BUYER: Big Sean
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,675,000
SIZE: 4,500 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: One of the Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial recently let Your Mama know that an up-and-coming and well-connected, 25-year old hip hop recording artist from Detroit who goes by the stage name Big Sean shelled out $1,675,000 for a freshly rehabbed and sparsely faux-quoined, mullett-style mock-Med residence in the Hollywood Hills.*
Well, children, we're not afraid to admit that Your Mama had never heard of this Big Sean person but it didn't take too many clicks or clacks on our handy-dandy lap top computer to discover that he's not really very big—he's merely 5'8" tall and supermodel slender—and that he's newly engaged to actress Naya Rivera who, in case you don't recognize the name, plays sassy and sexy Latina lesbian Santana Lopez on Glee. Our travels across the internets also turned up the official video for Big Sean's newly released single, Fire, that features pop music's favorite twerking and tongue wagging hellion Miley Cyrus who—if Your Mama can be permitted to critique out of our element—does an impressively effective job in her portrayal of a slutty video vixen who really knows how to sit on top of a humongous hunk of dramatically back-lit marble. Anyways...
From the street B.S.'s new house looks like a rather mundane if carefully groomed and compact single-story residence. However, children, the house, perched on a wicked steep lot with a San Fernando Valley view in a not-so-glam section of the Hollywood Hills above the Cahuenga Pass, drops mullett-style two more floors at the back to encompass five bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms in about 4,500 square feet on three, elevator-free floors.
A low front wall, newly planted privet hedges, and a sliding electronic driveway gate define the tight, stamped concrete driveway that does double duty as an extremely low maintenance and water conserving all-concrete front yard. Carved wood pillars and a shallow portico signify the entrance to the residence on its uppermost floor through double front doors that open to a foyer the size of a small living room. A pony wall** is about all that separates the foyer from the only slightly larger "formal"living room where single-pane French doors open to the front yard/driveway and a gas fireplace was wedged—uncomfortably by our persnickety estimation—in a corner between two windows.
The simple, over-the-counter moldings and espresso-toned wood flooring in the foyer and living room—the sort of wood flooring that Your Mama would bet both our long bodied bitches, Linda and Beverly, are the engineered type—continue into the formal dining room that has an almost magnificent, not quite square picture window with canyon and San Fernando Valley views.***
The (possibly engineered) wood floors switch to stone—or stone-like—tile in the spacious, center island kitchen. The tile on the kitchen floor looks to Your Mama a little too—uhm—identical to the stone tiles that demarcate the chimney breast in the aforementioned corner gas fireplace in the "formal" living room. The kitchen, equipped with white, double raised panel cabinetry decorated with fluted pilasters, ebony counter tops of unknown material, medium grade stainless steel appliances, and, over the sink, a double-wide greenhouse-style bay window, adjoins a convenient breakfast room off of which open a laundry room and attached two-car garage.
In addition to a small guest/family bedroom with hall bath access, the middle level has a pair of master suites, both with private sitting rooms, small private terraces, walk-in closets, and attached bathrooms with tumbled travertine (or maybe limestone) tile work. Presumably, the master with two walk-in closets, a corner fireplace, and bigger bathroom is meant to be the main master. Incidentally, the corner fireplace in the main master bedroom was treated with the same stone or stone-like tile as the fireplace in the living room upstairs. Listen, children, Your Mama loves us some decorative unity in a home, but all this matchy-matchy mottled beige stone or stone-like tile looks to us like it was bought in a hurry, in bulk, and at a discount from a big box home improvement center. Then again, what do we know? Maybe that is some kind of rare, artisinal travertine, or whatever. Could be. Probably isn't but it could be, right? Anyhoodles, poodles....
One more glute-busting floor below there's a central, wet bar-equipped family/media room flanked by two reasonably sized bedrooms that share a three-quarter bathroom off the the family room. Your Mama imagines Mister B.S. converted or will convert part or all of this lower level to a recording studio.
Outdoor space is limited to the all stamped concrete front yard/driveway and a series of petite, slate-tiled and wrought iron railed balconies that effectively cantilever over the canyon off the rear facade and offer up long if slightly tree-obstructed views out over the eastern reaches of the San Fernando Valley.
Avid celebrity real estate watchers may recall that Mister Big Sean's fiancee, Naya Rivera, has been on a bit of a real estate streak herself. In June (2013) she sold a renovated residence in a Beverly Hills (Post Office) canyon for $1,930,000 and, a few months earlier, paid $2.6 million for a 1930s clapboard-sided traditional at the far western edge of L.A.'s Los Feliz area.
So, children, will these two, like so many other newly wedded rich and famous before them, sell their houses and buy a new, neutral one or will one move into the other's bachelor or bachelorette pad? Pins and needles, pins and needles...
*For the record: Big Sean actually bought his new house several months ago but we didn't know a thing about it until a couple days ago.
**Has we ever complained to the children about how an ill-placed pony wall makes Your Mama crave a damn nerve pill? Well they do. Anyways...
***Oh, how Your Mama wishes that window were square.
photos: David Charmaine for John Aaroe Group