Evan Metropoulos for a stupefying $65 million. As a teardown! Aaron Kirman of John Aaroe Group repped Chagoury.

4. $50,000,000 — Malibu

In the biggest vacant residential land sale ever recorded in Malibu — and perhaps the largest ever in all of LA, we’re not sure — seaside developer Scott Gillen forked over the cash for a 24-acre parcel upon which he will construct six spec-giga-mansions. Sandro Dazzan of Coldwell Banker had Gillen’s side.

5. $48,000,000 — Malibu

Larry Ellison bought his thirteenth house on Carbon Beach. What more can Yolanda say? Not a damn thing.

6. $40,800,000 — Holmby Hills

The so-called “homeless billionaire” Nicolas Berggruen hasn’t been homeless in a long while — he has a collection of luxury apartments in WeHo’s Sierra Towers — but it seems he also (apparently!) wants a historic pad with some land. The seller, businessman Gary L. Wilson, was repped by Drew Fenton and Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland plus Aaron Kirman of John Aaroe Group. Linda May of Hilton & Hyland took Mr. Berggruen’s side.

7. $38,500,000 — Beverly Hills Post Office

Scottish billionaire Sir Tom Hunter got himself an ultra-contemporary crib up in the hills. It’s got a boomerang-shaped pool! Jesse Lally and Branden & Rayni Williams (all of Hilton & Hyland) were the listing agents.

8. $38,500,000 — Malibu

Chrome Hearts founders Richard & Laurie Stark shocked everyone when they paid a billionaire-worthy price to add yet another luxury pad to their extensive portfolio. Longtime friend Chris Cortazzo of Coldwell Banker made the dream deal come true.

9. $36,000,000 — Bel Air

Semi-mysterious developer Woodbridge Luxury Homes — they’re the ones who paid $90 million for the Owlwood estate only to shamelessly try to flip it for $180 million less than a year later — forked over another huge sum for a vacant Bel Air hilltop property. The seller was “Hard Rock Cafe” founder Peter Morton.

10. $36,000,000 — Malibu

Multi-billionaire hedge hog Stanley Druckenmiller paid a record-breaking price for philanthropist Wallis Annenberg’s contemporary crib. Linda May of Hilton & Hyland took charge of the sale for Ms. Annenberg.

11. $35,500,000 — Bel Air

An enigmatic buyer shielded by an entity called La Croix LLC paid an enormous sum for a vacant property in Bel Air once owned by Tom Gores but sold by developer Gala Asher. Ginger Glass of Coldwell Banker repped the seller, who happens to be her hubby.

Yolanda has left Ms. Glass dozens of voicemails inquiring about the identity of the buyer, but our gurl is giving us the cold, cold shoulder for the time being. We’ll find out eventually, though. Not to bounce our own banshee, but Yolanda always gets our man (or woman).

12. $33,900,000 — Bel Air

“To $33 million and beyond!” is Yolanda’s cheesy line of the day. Wait… is that even from Star Wars? Whatever. George Lucas got himself a historic estate in Bel Air courtesy of billionaire Ross Perot Jr.

13. $30,000,000 — Holmby Hills

Alo Yoga (great store, btw) co-founder Danny Harris bought himself a big ass Holmby Hills manor from Bebe founder Manny Mashouf. James Harris, David Parnes, and Kelsey Kroon (all of The Agency) had both sides of the deal.

14. $27,000,000 — Holmby Hills

South African-born businessman Max Fowles-Pazdro spent the big bucks for a sprawling teardown in what is often considered to be the swankiest neighborhood in all of LA. Jade Mills of Coldwell Banker was the listing agent; Stephen Resnick of Hilton & Hyland was on the selling side.

15. $26,725,000 — Beverly Park

High-end Indonesian property developer Tommy Silfanus purchased this property through an LLC named after his two adult children. Another Indonesian — embattled dictator’s son Bambang Trihatmodjo — was the seller. Beverly Park specialist Mauricio Umansky of The Agency repped Trihatmodjo.

16. $25,700,000 — Bel Air

A San Marino (CA) resident named Ming Li coughed up some major moolah for a multi-acre Bel Air property that overlooks the local country club. On the land stands a pretty cool mid-century modern pad, but the property was marketed as a teardown. We know nothing else about Mr. Li, unfortunately. David Parnes and James Harris of The Agency were the listing agents.

17. $25,150,000 — Beverly Park

Canadian construction heir Cody Leibel bought bazillionaire Yife Tien’s flip project in Beverly Park. Reba used to live here, too! Mauricio Umansky and Farrah Aldjufrie of the Agency were the listing agents. Drew Fenton and Justin P. Huchel of Hilton & Hyland were the selling agents.

18. $25,000,000 — Beverly Park

Yet another Beverly Park deal — Kimora Lee Simmons unleashed her phat financial power upon this sprawling, 5+ acre estate in the super-exclusive gated community. Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency repped the sellers, the Harouche family of Beverly Hills.

19. $24,500,000 — Los Feliz

Headline hogger Angelina Jolie stunned even the most jaded real estate watchers when she utterly demolished the Los Feliz real estate record by paying the full asking price for the legendary Cecil B. DeMille estate. Brett Lawyer and Rayni Williams of Hilton & Hyland were on the listing side.

20. $24,151,000 — Malibu

Bratz dolls founder Isaac Larian plunked down over $24 million for a truly repulsive Frank Gehry creation on (not-)Broad Beach. Yolanda prays Mr. Larian has some sense and demolishes this monstrosity. Westside Estate Agency’s Kurt Rappaport was the listing agent; Brant Didden of 4 Malibu Real Estate took the selling side.

21. $24,000,000 — Hollywood Hills

Thai billionaire Chanchai Ruayrengruang paid Indonesian businessman Aburizal Bakrie $24 million for this striking estate that is situated walking distance from the Sunset Strip.

22. $22,000,000 — Pacific Palisades

Low-profile private equity pasha Matt Barrett and his wife Kathy upgraded from Brentwood to the Riviera with this purchase. Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency was the listing agent. Richard Stearns of Partner’s Trust Brentwood represented the Barretts.

23. $21,000,000 — Manhattan Beach

Sketchers heiress Jennifer Greenberg Messer and/or one or more of her brothers broke the Manhattan Beach record with this large but architecturally uninspiring residence. Victoria Beck of Re/Max was on the listing side, Robert Schumann of Real Estate West was on both ends.

24. $20,400,000 — Beverly Hills

Convicted felon Victor Noval grabbed this supremely-located mini-estate from Greek heir Alki David. Marc Noah of Sotheby’s International Realty had both ends of the transaction.

25. $20,100,000 — Beverly Hills

Local businessman Jack Farshi paid a Saudi prince more than $20 million for this just-north-of-Sunset fixer. The prince lost more than $3 million dollars on the deal, bless his heart. Florence Mattar and Mitra Sisatar, both of Coldwell Banker, had the listing and selling sides, respectively.

26. $20,000,000 — Malibu

After selling their Point Dume teardown to Alexandra von Furstenberg for a hefty $16 million, real estate investors Gary & Gilena Simons high-tailed it out to Malibu Road. Sandro Dazzan and Irene Dazzan-Palmer of Coldwell Banker were the listing agents.

27. $20,000,000 — Beverly Hills

Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist Alan Salzman is apparently charting some new territory in Southern California: he bought a fully renovated mini-mansion in perhaps the best part of Beverly Hills from hedge funder Jon Burton.

28. $20,000,000 — Century City

Friends royalty-rich actor Matthew Perry apparently wants to live like an aging billionaire widow. In one of the biggest condo sales ever recorded in LA, Mr. Perry snagged a full floor at The Century. It’s not the most expensive pad at the building, though, Vicki Walters’ $22.5 million full floor and Candy Spelling’s $34.8 million duplex penthouse put it to shame. Ah, well.

Bachir Oueida at Douglas Elliman repped The Century and Greg Holcomb of Partner’s Trust Beverly Hills had Perry’s end of the deal.

While that other famous (and famously expensive) Southern California seaside community of Malibu has been celebrating a banner sales year — two of the three biggest sales ever recorded in the last six months, not to mention multiple other $30M+ transactions — action down in the OC’s toniest communities (Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and Dana Point) has been conspicuously muted by comparison.

Although the OC record was bludgeoned last year with the $45 million sale of the Twin Points estate to LA-based billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, only two transactions of $20 million+ have been recorded in the area so far in 2017. The first was the $22 million hand-off of a newly-built 12,000+ square foot mansion in a guard-gated Newport Coast enclave to South African billionaire Eric Samson. The other transfer was also recorded in the amount of $22 million, in the also guard-gated enclave of Irvine Cove in Laguna Beach. The buyer of that nearly-7,000-square-foot house was a famous octogenarian widower named Ed Thorp.

But lo, kiddies, thunder breaks over yonder hills. Yolanda happens to know from a little birdie that there was an unprecedented $55,000,000 sale very quietly recorded in the Corona del Mar area of Newport Beach just days ago. That’s right — fifty-five million bucks, an amount that easily blows away every other price recorded for a home down behind the dreaded Orange Curtain.

There’s an asterisk that goes along with this sale, however. The $55 million was given in exchange for a compound that includes two separate but contiguous properties with two different addresses and APNs. If we’re being technical, the larger property went for $35 million and the smaller house went for $20 million. But given that both homes were sold by the same sellers to the same buyers and both transactions were recorded on the same day, we’re calling it what it is: a $55 million compound purchase.

Y’all may be surprised to learn that the preposterously pricey compound in question is actually not oceanfront. Nor does it have any sort of direct beach access. But the blufftop spread does have a lot of land (about 3.3 acres), some badass views, and a rich, unique history that dates back to the dawn of Orange County.

Since the 1930s, the cliff-top compound has served the summertime home of the Irvine family, the wealthy ranchers who once owned a massive swathe of  what is the modern-day Orange County.

At some point in more recent times, however, the 4.4-ish acre spread was subdivided into three different mini-estates. Though there were attempts to sell them over the years, two of the homes remained in the Irvine family up until last week, when they sold for the combined $55 million.

The third and largest house, however, was sold off way back in 2008 for a whipping $27,100,000. The buyer — who still owns the property nearly a decade later — was a mysteriously-named corporate entity that has links to a Canada-based energy executive named Ray Chyc. That home is known as the “Hale O Pau Hana House” and was built by family member Myford Irvine in 1958. Old marketing materials show that the rambling, vaguely triangular structure weighs in at a mega-mansion-sized 20,000-square-feet of living space.

But we digress. The other two properties eventually came to be owned by Nita Irvine Wheeler Connelly, the great-granddaughter of James Irvine. Our Mrs. Irvine Wheeler Connelly, God rest her soul, passed on to the other side earlier this year, and it appears that her widower John Connelly is the fellow who just took in the $55 million paycheck.

One of the homes has a tennis court and an indoor pool and a house with 4,207-square-feet of living space; the other (photos below) sports an outdoor pool and walls of glass and a 7,113-square-foot single-story sprawler.

If you are a aficionado of trashy reality TV and think this house looks somewhat familiar, your eyes don’t lie. This is the very same house that was until recently being leased to Real Housewives of Orange County “star” Shannon Beador and her cheatin’ and beatin’ hubby David. Our Mrs. Beador — in true Bravolebrity fashion — even hired “designer” drama queen Jeff Lewis to gussy the ol’ gurl up during her temporary stay.

Yes, kiddies, even these classy old money estates can’t escape the Real Housewives scourge. Is nothing damn sacred?!

By now, however, y’all are probably wondering who can afford to buy such an estate. Well, Yolanda will tell you. We are feeling generous today, after all. The house was sold to a generically-named LLC with a Phoenix (Arizona) address, but your gurl just happens to know that the big-bucks buyers are a low-profile guy from Kansas named Larry Van Tuyl and his longtime wifey Patty. Bless their hearts, the Van Tuyls became billionaires just a few years back when they sold their collection of automobile dealerships to none other than Warren Buffett for a mind-bending 4.1 billion bucks.

Our research indicates that the deliberately low-profile Mr. & Mrs. Van Tuyl’s main residence lies in the swanky desert community of Paradise Valley, Arizona. Their 13,000+ square-foot mansion is within walking distance of many other bajillionaire-owned homes like those owned by Bruce Halle and Bennett Dorrance.

Oh, and just around the corner from the Van Tuyls’ Paradise Valley digs is an epic compound of five — yes, five — adjacent mansions that all belong to one of the richest men in the world, Wal-Mart heir S. Robson “Rob” Walton. But we digress…

Mr. Van Tuyl is also know to be the owner of an insane $125 million superyacht that has been christened “Vanish”. For more info on that floating 217-foot mansion, go here.

Although our intel says it has not yet happened, Yolanda can only assume that Mr. & Mrs. Van Tuyl are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to acquire the missing link to their Corona del Mar compound property. We’re talkin’ about that $27 million third house, the final piece of their estate trifecta. This will effectively complete their compound and reunite the broken pieces of the Irvine estate once and for all — or for a few years, at least.

For any of you who concerned it might not happen, never fear. Mr. & Mrs. Van Tuyl will make it happen. Things have a way of falling into place when you have time, patience, and all the money in the world.

EDIT: We now see that the busy peeps at the OC Register already wrote about this transaction yesterday, though they did not identify the buyer. But Yolanda will give credit where credit is due. (We swear we didn’t see that post until now, y’all!)

Listing agent: Rob Giem, Compass
Larry & Pat Van Tuyl’s agent: Kim Walker, Surterre Properties

To most folks, spending $10 million on a house seems like an unfathomable extravagance, the kind reserved for lottery winners and nouveau riche celebrities. But in reality, it’s a different kind of group altogether that (generally) buys those homes. Most folks spending eight figures on a property are successful businesspeople who are looking to invest and don’t blink twice at the price — after all, they usually already have three or four other homes that are worth just as much.

Take Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos, who was recently (and briefly) listed as the world’s richest person. Although he lives a relatively frugal lifestyle in comparison to his unfathomable $84+ billion net worth, he still spends like — well, a billionaire.

Astute real estate watchers may recall that almost exactly a decade ago, Mr. & Mrs. Bezos laid out $24,500,000 for a major (and majorly gorgeous) estate located in what is often considered to be the best neighborhood pocket of Beverly Hills. Homes in this area have a decidedly low turnover rate, so it was big news when Mr. Bezos decided to buy his privately situated compound.

Well, Yolanda has heard that Mr. Bezos apparently spends a significant amount of time in LA. And given that his current net worth is nearly 20 times more than what it was back in 2007, Mr. Bezos’s place is apparently no longer private enough for him, or maybe he just needs additional space for more staff and/or security. Or maybe he just wants to expand his compound because he can? Hmmm. In any case, Mr. Bezos just coughed up (through a blind trust) another $12,900,000 for his next-door neighbor’s house.

The deal was done completely off-market, of course. Unfortunately, that means Yolanda has no listing photos to share with y’all. But we do know that the property spans .49-acres and the existing structure measures a roomy 4,568-square-feet with 4 beds and 6 baths. The house — which is unassuming to the point of being dreary — was originally built in 1956 in a typical mid-century single-story ranch style.

Although the house sits on a knoll above the street, is double-gated for privacy, and sits behind a riotous collection of mis-matched hedges, the whole exterior/yard looks in dire need of editing/updating, at the very least. Yolanda is not sure what plans Mr. Bezos has for the property, but rest assured y’all he will never spend a night in this place. Unless he’s some sort of billionaire masochist. Oh, wait…

Yolanda does not know the full extent of Mr. Bezos’s residential real estate holdings — we’re not VIP enough for that — but we do know he has at least three super-luxe compounds. The first is, of course, the Bezos family’s main residence in swanky Medina, Washington, just outside of Seattle.

The gated, high-hedged, and heavily fortified spread lies on well over 5 acres of waterfront property along Medina’s super-posh Evergreen Point Road, the very same street where Bill Gates’s world-famous compound is also located.

It would seem that Mr. Bezos has kept a remarkably tight lid on many of the features of his Washington home, but Yolanda can tell it has multiple meandering structures. And thanks to a $28 million building permit that was issued and completed several years back, we know the estate now contains a colossal total of 29,000-square-feet of living space.

Mr. Bezos also keeps a combined three-unit “mansion in the sky” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which he purchased way back in 1999 (in a gutted state) from record exec Tommy Mottola for about $7.65 million. Located on Central Park West (on the Upper West Side) in a 1930s Art Deco-style building known as The Century, the high-floor spread weighs in at 10,000-square-feet of living space, which is Goliath-sized for NYC.

Perhaps the most interesting property in Mr. Bezos’s portfolio, however, is his epic (and historic) compound in Washington D.C. In October 2016, Mr. Bezos steamrolled his way into politics city with the $23,000,000 purchase of the former Textile Museum, which is actually two side-by-side mansions and reportedly the largest residential compound in the city.

Well, the largest other than President Trump’s house, of course.

The house y’all see on the left was built back in the day (1915) by a guy named George Hewitt Myers and designed by Jefferson Memorial architect John Russell Pope. Sometime in the 1920s, Mr. Myers made a classic baller-style move and snatched up the even larger mansion immediately next door, which was designed by architect Waddy Butler Wood. Our Mr. Myers needed a place to store his extensive textile collection, you see, and apparently found his own home far too cramped.

Mr. Bezos reportedly plans to combine the 27,000-square-foot compound (no doubt at considerable expense) into one colossal mega-mansion. What better way to show his richie-rich political star neighbors who the real boss is, right?

Some of the surrounding are home to a whole slew of foreign embassies, not to mention the homes of Barack and Michelle Obama and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Most important to Yolanda, however, is the future of the Bezos famiy’s Beverly Hills compound, which now spans 2.52 acres, encompasses more than 16,000-square-feet of living space and cost a whopping $37,400,000. Will the somewhat eccentric tech billionaire turn it into a exclusive shipping facility for Amazon packages heading to the 90210?

We’re sure his neighbors — the closest of whom include Ellen DeGeneres, Casey Wasserman, and Mexican investor Isaac Oberfeld — will appreciate that. Or will they?

He may be pushing 90 years old, but apparel tycoon turned billionaire film producer and hardcore real estate baller Sidney Kimmel apparently wants a new house. And Yolanda hears from a little birdie that he has already closed on his latest dream residence: a deceptively modest-lookin’ contemporary spec build in prime Beverly Hills.

Modest is a relative term here, of course, and the only viewpoint that can be called that is from the street looking inward. Yolanda is not thrilled with the front-facing three-car garage and the grotesquely tall wart-like window hovering above it in the right corner. For $25 million (actually, $24,900,000), we don’t want none of that mess. You hear?

But the rest of the property is generally quite spectacular, even if the color scheme errs a bit too far on the side of banal beige for Yolanda’s persnickety personal tastes.

Naturally, the .68-acre lot is heavily secured behind gates and protected by an elaborate security system. A pathway of concrete steps leads to the wooden front door, which swings inward to reveal a long hallway flaunting its limestone (?) floors and a chunky columns. There is a high-ceilinged living room with three sets of French doors leading out to the back patio, and a snazzy glass wine “cellar”.

Yolanda loves herself a good contemporary kitchen, but this one leaves us feeling a bit blue. All the appliances and amenities are top-notch, of course, but don’t it just look a bit too 80s? Maybe it’s the color scheme.

The Subaru-sized center island that is carved entirely out of one hunk of marble is certainly good for a wow, but the ever-practical Yolanda wonders if it has much (if any) functionality beyond that other than another tabletop and a place to bang one’s knees. Ouch.

Elsewhere there is a vaguely gothic step-up formal dining room, a sizable living room with walls of glass overlooking the pool, and a movie theater that’s really more of a “movie room”.

The approximately 12,000-square-foot mansion has 6 becdrooms and 8 bathrooms, all of which appear to have been yanked out of a Ritz-Carlton.

The backyard features neatly-trimmed greenery and substantial patio space for hosting large gatherings.

Although the pool isn’t as big as y’all might expect for a $25 million house, how much swimming is a 90-year-old guy really going to do?

Anyway, this house is close enough to the Beverly Hills Hotel that Mr. Kimmel could easily scoot his wheelchair on over be chauffeured to the front door in his Mercedes-Maybach within a few seconds.

Some of Mr. Kimmel’s nearest new neighbors include longtime local heavy hitters like Paul Marciano, Benjamin Nazarian, and even Neil Diamond. And don’t forget, multi-billionaire hedgehog Steve Cohen is almost directly across the street. Side note: Yolanda heard that Mr. Cohen purchased his $30 million Beverly Hills mansion because his kids attend USC and he needed a place to stay when visiting them, like on parents’ weekend and such. But we digress yet again!

A little background: Mr. Kimmel is the founder of the Jones Apparel Group, which was sold for $1.2 billion back in 2014. He currently makes do with a net worth of $1.32 billion, per Forbes. And though he’s just a few months shy of becoming a nonagenarian, Mr. Kimmel shows no signs of fatigue or retirement. His production company just merged with Hong Kong-based Ivanhoe Pictures to create lots more films!

Mr. Kimmel’s Beverly Hills mansion was built (on spec, as previously mentioned) by fellow billionaire Alec Gores. Our Mr. Gores made his money through leveraged buyouts but also dabbles in real estate investment. In addition to his main residences — a village-like mansion up in Beverly Park and an oceanfront house in Malibu — he recently paid $16,500,000 for a Beverly Hills teardown. Yolanda imagines he will build something glitzy and immodestly proportioned on this soon-to-be-vacant lot. And maybe he will move into the new build with his new third wife?

(Oops, another digression.)

Yolanda believes that Mr. Kimmel’s current main residence is his idiosyncratic blufftop compound in Malibu’s Point Dume neighborhood. Our Mr. Kimmel purchased the two-parcel property in 2007 from Alexis Carson, the widow of the late, great talk show host Johnny Carson. We don’t know much about the house, other than it sits on 2+ heavily wooded acres and spans 7,083-square-feet of living space inside a two-story, triangular-shaped structure.

Although the 2007 purchase price was (at the time of the sale) widely reported to be as much as $40 million, property records show the actual recorded transfer value was “just” $27,067,500.

In April 2008, almost exactly a year after acquiring his new Malibu digs, Mr. Kimmel sold his mega-estate in Palm Beach for a then-record $77,500,000 — a brain-frying amount that Yolanda still has trouble fathoming. ($77.5 million, really? In Florida?!?! But we digress…) That enormous sum gets you a 32,316-square-foot mega-mansion designed by acclaimed architect Thierry Despont.

The buyer of Mr. Kimmel’s fantastically expensive Palm Beach home was a guy named John L. Thornton, who is the former president of investment bank Goldman Sachs and is currently an adjunct professor. As an aside, Mr. Thornton isn’t so popular with at least one of his Palm Beach neighbors. Lotta drama out there in Florida, apparently. Barking dogs, contentious tennis courts, lawsuits a-flyin’, oh my!

But there we go digressing again…

Alec Gores’ agents: Ryan Davis, Compass; Tiffany Martin, Christine Martin, Samira Gores, The Agency
Sidney Kimmel’s agent: Linda May, Hilton & Hyland

When Yolanda’s longtime friend Vlad the Revealer at Celebrity Address Aerial contacted us to inquire about a supremely-located Pacific Palisades property that had just sold for a fat $9,300,000 to a mysterious blind trust, we didn’t think it would be difficult to suss out the buyer’s true identity. After all, Yolanda is quite familiar with this particular neighborhood and most secrets out here don’t stay secrets for long. People talk. That’s just the way it is.

But to our surprise, it was quite difficult to pin a name to the purchase. The new owner did a real bang-up job of covering their tracks.

Eventually, however, Yolanda got it sorted out. The richie-rich buyer, who took title under something called “The Carter Trust” (an ode to Beyonce and Jay-Z? Hmmm…) is a fellow named Sam Harris and his wife Annaka Gorton Harris.

Yolanda is admittedly rather uncultured, kiddies, so we don’t mind telling y’all that we’d never before heard of Mr. Harris. Or of Mrs. Gorton Harris, for that matter. But it turns out they — he in particular, actually — are quite famous.

Our Mr. Harris, you see, is a New York Times-bestselling author, a philosopher, and a neuroscientist. He is also considered one of the “Four Horsemen” of the “New Atheist” movement. and He also has quite the interesting life story.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mr. Harris grew up in a very wealthy family — he is the son of Golden Girls show creator Susan Harris, after all. He experimented with drugs in his teens and 20s, enrolled in Stanford University but took an 11-year sabbatical to travel to India, where he meditated and did a lot of acid, we gather.

Eventually Mr. Harris would return to Stanford, where he graduated with a philosophy degree in 2000. He would go on to receive a Ph.D in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 from UCLA. And in the past 15 years he has established himself as one of the world’s foremost critics of religion. He has appeared on numerous television shows, has over 900,000 followers on Twitter, and has a highly-popular podcast to which paid subscriptions are required. He is also an author of multiple bestselling books on organized religion, the best-known of which is perhaps “The End of Faith“, which spent more than half a year on the NYT bestsellers list.

Mr. Harris is famously critical of religions — particularly of Islam, which he has called “the motherlode of bad ideas“. He frequently attacks the political Left for its defense of Islam and forgiveness of what he calls its “inherent extremism”. Nonetheless, he himself is also a political liberal and as such has been a vocal opponent of Donald Trump’s presidency.

But on to the real estate. The new Harris residence in Pacific Palisades lies in what is perhaps the best section of the hoity-toity “Riviera” neighborhood, on San Onofre Drive.

Directly below the new Harris estate is a huge spec-mansion that was built by Paul McClean of McClean Design and which sold for a record-obliterating $32,500,000 last year to Richard & Jackie Hollander. Just two houses away from Mr. Harris’s new pad is the $26,000,000 main residence of Tom Hanks, and a little further down the same street is another spec-house that was built on the former site of the Ronald Reagan estate and sold for $22,000,000 to Matt & Kathy Barrett.

Records reveal that Mr. & Mrs. Harris must have wanted this .47-acre hilltop property pretty badly, because the $9,300,000 they paid was a full $305,000 more than the asking price. Let’s see what they got for that very A-list sum, shall we?

Admittedly, the current structure — a wood-and-glass edifice built in 1949 that has been in the same family for decades — is decidedly dated and ripe for razing, but at the same time it is kinda cool. We love those wood floors, the tile floors, and the ground-to-ceiling windows, and we adore that backyard tree, which is mature yet angled just right that it does not impede the spectacular views, which stretch to the Pacific and (on a clear day!) Catalina Island.

But all of that matters little because this house — and its surrounding landscape — is not long for this world, we believe. The views and lot size alone were probably worth the $9.3 million pricetag.

Mr. Harris has been historically reluctant to divulge personal details, including refusing to say where he currently lives. But now that we’re doing a story about him, Yolanda will tell y’all because we’re a nosy beotch like that. Plus, Mr. Harris is a celebrity, and this sort of scrutiny comes with the territory. Capiche, Mr. Harris?

Our boy (and his wife, naturally) currently reside right under our very noses, in a very good area of east Santa Monica that practically borders Brentwood. And it’s an easy walk to one of Yolanda’s favorite LA places, the Brentwood Country Mart.

Property records reveal that Mr. & Mrs. Harris forked out an even-steven $5,000,000 (via blind trust) for the spec-built contemporary crib way back in 2008. The residence (it’s known as the “Marguerita House” or the “Wall House”, depending on where you look online) sits on a snug .2-acre corner lot. Despite this, the property is exceedingly private, mostly hidden behind a towering row of bamboo hedges and other assorted flora. Tax records show the house weighs in at 7,104-square-feet with 5 beds and 7 baths. The structure was built by modern-minded architect Aaron Neubert and features lots of rich wood, glass, and a floating staircase.

One of Mr. Harris’s nearest neighbors is our gal Tina Trahan. And for lots more pictures (inside and out) of the Harris family home in Santa Monica, click here or here.

Meanwhile, Mr. Harris’s mama Susan and her wealthy hubby Paul Junger Witt currently reside nearby in the Mandeville Canyon area of Brentwood — more specifically, in a 10,000-square-foot mansion in the guard-gated Brentwood Country Estates enclave. Some of their nearest neighbors include Dr. Dre and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But we digress…

One more thing, kiddies. There has been some debate (on Reddit, of all places) about how rich Mr. Harris actually is. Some folks think he’s not even a millionaire. Others swear by the Celebrity Net Worth website, which estimates his current fortune at $2 million. That, however, is obviously a gross underestimation, given that he has nearly $15 million in luxury real estate (and will likely spend millions more constructing a new Palisades mansion).

Listen kids, we don’t know exactly how rich Mr. Harris is, but this dude is loaded. And that’s no mythical belief of ours, that’s a scientific fact backed up by hard, cold, cash evidence.

Listing agent: Anthony Marguleas, Amalfi Estates
Sam Harris’s agent: Peter Turman, Coldwell Banker

As we have told y’all before, Yolanda has been in this “business” a very long time, kiddies. Thus we should have seen — or at least suspected — what was going on with this particular property a long time ago. But idiots that we are, we overlooked all the obvious signals.

When we say “this” property, we’re referring to the 2.63-acre former Mandeville Canyon estate of TV producer extraordinaire Fred Silverman, which (a few months back) sold for a massive sum to a mysterious LLC. We searched high and low for the buyer, but we couldn’t figure it out for the gosh-darn longest time. Were they shady foreigners? A hedge fund guru from NYC? Some secretive entrepreneur?

Turns out Yolanda should have been looking right under our very nose. Right next door, in fact. Because we happen to know (finally!) that the new owner is mega-rich investor (and longtime Mandeville Canyon resident) Mark Attanasio.

Mr. Attanasio is, of course, the co-founder of Crescent Capital Group, a multi-billion dollar asset management firm headquartered in LA. But he is much better-known to the general public, however, for his ownership of the Milwaukee Brewers major-league baseball team. Funny how those things go.

But we digress. The interesting thing about this purchase, y’all, is the Attanasio estate is already one of the biggest in Brentwood, with 3.49 acres of land and about 22,000-square-feet of living space spread out over at least five or six structures. Make no mistake, that’s massive.

With the addition of the Silverman land, however, the Attanasio estate has now ballooned to become one of the very largest on all of the Westside. We’re talking 6+ acres of land on 6 parcels and 8 or 9 structures with over 33,000-square-feet of living space and dozens of bedrooms and bathrooms. Damn! The poor Attanasio family maid is gonna have to call in reinforcements, y’all.

The Silverman estate was grandiosely referred to in listing materials as “the most important compound on the Westside”, a statement so pretentious and ridiculous that it boggles the jaded Yolanda’s mind. Seriously, we don’t mean to be rude, but how the heck can you call this thing “most important” when the Attanasio estate right next door is way bigger already? Most important?! What does that even mean? Ugh.

Sorry, kiddies. Yolanda is a tad grouchy today because the red Cadillac is back in the shop. Some fool rammed the ol’ gurl because we turned without using our turn signal. Then he had the nerve to start bitching about us being a bad driver! Puh-lease, hunny. Get real — this is LA. ‘the hell is a turn signal?

People these days!

Anyway, the Silverman compound is certainly pretty. There is a swimming pool, a proper north/south tennis court, lush lawns, an enormous (and fully stocked!) koi pond, formal gardens, meandering pathways, and parking space for dozens of vehicles. As of today, the compound’s three structures remain standing. We rather imagine Mr. Attanasio will leave this property as-is and use it for housing guests, staff, or as overflow parking for events at his 13,000+ square foot main house.

For some reason, the MLS shows a sale price of $17,765,000 but public records clearly show the recorded amount was actually $16,688,500. We can’t explain the discrepancy, but we’re going with the recorded price on this one. Regardless, Yolanda would estimate the entire Attanasio spread — including the Silverman compound — is probably worth at least $50 million or so.

Buckle your safety belts, however, because this is hardly Mr. Attanasio’s only compound. We don’t know how rich this guy is, but based on the real estate he’s gotta be a billionaire or very close to it.

Over on Malibu’s ironically-named Broad Beach, Mr. Attanasio owns not one but two separate oceanfront spreads, into which he has sunk (per property records and permits) at least 50 million bucks.

The first compound is a two-parcel spread (with a detached garage/guest house and full-size sport court!) that sits directly between two $20 million mansions, one owned by Friends creator Marta Kauffman and the other by multi-billionaire businessman Edward Roski.

A bit further down the beach, however, is an even larger compound also owned by Mr. Attanasio. This two-house property is actually three contiguous lots (one of them vacant) totaling about an acre of land. There are two swimming pools and what appears to be a small palm tree forest. Yolanda hopes there is at least one hammock hiding in that there forest. Ahhh, paradise.

The larger house and the adjacent vacant lot, y’all may be interested to know, were both bought by Mr. Attanasio from none other than trouble-making (and baby-making) actor/real estate baller Mel Gibson.

Why on earth Mr. Attanasio wants or needs two fiendishly expensive compounds on the same beach is unknown to Yolanda, but property records are clear that he has owned both for the last decade or so. And one of the houses is available for sale right now, so there’s that.

In addition to his excessive LA real estate, Mr. Attanasio also has a multi-million dollar duplex penthouse in Milwaukee, naturally. Cool. But now we’re back to praying that our Caddy survives to see another Sunset Boulevard cruise.

Listing and selling agents: Stephen Shapiro & Richard Ehrlich, Westside Estate Agency

Want to know a secret, kiddies? Well, pretend to give a care for a minute and guess what Yolanda’s most-read post of 2017 (so far) was. Go on, you know you want to.

Our story about Sandra Bullock? How about Kylie Jenner? Maybe Jeremy Piven? Nope. Nope. Nope. None of the above. The post that has received the most clicks thus far was a wee little tale about a woman named Alexandra Court.

This is a bit surprising because Ms. Court is not a conventional “celebrity” at all. She is, however, a fairly major player in the financial services industry. And not long after Yolanda wrote about her for the first time, she made it onto the front page of the illustrious Financial Times, a publication that is far more interesting to Yolanda than even our trusty National Enquirer.

That juicy article detailed the current workplace drama at Ms. Court’s employer, the $290 billion asset manager Guggenheim Partners, and called out her allegedly “close relationship” with Guggenheim’s CEO Mark Walter. You see, Ms. Court — born and raised in South Africa, incidentally — arrived from Europe last year as Guggenheim’s new Global Head of Institutional Distribution. Allegedly emboldened by her “relationship” with Mr. Walter, she made some mass layoffs and sweeping policy changes that did not sit well with Scott Minerd, Guggenheim’s Chief Investment Officer. The resulting drama pitted Mr. Minerd and Mr. Walter squarely against one another and drove (again, allegedly) a whole slew of concerned execs to depart Guggenheim.

For their part, a Guggenheim spokesperson responded to the claims of a “close relationship” between Mr. Walter and Ms. Court with a bizarrely-worded statement that even a Mensa member probably couldn’t decipher. Seriously, a smart ol’ gal like Yolanda can’t make heads or tails out of this jumble of words. Maybe that’s the point? Here’s what the statement said:

“There is no non-business relationship, but if there were it was fully and promptly disclosed to the appropriate parties at Guggenheim in accordance with established processes and procedures, which were then fully implemented, to avoid improper influence or favour.”

Um, okay. ‘The hell does that mean? There was a relationship but no longer — is that it?

But we digress. As y’all may recall, Ms. Court is a very wealthy woman. Last year she paid a very A-list $13,350,000 (in what appears to have been an all-cash deal) through her “1141 Maroney Lane LLC” for a huge house in Pacific Palisades that was built back in the 1930s by Hollywood actress Virginia Bruce.

The stately Traditional/Colonial/Georgian mish-mash pile sprawls across 8,100-square-feet of living space with 7 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. There are lots of nifty features like Calacutta gold marble countertops in the kitchen, formal gardens, a “British pub” with secret staircase, and a koi pond. The house sits very privately down a long gated driveway at the end of a dead-end road.

You might think that a $13+ million mansion on 1.54 acres of land in one of LA’s most expensive neighborhoods would be property enough for a divorced (we think?) mother of two children. But not Ms. Court! Oh no.

Despite the fact that her name has been splattered around the interwebs recently and that she is currently taking a suspicious months-long sabbatical from work, in the midst of all the publicity — our gurl still has money on her mind and her mind on expansion.

A few weeks ago, a much smaller house directly adjacent to Ms. Court’s palatial pad sold in an off-market deal for a hefty $4,635,000. The buyer? A mysterious corporate entity calling itself “1119 Maroney LLC”. Again, Yolanda finds no evidence of a mortgage on this property.

We just happen to know, y’all, that the new owner of the home is none other than our very own Alexandra Court. The seller, records reveal, was another powerful lady in finance: Jessica Bulen, a managing director at J.P. Morgan in LA. Our Ms. Bulen made a killing off this house when she sold to Ms. Court: records show she paid just $2,960,000 for the .34-acre spread only four years ago.

Since the sale was totally off-market, Yolanda has no interior photos or much information to share with y’all. About the only thing we know is that the house spans a roomy 4,303-square-feet of living space with 5 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms. There is a three car garage, but there does not appear to be a pool and the backyard space seems limited.

So why would Ms. Court buy this property? Perhaps to act as a buffer to her already-secure homestead. Or maybe she’s hiring a full-time security team and will station them here. Possibly a guest house?

Or could it be that Ms. Court is moving her live-in nanny/house manager/assistant Fiona Wright into this house? Yolanda happens to know that Ms. Wright currently resides in the main house, but maybe Ms. Court needs more space to herself.

Ms. Court’s Pacific Palisades estate now spans a hefty 1.88 acres with more than 12,000-square-feet of living space. Plus there’s 12 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms — enough for a whole busload of folks.

Records reveal that Ms. Court has spent a whopping total of $17,985,000 on her Palisades compound, an amount that is fast approaching billionaire territory. For only a few million bucks more, y’all, Ms. Court could be living like a queen up in Beverly Park. And if the $18 million that Ms. Court has spent was all in cash, as Yolanda suspects, well now. That’s just a shit-ton of moolah!

But really! Where does all this money come from?

Hmmm. Yolanda is not sure. Our Ms. Court is rich and important, no doubt, but $18 million bucks on a luxury compound of this size, plus all the maintenance required? That takes some serious financial firepower!

Could it be that Ms. Court’s (alleged!) “close relationship” with Mr. Walter has contributed to her being richer than most of us could even fathom? Of course it could! Anything is possible — remember that, y’all.

Also remember, kiddies, that money flows like water for Mr. Walter. Don’t forget that he just spent a record-busting $85,000,000 to acquire David Geffen’s compound on Malibu’s Carbon Beach.

But at what cost has this wealth come? Has Ms. Court abandoned her prestigious, seriously impressive role as one of the most powerful women in global finance to become the Palisades’ local lady billionaire? Yolanda rather wonders if she will ever return to Guggenheim after her sabbatical, or if the negative publicity and tension will necessitate her being released permanently to mundane civilian life.

Not that being the Palisades’ billionaire lady resident is a bad life to lead, of course.

But truthfully, there are dozens of billionaires in LA. Female billionaires too. Ms. Court is now yet another number, a statistic, just another anonymous rich lady with good hair in this concrete jungle of rich ladies with good hair. And sooner or later, just like the song says, they all will be gone.

That’s not harsh, y’all, that’s just the truth. You know what they say about the truth hurting and all that.

Oh, Ms. Court! What have you done?!

This isn’t really the sort of story Yolanda would normally yakk about, but If y’all live in the area or follow local LA news religiously, you probably already know that the super-wealthy yet low-key and family-friendly Pacific Palisades neighborhood recently got shook. A few days back, you see, an (allegedly) alcohol-fueled gunfight went down — the likes of which seem more akin to a situation you’d come across in an Albuquerque trailer park than a $15 million mansion in the Palisades. And it’s all the more interesting because Pacific Palisades is a very wealthy but very lefty-liberal enclave, the kind that shuns guns and violence of any sort.

Heavens to Betsy! Yolanda was gone for the weekend and the neighborhood has already gone to shit!

Anyway, the incident took place in the “Riviera” section of the Palisades, which is the ritziest part of town and certainly one of the most expensive neighborhood pockets in all of LA. The multi-winged Mediterranean mansion in question spans more than 9,302-square-feet with annual property taxes that come to a throat-clenching $176,000. The house was last assessed at a value of more than $14.7 million.

From what we can gather, the violence erupted after a man — the on-again/off-again boyfriend of the Palisades homeowner — stumbled over to her house and a drunken domestic quarrel ensued. The man grabbed a gun that belongs to the homeowner’s mother and began shooting at her. The lady escaped unharmed, luckily, and called security, but the man barricaded himself in the house, necessitating SWAT team reinforcements and tear gas grenades. Anyway, the boyfriend (a WeHo man named Eric Bogart) died of what may have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Yikes!

In an odd coincidence, Yolanda already wrote extensively about this house and its owner just last year — right on this blog. The owner’s name is Tamme Mccauley, and she’s certainly got an interesting life story.

Ms. Mccauley was born in Arkansas to a teenage mother named Brenda Burns and raised mainly in Indiana. She grew up in poverty — her mama worked a variety of odd jobs to make ends meet, at one point employed as the cigarette girl in a local hotel.

You might wonder how an unemployed Indiana gal raised in these circumstances came to own a humongous house in Pacific Palisades, right? And since we’re feeling today, Yolanda will tell y’all.

At some point in her late childhood, Ms. Mccauley’s fortunes rapidly changed when her mama married billionaire shopping mall magnate Melvin Simon, who was (until his 2009 death) the co-owner with his brother of the Indiana Pacers professional basketball team.

As an adult, Ms. Mccauley was officially adopted by Mr. Simon. And, well, the rest is history. Though long based in Indianapolis, the Simon clan relocated to Los Angeles some years back. Records show that our Ms. Mccauley paid a very A-list $12,500,000 for her Pacific Palisades mansion way back in 2005. In the 12 years since, Yolanda would bet that the house has appreciated by several million dollars.

Anyway, y’all should know that real estate baller Bren Simon (the former Brenda Burns and Ms. Mccauley’s mama) done sold her Bel Air mega-mansion for almost $35 million last year only to “downsize” to a $10 million Santa Monica house located on what is probably the city’s best residential street.

Ms. Mccauley also has a connection to Hollywood — her daughter Tasha is the wife of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That makes Ms. Mccauley the grandma of Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s son, of course.

Back in Pac Pal, some of Ms. Mccauley’s nearest neighbors are Gregory Milken (son of billionaire Michael Milken) and Matt & Kathy Barrett (who paid $22 million for the former Ronald Reagan estate). Also within walking distance are the homes of Tom Hanks, Jennifer Garner, Brooke Shields, Sam Harris, JJ Abrams, and many more celebs.

Yolanda is glad Ms. Mccauley remains safe and sound. We advise her to exercise caution in picking boyfriends in the future. Yolanda herself exercised bad judgment when we married our second ex-husband George, a fellow with a lot of money but philandering ways. And even worse, the old bastard was a cheapskate! How egregious is that!

But we digress…

Yolanda thought we’d do something a wee bit different today. We realize that we pay the Westside of LA entirely too much attention up in this here blog. It’s not okay that we neglect other areas, other areas like the wilderness that is the San Fernando Valley.

Yeah, the only time we chat about the Valley is to occasionally toss a snarky comment its way now and again. Come on, the Valley is hot! It needs all the shade we can give — get it?!

But that’s unfair. There are many expensive neighborhoods out there. Who knows why, but there are! Probably the most prestigious (and pricey) of all of them is Hidden Hills, which sits way out in the boondocks, dangerously close to Ventura County. But it sports the Kardashians and mega-mansions that routinely sell for over 10 million bucks, so there’s that. Hidden Hills is best known for its proliferation of celebrity residents, particularly those from the music and professional sports industries.

So this week we’re gonna atone for our neglect — Yolanda will try to write about a Hidden Hills house every day of this week! It’s gonna be tough, but we are down to grin and bear it for y’all.

Last summer, a humongous white elephant of a Hidden Hills mansion finally transferred for $7,400,000 after an eternity on the market. When we say an eternity, Yolanda means it. This place was on the market essentially non-stop since September 2006! That’s a full 10 years, kiddies.

Come to think of it, Yolanda doesn’t know of any other house that was for sale quite as long as this place. Just recall: 10 years ago, George W. Bush was still our president, True Religion jeans were still in style, and Paris Hilton was still famous.

Oooh! Ouch. Did we say that out loud?

As they say in real estate — every ass has a saddle. Eventually, a mysterious corporate entity came and paid the aforementioned $7.4 million. Records show that this LLC leads down a dead-end road, to a legal address in Missouri (?!) of all places.

So who could the buyer be? It took Yolanda eons to figure it out, but finally we know. It’s a 6’10” (or 6’9″, depending on where you look) Ferrari-driving guy named Paul George.

If you’re reading this and you just stumbled across this here blog, you probably already know who Mr. George is. But as the regulars all know, Yolanda is a bit ignorant when it comes to the world of professional sports. So we had no idea, but it turns out he’s a much-decorated and very popular (5.4 million Instagram followers and counting!) pro basketball player who has spent most of his career playing for the Indiana Pacers but currently makes his professional home with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Mr. George originally hails from Southern California — the Antelope Valley, to be precise. So that could explain why he’s eager to set down some roots out here.

The 15,973-square-foot colossus was built in 1989 and contains a total of 7 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. While we love the mature sycamore trees and rolling lawns in the front yard, Yolanda is not fond of the building itself, which has a pitched roof and an arched entryway that looks a bit too much like a suburban house of worship or a small town’s city hall than a luxurious Hidden Hills mega-mansion.

Like a good 80s mullet, the house drops down party-style to two full floors out back. There’s a full-size basketball court and plenty of room for entertaining, although the actual yard seems a bit smaller than one might imagine for 1.44 acres. Blame that on the enormous proportions of the house itself.

“Grandly scaled” would be how Yolanda would describe the interior spaces. The centerpiece of the home, naturally, is the airplane hangar-like 4,000-square-foot great room with its walls of glass, acres of book-matched limestone flooring, and views out over the neighboring hills of Calabasas.

Other spaces include a brand-new kitchen that still manages to look somewhat dated (maybe it’s those hideous bar stools) and an adjoining formal dining room with a table that can easily seat 12.

All the usual suburban mcmansion creature comforts can be found in this place: a game room/lounge, a wood-paneled library, and a home theater.

Out back there views galore and shade from the hot San Fernando Valley sun under the covered loggias. Naturally — in addition to the basketball court and pool — there’s an outdoor kitchen and even a wooden kid’s playhouse that may or may not be built-in. In any case, we’re sure Mr. George will appreciate this feature — he and his ex-stripper baby mama Daniela Rajic have one toddler-age daughter and another child on the way. Mazel tov!

Our Mr. George’s new Hidden Hills mansion sits in the “Ashley Ridge” section of Hidden Hills — long the most-coveted area in town — and as such he’s got a whole slew of very rich (and in some cases very famous!) new neighbors. Right next door, for instance, is an enormous estate that was acquired by baseball legend Vin Scully back in 2009 for a whopping $12,400,000.

Also in the “Ashley Ridge” section are the mansions of comedians Russell Peters and Howie Mandel, Nickelodeon emperor Dan Schneider, auto dealership magnate Howard Keyes (Keyes on Van Nuys!), and record producer Rodney Jerkins aka Darkchild.

Now then — tomorrow Yolanda will show y’all another Hidden Hills mansion that more accurately represents what today’s luxury homebuyers are looking for. But for now, we digress.

Listing agents: Marc & Rory Shevin, Berkshire Hathaway HomeService
Paul George’s agent: Geoffrey D. Gasway

Last summer, a brand-spankin’-new Hidden Hills monster mansion sold for a fat $12,100,000. Records are a bit perplexing on this one — they show the property was acquired by an untraceable Zurich, Switzerland-based entity that was originally incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, a notorious offshore tax haven. All of that seems decidedly exotic for a super-suburban Valley area like Hidden Hills, so Yolanda was naturally curious about who the new owner could be.

Luckily for us, Yolanda has a (relatively) new friend who we’ll call Mary Contrary. Our Ms. Contrary happens to be a Hidden Hills resident and a very generous lady. And yes, kiddies, we were able to phone in a favor. So we can tell y’all that the new owners — who have long since moved in — are a very low-profile couple named Eran & Lucie Moas.

Although there’s precious little info about either of them on the interwebs, Yolanda was able to piece together some background details on this (obviously very rich) couple. Mr. Moas is an Israeli citizen who mainly resides in Africa, while Mrs. Moas hails from Cameroon — a French-speaking Central African country nestled due south of Nigeria, north of Gabon, and just west of the Congo.

Yolanda has no idea where Mr. & Mrs. Moas get $12 million for a sprawling Hidden Hills estate, but the Mr. was described in a 2004 article as an “Israeli communications technician”. We also dug up evidence that he was a co-owner of a business called “Skin Cancer Scanning LTD”. And he is also, apparently, a major donor/supporter of great ape conservation efforts in Cameroon.

Anyway, the real reason we wanted to write about this place is because it pretty accurately represents what today’s ultra-rich luxury homebuyer is looking for in a suburban residence, we think. It’s new construction with a contemporary floor plan, is totally done-done-done from floor to roof, and is equipped with just about every gizmo and gadget available.

The main house is undeniably giant, weighing in at a whopping 12,660-square-feet spread out over over two levels. Although described as a “Contemporary Farmhouse” in marketing materials, Yolanda would call it a loose interpretation of an East Coast Traditional mansion with a contemporary West Coast twist. Too long?

A dangerously delicate-looking glass front door swings silently open to an enormous two-story foyer with a particularly striking hardwood floor. Yolanda is not sure what specimen of tree these planks come from, but the developer must’ve decimated an entire grove to build this here house. Just look at it all — the wood has even been applied to certain walls both indoors and out for that oh-so-trendy barnyard vibe! Why, we never.

As one might expect, that kitchen can accommodate a hungry herd of hippos and features two tank-sized center islands: one with a built-in sink and dishwasher, the other with bar stool seating, and both with pricey marble countertops. The formal dining room can easily seat 12 and has an a wall devoted entirely to the all-glass wine cellar/rack.

Elsewhere there’s a gigantic theater with captain’s chairs up front and two couches behind. The downstairs office has a pitched ceiling and moody black (or is it dark blue?) paint on the walls and trim.

Upstairs, the master suite has more of those same hardwood floors, a big fireplace for all those freezing Valley nights (we joke!) and another wall of glass that gives way to a balcony overlooking the backyard. The party-sized glass shower can accommodate several friendly individuals, and the walk-in closet has plenty of space for a clotheshorse owner.

The house has a total of 8 bedrooms and 9 baths, most (or all) of which sport those hardwood floors and marble/glass showers.

Online marketing materials make no secret that this place was built to entertain — there are seven separate covered patios spanning 1,800-square-feet scattered around the house — one of them with a fireplace, TV, and built-in BBQ center. Next to the pool/spa area is an 800-square-foot guest/pool house with living quarters and a kitchen.

Surprisingly, the upward-sloping backyard has no privacy beyond a low-tech white fence, but then again this is a countrified neighborhood without the need for Beverly Hills city-style fortifications. And while there aren’t really many famous folks in this particular Hidden Hills pocket, directly next door to Mr. & Mrs. Moas’s new pad is an even larger 18,000+ square foot whopper of a mega-mansion that is owned by hedge funder Michael Kao and his entertainingly-named wife Holi Kao.

Records show that this is not the first LA residence owned by Mr. and Mrs. Moas. Way back in 2010, they (he, rather) paid $1,575,000 for a Hollywood Hills house situated high above the Sunset Strip. In 2014, that house was sold off for $2,725,000.

Yolanda has found evidence that the Moases also own a luxury apartment in the majorly-expensive One57 building on New York City’s Billionaires’ Row. But due to the sea of mysterious corporate entities that own at that tower, we haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly which unit it is. And not for lack of trying! Que sera, sera…

Listing agents: Marc & Rory Shevin, Berkshire Hathaway HomeService

No Hidden Hills discussion could be complete without mentioning the Kardashians, long the area’s most famous (or infamous, if you prefer) residents. When they’re not busy taking butt selfies or doin’ the daily pap stroll, the krazy K-Klan buys and sells multi-million dollar Valley mansions like normal folks go through laundry detergent. And so, here we are.

Although the transaction has not yet officially closed, Yolanda happens to know that 20-year-old Kylie Jenner will soon sell the smallest of her three — yes, three — Hidden Hills mansions. The sale price will be $5,275,000 — a fat $775,000 more than the $4.5 million that Miss Jenner paid for the 5,154-square-foot confection just over a year ago. That’s all the more impressive because Miss Jenner reportedly never spent a night in this house and it does not appear she made any significant alterations other than some paint and new furniture.

The soon-to-be-new owners, Yolanda also happens to know, are a couple from up north — the San Francisco Bay Area, to be precise. Their names are John & Elia Schiavo. And while you’ve likely never heard of them, y’all have almost assuredly tasted Mr. Schiavo’s money maker at some point in your life. Oops — does that sound wrong? Beg pardon!

What we mean to say is that Mr. Schiavo is the President and CEO of Otis Spunkmeyer, the uber-popular food distribution company most famous for its baked goods. Cookies and muffins, oh my!

Onto the house, which is one of the most private in all of Hidden Hills — it sits down an almost ridiculously long driveway at the end of a little-traveled cul-de-sac. About the only neighbors Mr. Schiavo will have to deal with are the three with whom he shares the driveway. One of them, of course, is Kylie Jenner, who still owns the larger mansion next door (but no longer lives there).

And for a nearly $5.3 million residence, the home’s exterior is unpretentious to the point of being almost too modest. Yolanda wonders if there’s a gold mine or maybe some murder victim’s body buried under this place and the plain-Jane (if pleasant) facade is just to ward off nosey neighborhood Nellies.

The single-story crib was built in 2012 and sports a commodious 5,154-square-feet of living space with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 baths. There are wide-plank hardwood floors and  a stacked-stone fireplace in the airy living room, which also includes a wet bar.

The kitchen has marble and stainless everything, although the center island is a wee bit smaller than we’ve become accustomed to seeing.

The master suite includes a fireplace, a sitting area, and French doors that access the backyard. The master bath is slathered in marble and around the corner is a full-sized walk-in closet. Elsewhere there’s a library/study with baby blue walls and few (if any?) books.

Perhaps the best feature of the sprawling 3.3-acre estate is that it backs up to a huge swathe of open, undeveloped land — there’s something about that rural country feeling that Yolanda loves. Recreational amenities include a pool/spa, cabana w/ fireplace, and an outdoor BBQ set. There are also rolling lawns and even a petite vineyard.

We never thought we’d say this and Kardashian in the same sentence, but the whole place is charming and, well, kinda cute.

Anyway, Mr. & Mrs. Schiavo have their longtime home in Lafayette (CA) up for sale at $2,595,000, and online listings say it is currently in escrow to be sold for an unknown price. Records show that the Schiavos bought the 1994-built mini-mansion on 3.12 for $1,056,500 way back in 1996.

As for Miss Jenner, she still owns the $6,025,000 house directly next to the one she just sold to the Schiavos. But she has long since traded up to a $12,050,000 spec-mansion on a different Hidden Hills street. However, kiddies, she doesn’t actually live there either. Yeah, an unused $12 million, 13,000+ square foot mansion for a gal who just turned 20 years old and can’t even drink legally. Y’all read that right.

We say “unused” because the big Hidden Hills house is currently having renovations done (what renovations does a brand-new spec-mansion need? Who knows). But in any case, nowadays Miss Jenner has been residing far, far away at her rental mansion in the Beverly Hills Post Office area of LA, just off Coldwater Canyon.

Sources say that Lady Kylie — who is currently CEO of her own billion-dollar brand — is paying $125,000 per month (or something equally silly) for the Mediterranean mansion, which sits in a tiny gated community that is more like a gated driveway shared with two other houses, really. There is a tennis court, a putting green, a big pool, and a vineyard. Plus majestic westward views out toward the Pacific.

Interested in Miss Jenner’s rental mansion? Act quick — it’s currently listed for sale at $35,000,000.

Oh to be young, fickle, and filthy rich. We know these Kardashian gurls are frequently derided for being publicity hogs and having “no talent”. Maybe that’s true in the conventional sense. But they mint money like nobody’s business.

And that, kiddies, is a talent that Yolanda would forsake all her other talents to have.

Kylie Jenner’s agents: Tomer & Isidora Fridman, Compass
John Schiavo’s agent: Sharon Staples, Keller Williams

For a 29-year-old lass, international music superstar Rihanna has had more than her fair share of property problems. So it’s not particularly surprising that although she has been a multi-millionaire since her teenage years, our gurl has only ever owned one U.S. home, or at least that was Yolanda’s understanding before today. Anyway, that’s in stark contrast to most of her contemporaries — folks like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and (oh, hell) the Kardashians — who go through eight-figure homes as easily as all those DTLA taco trucks unload their wares on Tuesdays.

Way back in 2009 — at the very height of the recession –Rihanna paid a fat $6,900,000 for a rather hideous house located on a flag lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Beverly Hills Post Office area. A mere two years later, RiRi unloaded the thoroughly trashed property at a massive loss. Soon lawsuits were being slapped around over build quality issues, blah blah blah. Anyway, suffice to say that Ms. Thang was good and pissed.

(Side note: Rihanna’s old B.H.P.O. house was acquired by an investor who fixed up the joint and flipped it (in 2014) to another investor, who gave it a cosmetic overhaul and then sold it last year for an unbelievable $14,100,000 to John Legend and Chrissy Teigen. For what it’s worth, Yolanda happens to think the Teigen-Legends waaaaaay overpaid. But we digress.)

Thus began a nomadic lifestyle for the pop superstar: Riri then rented a palpably hideous Pacific Palisades mansion but was plagued by stalker issues. So she high-tailed it up to an even hideous-er but highly secure Sunset Plaza “fortress”. From there, she moved on to other rented homes but Yolanda sorta lost interest at that point. We know architecture is a somewhat subjective matter, kiddies, but when it comes to these places there ain’t no two ways about it: Rihanna likes herself some ass-ugly houses.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Fast forward a few more years and here we are, barreling through 2017. A couple months ago, our trusty pal Vlad the Revealer at Celebrity Address Aerial reached out to ask about a mysterious blind trust that had just paid a fat $6,800,000 for an almost-brand-new mansion perched near the base of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills.

Y’all can imagine our surprise when we cracked the trust and discovered that the new owner is none other than Ms. Robyn Fenty herself. And we’re sorry to report that it does not appear her taste level has improved much over the past eight years.

Don’t think we’re being snotty, kiddies. Rihanna’s new roost is certainly a step-up in style from some of her prior residences, but the whole “Contemporary Mediterranean” architectural style gives your gurl more heartburn than that bottle of cheap brandy we just downed. Those two architectural designs should never meet, because it just never works out. And we’re pretty sure that commandment is in the Bible. Okay?

Anyway, the fancy 7,130-square-foot mini-compound was originally built on spec. Completed in 2015, the property was immediately sold for $7,400,000 to a fellow named Timothy Redman-Manna. Yolanda confesses we know little about Mr. Redman-Manna, beyond that he hails from the UK. How or why he bought a $7.4 million house in Hollywood remains a mystery to us, but within two years Mr. Redman-Manna flipped the house at a $600,000 loss to the bargain-hunting Rihanna.

Arched windows in the dining room provide plenty of light, and glass wine cellar/rack promises a good time to Ms. Fenty’s guests. The sleek kitchen is decked out with a full array of expensive appliances, and other recreational rooms on the main level include a billiard room with polished hardwood floors and a blue-and-grey movie theater.

The second floor of the main residence boasts three guest/family bedroom suites, plus a luxurious master with a fireplace, private patio, and a sitting area. Out back there’s also a two-story guesthouse with garage parking and a serious-looking gym on the upper level. The .43-acre lot (generous for this area) includes an infinity pool with inset spa also includes plenty of off-street parking.

Much to Yolanda’s surprise, a thorough scrub of property records reveals that this is not the only LA property currently owned by Ms. Fenty. Way back in October 2014, she secretly dropped $5,450,000 for a mid-floor condo in The Century residential skyscraper. Has 3,560-square-feet of living space with 3 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.

Other Century residents include a couple of bazillionaire widows — Candy Spelling and Vicki Walters — plus actor Matthew Perry, socialite Dorothy Wang, and high-end Indonesian property developer Tommy Silfanus.

In November 2016, Rihanna also forked out another $925,000 for another condo unit in a different (and less fancy) Wilshire Corridor building. Records show that this building was last overhauled in 1978 and the unit in question has 2,064-square-feet with 3 beds and baths. Yolanda would guess that this space is for staff or family member(s), but who really knows?

Now let’s hope and pray that Ms. Fenty’s architectural taste continues to improve as she grows older and wiser — this place is a small step in the right direction, despite Yolanda’s usual negativity. Who knows, maybe she’ll get that billionaire boytoy to put a ring on it and she’ll start devoting all her time to collecting and preserving every last Neutra, Paul Williams, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

It could happen! You never know. And that’s something we can all drink to, okay?

Listing agents: James Harris & David Parnes, The Agency
Rihanna’s agent: Jackie Smith, The Agency

Ages ago, Yolanda’s friend Vlad the Revealer asked us about this stately Tudor located in an unpretentious (but still quite pricey) area of Studio City. On the market for the first time in more than 30 years — per the listing — the property recently transferred for $2,450,000 and was acquired by a blind trust.

Well, a little poking around in records reveals that the new owners are a guy named Daniel Gillies and his wife Rachael Leigh Cook. Got it?

Anyone who has been subscribed to this blog for more than a couple weeks should know that Yolanda is surprisingly (perhaps?) ignorant when it comes to celebrities. So we must confess that we’d never before heard of Mr. Gillies or Ms. Cook, but it turns out they are both quite famous. And of course, Yolanda instantly knew who Ms. Cook was once we connected her with She’s All That, the quintessential 90s flick that catapulted the lady to stardom. For his part, the New Zealand-raised Mr. Gillies is exceptionally recognizable (1.4 million Instagram followers and counting) due to his starring turn on The Vampire Diaries, a show that Yolanda blessedly ain’t never seen.

While the 1923 house in question doesn’t appear to have a celebrity ownership history — or at least your gurl couldn’t find any evidence of one — it is perfect for a famous couple like Mr. Gillies and Ms. Cook, as it is located at the very end of a tiny dead-end side street and tucked away behind tall hedges and a big gate.

A tree-shaded motorcourt leads to a grassy front yard with a brick walkway. There’s a big bell by the doorway that is kinda cute but also could be annoying if the neighborhood squirrels get frisky and start a-ringin’ during their play.

It’s clear the home’s interior decor could use an update — the wood and tile and black granite kitchen is rather ghastly. But the living room looks nice, albeit a bit cluttered. Check out the baby grand piano, the harp, and the harpsichord (??).

There are a total of 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a comfortable 4,214-square-feet within the main house.

The .39-acre lot has lots of fun is exceptionally private, with a forest-like canopy of trees and other assorted greenery sheltering the home from view. Out by the front gate is a 500-square-foot, one bedroom guest house that is a mini-replica of the main building. Elsewhere there’s a swing set and plenty of space for entertaining.

Last year, Ms. Cook and Mr. Gillies sold their previous home, a Paul Williams-designed Traditional set just above the bustling Sunset Strip, for $3,064,000 to a prominent (but not famous) medical doctor and her husband.

Listing agent: Robert Howell, Keller Williams Beverly Hills
Mr. Gillies & Ms. Cook’s agent: Stephanie Vitacco, Keller Williams Encino – Sherman Oaks