Ellen DeGeneres Sells Hollywood Hills House in Off-Market Deal

SELLERS: Ellen DeGeneres and Portia Di Rossi DeGeneres
BUYERS: Barry and Sheryl Schwartz
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $9,900,000
SIZE: (approx.) 4,000 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

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Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, two of Hollywood’s most prolific buyers and sellers of multimillion dollar homes across Southern California, have quietly sold a house in the Hollywood Hills in a covert off-market deal for $9.9 million. The buyer, as we first heard from impeccably plugged in real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak and later confirmed with property records, is a corporate entity linked to retail fashion businessman, thoroughbred racing aficionado, and dedicated philatelist Barry Schwartz, a man otherwise and probably best known as Calvin Klein’s childhood friend and long-time business partner.

The design savvy daytime chat fest queen acquired the property in November 2014 for $8.75 million — she later leased it to pop star and actor Nick Jonas — but avid celebrity real estate watchers will recall this was actually and somewhat curiously not the first but the second time the house-mad comedian bought the property. The first time was in late 2005 when she snapped it up for undisclosed amount that we’ve heard but cannot confirm was in the neighborhood of $6.5 million. As is typical for Miz DeGeneres, she didn’t hang on to the house for very long and sold it in September 2007 along with a smaller neighboring residence she also owned for a total of $10 million to Allison Milgard, philanthropic heiress to a Washington State window fortune.

The low-slung 1950s ranch style residence, rebuilt and redesigned in the early 2000s by innovative architecture firm Marmol Radziner, measures in at about around 4,000-square feet with panoramic canyon and city views. The house sits behind gates on private knoll of 1.63 acres near the top of Nichols Canyon and, according to our research, features an 1,100-square-foot great room plus 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms that include a 900-plus-square-foot master suite. Pennsylvania bluestone flooring runs throughout and then right on out of the house where it’s used for more than 2,500-square-feet of terracing that surrounds a swimming pool and spa.

Since the late 1970s Mister Schwartz and his wife Sheryl have owned and for the last decade or so made their primary home at Stonewall Farms, a sprawling, 750-acre equestrian estate north of New York City in the Granite Springs area of picturesquely pastoral and prodigiously prosperous Westchester County. Said to be the largest privately owned property in Westchester County besides the fabled Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, the Schwartzes’ spread is anchored by an elegant, custom-built mansion of approximately 26,000-square-feet that, according to a glowing article in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2005, has a total of 30 rooms and 13 bathrooms plus 10-inch thick walls, “super-wide pine plank” floorboards, a slate roof reclaimed from the Yale Divinity School, and a 60-foot long indoor swimming pool complete with stone fireplace and vintage French chandeliers. The Schwartzes purchase of a Los Angeles home is not their first foray into the high-end West Coast real estate scene and comes less than two years after property records indicate they coughed up $12.5 million for an ocean-front property on a coveted stretch of beach in Carpinteria, California. Last year, according documentation we turned up online, the Schwartzes received permission from the County of Santa Barbara to raze all the existing structures on the property — a modest cottage and several small accessory structures — to make way for a brand new residence of 7,980-square-feet plus a detached garage with 480-square-feet of additional living space above.

As for the tirelessly peripatetic de Rossi-DeGenereses, their perpetually in-flux property portfolio currently contains: a 1960s contemporary privately positioned at the end of a gated drive in a particularly prime pocket of Beverly Hills they scooped up in a hush-hush off-market deal in late 2014 for $15.995 million; two adjacent condominiums that overlook the L.A. Country Club along the Wilshire Corridor near Westwood they snapped up in July 2014 for a combined $16,000,000; and a 17-acre estate with a 10,522-square-foot Tuscan villa on the fancy-pants border between Santa Barbara and Montecito they picked up in May 2013 for $26.5 million.

Aerial image: Google

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