LOCATION: Beverly Hills (Post Office), CA
PRICE: $3,450,000
SIZE: 3,734 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Some good, old-fashioned peeping and poking around some of the newer listings in some of the more desirable zip codes in Los Angeles turned up a multi-winged single-story abode that sits behind gates (and an ugly chain link fence) just off Mulholland Drive that's listed for $3,450,000 and, as per property records, owned by screenwriter and author Mark Foster.
Mister Foster, in case you don't know but might like to, cut his show business teeth as a writer for The Six Million Dollar Man and Hill Street Blues, the latter of which earned him the first of his three Emmy nominations. It looked that Mister Foster's showbiz ship had come in but good when, in the early-1990s, he teamed up with arty-farty filmmaker David Lynch and co-created the ground-breaking and deliciously dark if very short-lived Twin Peaks television series but, alas. Mister Frost seems to have all but retired from writing for television or movies sometime in the mid-Aughts but not before he wrote screenplays for a couple of the not-particularly-highly-rated but none-the-less money-making Fantasic Four superhero movies.
In the late 1990s Mister Frost began to write—or, at least, publish—(mostly) mystery/thriller novels and a series of (mostly) sports-related non-fiction books including a well-regarded three-book history of golf, the first of which, The Greatest Game Ever Played, was adapted (by Mister Frost) to a 2007 movie of the same name with Shia LaBeouf.
Property records show the half-acre mountain and city lights view property, situated near the craggy border between Beverly Hills Post Office and the valley town of Sherman Oaks, was purchased by Mister Frost and his wife, Lynn, in the summer of 1997 for an unknown amount of entertainment industry bread that, based on mortgage details Your Mama dug up in public records, we'd guesstimate was somewhere between three-quarters of and a million bucks. Anyways...
The rehabbed late-1940s ranch-style residence, described in listing details as "Metropolitan Home Meets Sonoma Style Farmhouse," measures in at a generous but hardly gigantic 3,734 square feet and is currently configured with two bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.
Extra-tall wood doors open into a lofty, crystal chandelier-lit foyer that gives way to a boomerang-shaped open-concept main living space decked out with rustic, chestnut-toned wide-plank oak floors, crisp white walls, vaulted ceilings, and windows and sliding doors set off with black frames and mullions. A fireplace anchors the living room end, a built-in buffet defines the dining area, and the spacious center island kitchen is outfitted with soap-stone and butcher block counter tops and top-grade appliances.
Snacks and coffee breaks can be taken at the four-stool breakfast bar that divides the dining area from the kitchen or tucked into the cute and compact semi-circular banquette built into a windowed bay in the kitchen proper. Two swinging doors with porthole windows in the kitchen open into what looks to be a fairly luxurious laundry room with stacked washer/dryer, built-in hanging storage, and a counter top for folding clean clothes.
Other rooms include a roomy, bookcase-lined library/office, a small fitness room, and an also bookcase-lined media room with enough tiered seating on milk chocolate-colored leather recliner-sofas to accommodate (at least) ten boob-toob watchers.
The lone guest/family bedroom has a private bathroom and the much larger master suite includes a bedroom with direct access to the backyard, a big and fitted walk-in closet, and dual bathrooms, his with a frosted glass doored shower stall and hers with a built-in make-up vanity and a mini-fireplace at the business end of a jetted tub in front of a large picture window with tree-top view.
The back of the house opens to an amorphous back yard with concrete patios and an amoebic swimming pool partially surrounded by a thin strip of rolling lawn that gives way to a nicely framed view that, on a clear day, extends all the way to the mountain bordered northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. Around back there's a chain link fence-enclosed dog run, as per listing details, and somewhere there a putting green. Near the pool a free-standing writer's shack has more deep brown wide-plank wood floors, a vaulted ceiling, and an entire wall of cable-suspended glass book shelves.
listing photos: PostRAIN Productions for Coldwell Banker Beverly Hills South
