Though some snarky folks have opined that she has all the personality of a Maytag washing machine, Yolanda finds Kendall Jenner to be the most interesting member of the Kardashians. We care about the real estate, after all, and though she’s not as rich as her little sister Kylie, the Ferrari-owning elder Miss Jenner is the only biatch who currently dwells outside the gates of her klan’s longtime homestead of Hidden Hills/Calabasas, deep within the throes of the scary San Fernando Valley.
In May 2014, when she was all of 18 years old, Miss Jenner paid $1.3 million for a luxury flat within a fancy high-rise along the Wilshire Corridor area of LA. Although Miss Jenner continues to own said flat (as of today), it is currently available on the open market with a recently-reduced $1,525,000 asking price. By summer 2016, you see, Miss Jenner had moved on to a $6,500,000 contemporary home in the foothills of Hollywood, just above the bustling Sunset Strip and the world-famous Chateau Marmont. She bought the property from actors Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and Jimmy Kimmel lives directly across the street.
However, kiddies, all was not well. The neighbors, despite the fact that many are famous themselves — Dakota Johnson, Sandra Bullock, and Cameron Diaz all own homes on the same dead-end street — were furious that a Kardashian was living in their midst and exchanged a flurry of angry emails on the subject, according to Mr. Kimmel himself. Turns out their “fears” were justified. In the brief 13 months that Miss Jenner owned the Marmont Lane property, she experienced stalker and burglar problems galore.
To her credit, Miss Jenner seems to have realized that it was her own poor choice of home location that set her up for residential failure. It’s always a risk when someone as famous as she — 84 million followers and counting — lives outside a gated community, no? Particularly in the Sunset Strip area of the Hollywood Hills, which is chock-full of expensive homes but has a reputation for, ahem, a wee bit of debauchery and hard partying. To say the least.
Two months ago, Miss Jenner sold her WeHo-adjacent house in an off-market deal for $6,850,000. The buyers, in case y’all wanted to know, were infomercial kingpin Bill Guthy and his cosmetics entrepreneur wife Victoria Jackson. Yolanda would guess that the property was purchased for one of the Jackson-Guthy couple’s two adult children, both of whom are in their early 20s.
But we digress. Immediately upon selling her Hollywood house, Miss Jenner (and her Ferrari) disappeared into the night. Vanished off the face of the earth, essentially.
Yes, Yolanda was shocked too. For weeks, we waited for Miss Jenner to surface in one of our comrades’ real estate gossip publications, but she never reappeared. Yolanda tried searching for her to no avail. Weeks turned into months. Still nothing!
So where did 21-year-old model go? Well, y’all, this is one very sneaky young lass. It turns out that Miss Jenner had already finalized the acquisition of a new residence nearly three months ago, several weeks before she even sold her old pad.
You read right, kiddies. Nearly three months ago, a mysterious and deliberately opaque blind trust paid an A-list $8,550,000 for a mansion within the guarded gates of Mulholland Estates, a somewhat remotely-located community situated high in the mountains above LA. There are about 90 homes located within this community, nearly all of them designed in that oh-so-common “mock-Mediterranean” style. Many of the homeowners, y’all may be interested to know, are quite famous. And tacky! But hold your horses.
First of all, it’s important to note that while Mulholland Estates homes carry a 90210 zip code (and thus are part of the Beverly Hills Post Office neighborhood), the community is geographically sited, technically speaking, in the hills of Sherman Oaks, on the Valley side of Mulholland Drive. Make of that what y’all will.
Miss Jenner’s new abode is a “Spanish” take on Mediterranean and also sports quite the interesting ownership history. According to records, the house was originally built in 1991, possibly by Brian Mann, a son of the late billionaire physicist Alfred E. Mann. The younger Mr. Mann sold the house in 1993 to philanthropist Verna Harrah, the now-deceased widow of Las Vegas casino mogul Bill Harrah. Our Mrs. Harrah then sold the house in 2001 to Sam Gores, the head honcho at Paradigm Talent Agency. In 2006, Mr. Gores sold the house to his little brother Tom Gores — who happens to be a billionaire — for $5,712,000. Though T. Gores isn’t hurting for cash, he then dumped the property for just $4,800,000 in late 2012. The buyer? Perennially non-winning actor Charlie Sheen. As far as we know, Mr. Sheen never spent a night in this place. Instead, the house was occupied by his third ex-wife Brooke Mueller.
Still following?
Poor Mr. Sheen — once one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood — has faced a well-publicized series of money troubles in recent years. By early 2016, a “Notice of default” was filed against the property, which indicates that Mr. Sheen had fallen behind on his mortgage payments. To his credit, Mr. Sheen managed to stave off foreclosure for several months and unloaded the house in June 2016 for $5,415,000. The buyer at that time was luxury real estate broker Matt Altman of Douglas Elliman, who stars with his brother Josh on that drama-rama Million Dollar Listing show.
Please note that the photos shown here are from 2016, when this house was last publicly listed. Since Miss Jenner bought the house from Mr. Altman in an off-market deal, we don’t have any current pics and thus these pics may or may not be an accurate display of the home’s current look. We’re certain that for a $3 million price increase in one year that Mr. Altman made some improvements to the property. Aerial photos show that much of the overgrown landscaping and unchecked tree growth has recently been cleaned up.
Yolanda does not hate this house — actually, we like it much better than most Mulholland Estates mansions — but we pray that Mr. Altman gave the interior decor a makeover. It’s just a wee bit drab, a pinch too 90s. You feel Yolanda?
Anyway, the property has all the bells and whistles y’all might expect to find in an $8.5 million mansion: an eat-in kitchen with center island, granite countertops, and stainless appliances; formal living and dining rooms; a private sitting room; at least a half-dozen sets of French doors accessing various parts of the yard; and an outdoor plunge pool surrounded by emerald-green grass and various verandas for sittin’ and sunnin’. There area total of 5 beds and 5.5 baths in 6,635-square-feet of living space on the .84-acre lot.
Despite the fact that it is guard-gated 24/7, Mulholland Estates isn’t known for being a particularly secure enclave. Our gurl Paris Hilton had her home burglarized no fewer than five separate times by the infamous “Bling Ring”. On another occasion, Miss Hilton awoke to a knife-wielding intruder in her front yard. And then good ol’ Charlie Sheen had a Mercedes-Benz stolen from his own driveway on two separate occasions. Hmmm!
Let’s face it, when you’ve got 90 mansions in one gated community — all of them with guests and many with their own staff teams — how secure can the place be, really?
And residents of Mulholland Estates are colorful — to put it diplomatically. The more (in)famous ones (some of whom we’ve already mentioned) include Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Sumner Redstone’s ex-girlfriend Sydney Holland, music producer DJ Khaled, Beach Boy Brian Wilson, former Real Housewife Adrienne Maloof, rocker Slash, and actress Judith Light. And Tyler Perry recently paid $14,500,000 for a mega-mansion that sits just outside the Mulholland Estates gates.
Other less famous folks within the gates include a substantial number of foreign homeowners from eastern Asia and — so Yolanda has been told — at least one Saudi princess.
One more fun fact: Miss Jenner’s new house is directly across the street from Christina Aguilera’s substantially larger spread, which she bought from Tom Gores in 2013 for exactly $10,000,000.
At least Miss Jenner won’t, ya know, have to suffer the indignity of borrowing a cup of sugar from a non-famous person.