Comedian and "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane has paid $13,500,000 to purchase a 5,152-square-foot mansion above Beverly Hills, Calif. that had not been on the market.
As we continue our clean-up of leftover 2008 items that we never wrote about but should have written about, we wanted to weigh in on MacFarlane's new digs in the Beverly Hills Post Office before 2009 gets much underway. We know this is an old(er) item, but hey -- it's the holidays and it's a lousy real estate market, and there's not a huge amount of activity out there!
On top of all of that, MacFarlane's new pad actually is a house that we've written about before -- as part of our popular "Which celebrity's house is this?" feature, back in early July (yes, we know the date on the post that we link to above now reads August 28, but that's the result of our fall hacking attack that wiped out all of our archived posts; we had to restore them all by hand, and our programmers didn't get all of the dates of our archived posts quite right). In early July, we did not know who the recent buyer of this house was, but we did know that the house was purchased through a whimsically named trust (celebrity purchase tip-off #1), with an alcohol theme to it. We also knew that the money manager whose name is on the deed is a woman who has represented all kinds of celebrities in their real estate purchases over the years (celebrity purchase tip-off #2), including Drew Barrymore and Nicollette Sheridan.
But, at that time we still didn't know who the buyer was. So, we put the purchase out there to the world, to see what anyone knew. And we waited. Eventually, our respected peers answered the call -- and did they ever. First off, our friends over at the Real Estalker broke the news on July 7 that MacFarlane was the buyer, although Your Mama at the Real Estalker did not conjure up a purchase price as "she" so often does. Three days later, the Los Angeles Times' Ann Brenoff came to the rescue further, reporting that Seth had paid $13.5 million for the house. We still couldn't independently confirm that purchase amount until some weeks back, when it finally cleared public records that $13,500,000 was indeed Seth's purchase price.
Built in 1981, the three-bedroom house, which had not been on the market, sold to MacFarlane on May 30 (deed recorded on June 12). The seller was not a celebrity. Features in the house are scarce (since it had not been publicly listed), but they include five baths (according to public records) or three and a half baths (according to Brenoff). The house sits on a 0.88-acre parcel and has a tennis court and a pool, according to public records.
Also, the house is on the same street as the longtime home of actress Lisa Kudrow.