I’m not going to get into what “celebrity” means these days; as Joel McHale says, Kim Kardashian is famous for having a big a** and a sex tape,” but it cracks me up that celebrities in L.A. seem to move every year. It also cracks me up that Larry David pokes fun of this by having his Curb Your Enthusiasm persona move every season for reasons like having a wire they think is ugly in the backyard, or too many movies being shot on the street. Thank you so much to Vanessa for tweeting me this Luxist post featuring Kim Kardashian’s condo, which is currently on the market for a million plus bucks. I would like to point out a few massive design cliches that appear here.

Sometimes candles don’t make the room. Neither do hideous throw pillows. And a neutral palette doesn’t necessarily bring the calm:

Just as a big huge brass Buddha/Yogi/not sure (don’t mean to offend, I’m sure the owner doesn’t know who this is or what the meaning is either) doesn’t necessarily bring the “Zen”:

A big crystal chandelier and big tufted headboards and lots of mirrored furniture and

volumes of fabric for draperies do not equal “Hollywood glamor.” Sometimes they just equal “tacky bordello boudoir.”

I do, however, like where this bathroom was going – the wallpaper, glossy black ceiling, and light fixtures are doing it for me, while the floors and off-the-rack-from-big box store-vanity is not.

Word is that the condo is going for over a million. Also, that cute Hidden Hills house of Kris and Bruce Jenner’s is on the market. I think they lived there for about a minute. I rather liked that they lived in a cozy, not over-adorned, somewhat oversized cottage.

If you think this post is too mean, don’t worry. I’m sure a few of the keywords in this post will have me receiving all kinds of nasty spam comments for months. Instant Karma.

Photos via luxist.com via realestalker an the MLS service.

I was in Cincinnati for 48 hours last week and while I didn’t get a chance to check out the exhibit of his newly found paintings at Fabulous Frames, I stumbled upon this remarkable house while checking out a river view house for sale in Anderson Township. I suppose the street sign before the shared driveway should have given me a clue as to what was ahead:

There was another Charley Harper cardinal on the other side of the house in the carport. Those decks have a great view of the Ohio River and the rolling bluegrass hills of Kentucky on the other side.

By the way, this is the house nearby that my friends and I want to make our dream house when we win the lottery and retire:

I just got my internet going for the first time since this morning (comcast – ugh!) and now I am GORGING. While catching up on the latest Huffington Post entries, I perused the slide show of Mitt Romney’s humble ski chalet in Deer Valley Utah. Apparently, the Romneys are “downsizing and simplifying.” Maybe he’s going to follow the current hot political trend of thinking about Abe Lincoln, and trading down for a one-room log cabin. Can you imagine how much it would cost to heat this massive manor? It is 9,500 square feet. They have so many lights on for this photo that at first glance I thought it was on fire. I’m just picturing those energy meters going around and around at warp speed when I look at this:

I’m all for big timber, stone fireplaces, and a bit of hokey-ness in a mountain house, but the decor in this thing is so over-the-top fugly it makes me retch. In a 5.25 million dollar house, I expect a little better. Some of those light fixtures belong in the ugly lighting hall of fame. Ugh, and that wooden cowhide-covered coffee table, words escape me:

For another ridiculous ski lodge on the market, click here.

images from previewutah.com, via thehuffingtonpost.com

Every time I walk from my house to Piedmont Park, I pass this house and drool. This photo does not even do it justice. It has this low country charming style, and it was built in 1916, the same year the viaduct to Piedmont Park was built and connected my neighborhood and others beyond it to downtown Atlanta. The house has a magnificent front porch, two bedrooms upstairs with fireplaces and French doors out to that top deck, a nice sized kitchen, beautiful hardwood floors, a gorgeous front staircase equipped with a curved wooden banister, a screened-in porch, a large sleeping porch on the back, and even a garage with a man-cave room upstairs covered in horizontal beadboard. For the complete tour and more information, click here. To contact the real estate agent, see comment #5 below for email and phone information.

Yesterday on the way back from the park we noticed this baby is for sale and we actually went in for the open house. I know people go to open houses for entertainment purposes, but I hate to waste a realtor’s time when I am not actually in the market for a house and I usually never do it. However, yesterday I had to break down and make an exception. I was hoping the house would have 50 years of newspapers inside and smell like cat pee, so I would not covet it so much. It was the opposite – the house was airy and light and so charming I wanted to move in right away, and I hate moving! It’s a block from Piedmont Park, Trader Joe’s and the artsy movie theater – does location get any better than that?

Where’s your dream house? Have you ever seen it come on the market and consider about some hellish move  just to inhabit it?

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you get from Playboy to the Organic Architecture Movement? It goes like this: PLAYBOY – THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR ON E! – BARBI BENTON IN ASPEN – BART PRINCE. Only four quick steps! I admit it. I was watching The Girls Next Door on E! yesterday. Hef and his harem went to visit Barbi Benton in her humble abode in Aspen. Holy. Moly. Known as The Copper Palace (and locally as “the double double-wide”; Benton’s husband is a trailer park developer), the house consists of five pods connected by stairways. There are side-by-side lap pools, as Benton and her husband could not agree on a temperature. This is the most normal thing in the entire spread. Wavy walls are coated in stones and other objects, the bed sits upon a rotating platform, there’s a fireplace surrounded by a kiva, the dining table once belonged to Andrew Carnegie, there’s a large disco, complete with, as Bridget put it, “weird, crystal stalagmite type things coming up.” The home itself hovers over the ground and has a mere 25,000 square feet of living space. Interested? It can be yours for the low-low price of $25 million dollars. This sale price, surprisingly enough (no sarcasm intended), would set a record for Aspen if it is met.

The Girls Next Door: Kickin’ It Aspen is on about a million more times this week on E! The episode is basically a half-hour house tour of the house, which, hmmm, seems to coincide perfectly with the house being on the market. Trust me, it’s worth watching.

The home was designed by Bart Prince, who formerly collaborated with Bruce Goff during the heydey of Organic Architecture. If you want to see some amazing examples of The Other Modernism, you MUST visit his website right now.

Here is one more peek at some Bart Prince work. He deserves a few posts of his own, where he’s in the company of Goff, Lautner, Fay Jones and Fallingwater Frank instead of Bridget, Kendra and Holly. Perhaps another day!

Top photos from BartPrince.com

Bart Prince Albequerque photo by Steven St. John for the Chicago Tribune. I highly recommend following that link and seeing the rest of Mr. St. John’s Prince photos.

Erik Johnson tipped me off to another unbelievable modern dream house that is currently on the market. It’s the Slayton house in Northwest D.C., and it is one of only three known stand-alone residences designed by I.M. Pei (apparently, he also designed an apartment for Steve Jobs in the early 1980s). If you have a heap of extra money lying around, or really really good credit, you can live in a house designed by the same person who designed The Pyramids of The Louvre and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.*

The house received landmark status from the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board, and is currently nominated for designation as an historic landmark from the National Register of Historic Places. For more information on the house, it has its very own website here.

*It’s funny, as I looked through Pritzker Prize winning Pei’s C.V., I was struck by how some of his big projects demonstrate exactly what went wrong with the whole bad idea of urban renewal, which was a big trend during a lot of his career (see Boston Government Center and then read some Jane Jacobs). Regardless, Pei remains one of the most revered architects of our time.

Is that Kate Moss on the wall? What’s the story with that rocket strainer thing on the kitchen counter? I’ve never seen that before, I totally dig it!

photos 1,3,4 from slaytonhouse.com

all other photos from Erik Johnson

Another dream home on the market. Lately I’ve been using up a lot of my time perusing modern houses on the internet. This one is incredible. It belongs to Erik Johnson, one of my favorite photographers (I’ve swiped his work from magazines for posts in this blog quite a few times). I love that this home is clean and uncluttered, but not sparse. It reminds me a bit of the modern house with a soul I featured a month or so ago.

Back in the ’40’s, architect Charles Goodman and developer Robert Davenport came together to design and build the Hollin Hills neighborhood in Alexandria Virginia.  I thought I’d share some of Erik’s photos of his home with you.  For more information and more photos, please click here.

all photos by Erik Johnson

“The wine cellar holds 700 bottles!”

“That will only hold half of my collection.”

I have to admit, while blog-hopping around this morning I had VH-1’s Really Rich Real Estate on in the background, and I’m hooked. This show is a mix of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Cribs, and a how to be real estate millionaire infomercial. Basically, they follow the Westside Estate Agency real estate agents as they list homes and try to find homes for their clients. The clients are where the fun comes in:
1) A rocker from Lit whose Hollywood Hills house dream is demolished by his wife, who has to remind him that having a 20′ railing-less drop off to the pool doesn’t mix well with having a three year old.

2) Some huge developer trying to buy the last hilltop in Beverly Hills from some Saudi royalty. Apparently his $30 million offer was just an insignificant drop in the bucket to them – they didn’t even bother to counter.

3) Master P (I think he’s worth a couple hundred million bucks) looking to find all the best modern amenities, like a custom TV that comes out from under the bed. I don’t think having a flat screen under one’s bed is very feng shui…

4) Speaking of feng shui, the most entertaining client to watch was Ileana Douglas, who brings a feng shui advisor named Carol with her. As I watched her agent Max Shapiro (clad in a crappy T-shirt and jeans Read the rest of this entry »