Beck Picks Fixer in Santa Monica
BUYERS: Beck Hansen and Marissa Ribisi
LOCATION: Santa Monica, Calif.
PRICE: $2,711,000
SIZE: 2,456 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: It seems that uni-named musician Beck — the latest Grammy winner to have his acceptance speech rudely interrupted by the immensely talented if embarrassingly egomaniacal Kanye West — has embarked on a real estate spending spree.
Over the weekend we received a digital missive from the inestimable real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak, who let us know that Mister Beck shelled out, via trust, $2.711 million for a well-maintained if dated and decidedly nondescript residence on a plum, north-of-Montana Avenue parcel in Santa Monica. Listing details show the existing house, a double-gabled Tudor-ish residence from the late 1920s, has five bedrooms and 3 bathrooms in 2,456 square feet. Your Mama freely confesses we haven’t any inside intel on what he plans to do with the pricey but ho-hum abode, which was marketed as an “opportunity to remodel or rebuild.” What does seem obvious is he wanted the property in a bad way because he paid, according to online resources, $316,000 more than the published asking price.
Ever thorough, Yolanda’s communique also reminded us that the inventive, five-time Grammy winning alt-rock musician had, just a few months earlier in an off-market deal, paid $1,045,000 for a humble if not exactly inexpensive house in the same gated enclave in L.A.’s Los Feliz area where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie maintain a multistructure compound. Since the deal was done on the down low, details of the property are slim, but the L.A. County Tax Man shows the two-story, 1940s red-brick traditional measures in at 1,956 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Once again we haven’t an iota of an idea if Mister Beck and his wife, Giovanni Ribisi’s twin sister Marissa Ribisi, plan to occupy the Los Feliz residence, if they purchased it as an investment or acquired it for some other reason that, let’s be honest, butter beans, isn’t really any of our beeswax.
Whatever the reason(s), as avid celebrity real estate watchers well know, Beck is no stranger to the property gossip columns and has owned and sold a healthy handful of homes in the Los Angeles area over the last 10 or 12 years. In the fall of 2002 the spritely and delightfully unconventional musician and second generation Scientologist paid $2.25 million for a spacious, 1920s mini-mansion in L.A.’s historic Hancock Park ‘hood, which he sold, according to property records, in June 2005 for $4.2 million to pregnancy and parenting author Heidi Murkoff, who, as it turns out, has the property available off market with an asking price of $4.395 million.
In May 2005, shortly after he sold the Hancock Park mini-manse, Beck dumped an itty-bitty cottage in Santa Monica’s Rustic Canyon for $800,000 and paid $3.95 million for a 5,200-square-foot house on almost half an acre directly below Runyon Canyon in the foothills just above Hollywood. He sold the house two years later for $4.8 million, and the property has since had several owners and last traded hands in late January 2015 for $4.45 million. A few months before he sold the house in the Hollywood foothills, he shelled out $2.05 million for a mid-century ranch house on Malibu’s celeb-saturated Point Dume that he unloaded in February 2010 for $1.65 million, a substantial $355,000 loss not counting carry costs, improvements and real estate fees. (This property most recently changed hands in June 2013, when it sold for $2.1 million.)
Having sold his homes in Malibu and the Hollywood foothills, Beck quickly plunked down — also in June 2007 — $6.75 million for a roomy residence in his former Hancock Park ‘hood. He quickly caught a classic case of the Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped the property back on the market just a year later with a wildly optimistic $9 million pricetag. Alas, the property languished at ever decreasing prices until April 2010, when it sold for $5.6 million — a punishing million dollar-plus loss — to its current owner, three-time Emmy winning TV producer Shonda Rhimes.
Listing photos: Ken Borden
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