Six days later (and counting!) and Yolanda still has a nasty hangover from her New Years revelry. But we are valiantly getting back to work, regardless of the pain. And now that we’ve kicked all the grandchildren out of our house, we can speak freely and plainly to y’all without losing money to the swear jar.
So let’s be real — things in Venice have gotten real damn expensive. Seems like you have to either be a Bitcoin lottery winner or a TV princess to afford a decent hovel out there nowadays. Of course, y’all didn’t need Yolanda to tell you that. Just a look at all the big tech companies swarming the area, and all the cute vegan hotspots springin’ up, and y’all can easily guess that this neighborhood is on fire right now, for better or worse (depending on one’s point of view).
As is often the case, our friend Vlad the Revealer at Celebrity Address Aerial asked us to look into a house in Venice that had recently sold to a mysterious trust with a Minneapolis (Minnesota) address.
Now, to call this place puny would be an understatement. It’s got a pauper-style 2,618-square-feet of living space and sits on an absolutely microscopic .06 acre lot. However, it is an easy-breezy 5-minute (or less) walk to impossibly trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard and only 10 minutes by hoof to the beach. Thus it sold for a rather amazing $2,910,417 last year to the aforementioned mysterious trust. That’s right, it’s a $3 million house on a .06-acre lot. Egads!
Lo and behold, Yolanda discovered that the home’s spendthrift new owner is a young lady named Adriana Cargill. And our Ms. Cargill — if you didn’t already know — is a member of one of America’s wealthiest families: the ultra-low-profile multi-billionaire Cargill clan. According to Forbes, the extended Cargill family is the fourth-wealthiest in America, and no fewer than 12 members are official billionaires.
Never heard of the Cargills? There’s a reason for that. For decades, the family has strenuously striven to keep their name out of the papers and gossip rags (or off of TMZ, as is the modern-day equivalent).
What little online information there is about Ms. Cargill can be summarized in a few sentences. She is in her early 30s and was born and raised in Minneapolis. She graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from Chicago’s prestigious Northwestern University. Recently, she has been living in LA and working both as a freelance reporter and as an assistant producer for local radio channel KPCC’s Take Two. According to her personal website, Ms. Cargill regards herself as an “audio nerd”.
For those of y’all who are only interested in the tedious subject of money (such bores!), Yolanda believes Ms. Cargill is the daughter of Austen S. Cargill II and his first ex-wife. Forbes pegs her daddy’s net worth at a paltry $4.3 billion.
So now we’ve got that nonsense out of the way. Shall we take a look at Ms. Cargill’s tall and skinny new house? It’s sorta like the residential real estate equivalent of a giraffe, except not as interesting. Shit, just looking at this place makes Yolanda feel short and dumpy. Which we are. But we digress!
Described as a “modern Craftsman” in listing materials (perhaps a bit of a stretch), the three-story house sits securely behind a wooden gate. A short stone pathway leads past a small patch of (maybe fake?) grass to an itsy-bitsy wooden deck that offsets the white front door.
The house back up to an alleyway, and another wooden gate slides open to reveal a two car garage, perfect for making a discreet entrance or exit from the premises. Naturally, the home is equipped with a high-tech security and camera system, as is required at the residence of a billionaire heiress.
An otherwise small front living room is made larger thanks to its folding doors that bring the outdoors inside. The main living spaces feature expensive-lookin’ dark oak hardwood floors, a “gourmet” kitchen with Caeserstone counters and high-end Thermador appliances, and an adjacent dining room that also features folding doors leading out to a rear balcony. Fortunately, there appears to be a small powder room on the main level, which means that Ms. Cargill’s guests need not traipse upstairs into her private living quarters to use the loo.
Speaking of upstairs, the second floor sports three bedrooms and two full bathrooms, including a master suite with a balcony, a glass-walled shower, and a fireplace.
The third floor is perhaps the most interesting, as it consists of one large open room and a 3/4 bath, which suggests multiple possibilities to Yolanda. A music studio for “audio nerd” Ms. Cargill? A deluxe home movie theater? A swanky office or game room? Or perhaps Ms. Cargill would like to make this space into the new master suite: after all, it’s got a balcony and a corkscrew staircase with private access to a breezy open-air rooftop space.
Actually, now that we’ve seen the third floor, Yolanda takes back what she said about it being boring. We rather like this house! It’s fun. We hope Ms. Cargill has the imagination to renovate in an fresh way.
We shall see! Or shall we?
Listing agents: Michael Rozales & Kim Finestone, Keller Williams Beverly Hills
Ms. Cargill’s agent: Cory Charlupski, Douglas Elliman