Filed under: Famous Homes, Celebrity Homes, Cool Homes
The Los Angeles designer puts another one of her wildly glamorous homes on the market. If you have $46 million and love animal prints, this one's for you.
Donato Sardella/WireImage.com; Everett Fenton Gidley for Westside Estate Agency.
Nobody could ever convince white-hot decorating daredevil Kelly Wearstler that there's even a shred of truth to the minimalist mantra, "Less is more." For Wearstler, a plucky and gorgeous gal almost as famous for her fearlessly outlandish fashion choices as her kooky but always carefully conceived decorating style, more is always better.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in her own home, a legendary Beverly Hills, California mansion that she and her smashingly successful property developer/hotelier husband Brad Korzen bought five years ago for $25 million. They renovated, decorated and now they're ready to sell -- for a vertigo-inducing $46 million.
The design-oriented duo hired Los Angeles architect Brian Tichenor to work over their über deluxe new digs in a manner that preserved much of the mansion's original architectural details.
Naturally, the lady of the house did up the interiors with the sort of audaciously maximalist décor that has become her signature stock in trade and has made her both revered and reviled by the notoriously difficult-to-please interior design world.
At the entrance, electronic gates swing open to a long celebrity style driveway. The drive swoops dramatically up the gentle slope to a motor court, which stretches out in front of the sprawling and architecturally dignified 11,000+ square foot Georgian-meets-Hollywood-Regency style mansion.
The mansion's main entrance, marked by a cluster of potted topiary balls, gives nary a hint to the extreme decorative fantasia that lies beyond.
Passing through the front door into the octagonal sky lit foyer feels a little like Alice going through the looking glass. Here is a world of bold architectural details, dizzying patterns and surreal tableau, where a cheeky glass topped table with a gilded base of arms and hands (by Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg) and four Mackintosh-style ladder back chairs. The room speaks a decorative language that perhaps only Wearstler can comprehend.
A surprisingly muted palette prevails in the paneled formal living room where charcoal-colored wide plank wood floors stand in delicious contrast to the grayish-taupe colored paneling that covers the walls and ceiling. Upholstered arm chairs and a tufted black leather sofa form a seating area in front of the fireplace. On the coffee table is a suggestively lurid sculpture of a nude woman. A paneled alcove off the living room juxtaposes the pale black, white, beige and brass color scheme with the vibrant and lush foliage seen through the multi-paned window that stretches from floor to ceiling.
The dining room is daring in its decor but contains little more than a dining room table covered in a dense assemblage of busts and other sculptural bits and pieces. One would be hard pressed to find a square inch on which to set a champagne flute, let alone an entire place setting.
The room opens out onto an interior courtyard dotted with carefully trimmed boxwood balls.
In the paneled and pilastered den, there's a cacophonous but clear-headed mélange of 1970s decor: large-scale herring bone hardwood floors, a ceiling painted to look like a game of Pick-up Sticks, a glitzy antique crystal chandelier, and a black and white checked slab coffee table on top of which sits a shockingly large bronze bust. It's all wrong for a thousand reasons and yet, somehow, Wearstler makes it work.
No design stone was left unturned at the jaw dropping Wearstler/Korzen crib, not even in the dazzling and colossal cook's kitchen. It's kitted out with a glitzy combination of stainless steel and high-gloss black cabinetry, brass accents, marble counter tops and every high-grade and high-cost appliance money can buy.
An office/library, wrapped in custom wallpaper with a paint spatter pattern, has ebonized wood floors, a tiger-striped rug on top of which sit a pair of bizarre chairs shaped like bowing three-legged swans, and a handful of free-standing book shelves.
The room seems to have little use beyond looking picture perfect given that the flamboyant black lacquer and gilded Louis XV style desk has been rendered entirely unusable due to the spectacular throng of statues, vases, objet and stacks of books that cover every inch of its flat surface.
Angular contemporary artworks and animal prints in the sexed-up second floor master suite play against the classic paneling that wraps the room. A pair of doorways topped with matching pediments that repeat the shell motif found over the home's front door lead into a window-lined sitting room. In addition to the master suite, there are four family bedrooms plus two more for staff.
The expansive and lavishly maintained grounds include rolling lawns, rows of meticulously trimmed boxwood hedges and topiary, majestic mature shade trees, various fountains, a lighted tennis court and several outbuildings with a screening room and home gym. Sitting below the house, a quintessentially Old Hollywood-style swimming pool has an adjacent pool house/guest house with three bedrooms for overflow guests.
This isn't the only home Kelly's put on the market -- check out the Malibu Beach House she listed for $21.9 million.
For more on celebrity real estate, don't miss:
- Julia Roberts Buys Second Manhattan Apartment
- Inside Nicole Kidman's NYC Digs
And girls, ready your checkbooks, Kevin Jonas put his Texas house on the market.