Selena Gomez Sheds Hamptons-Style Bungalow in Studio City
Having recently and significantly upgraded to a celeb-pedigreed mansion in Encino, child actor turned multifaceted entertainer and powerhouse social media phenom Selena Gomez — she has 25 million TikTok followers and a breathtaking 194 million followers on Instagram — has taken in $2.368 million on the sale of her former home in the all-but-fully-gentrified San Fernando Valley community of Studio City.
Getting rid the pretty, perfectly maintained property has been a bit of an odyssey for the “Rare” singer, who hosts and executive produces a quarantine cooking show (“Selena + Chef”) on HBO Max, and will executive produce and co-star with comedy legends Steve Martin and Martin Short in the upcoming Hulu comedy “Only Murders In the Building.” The showbiz polymath acquired the expensively updated and comfortably plush Hamptons-inspired bungalow in May of 2017 for almost $2.25 million. The property briefly came for sale over the summer of 2018 with a too-aggressive price of almost $2.8 million and, earlier this year, before the Covid-19 quarantines began, the property popped up for sale again, but with a reduced ask of $2.6 million. With no takers, the almost 3,400-square-foot home was soon taken off the market only to be re-listed about a month ago with an even lower and more realistic asking price of not-quite $2.4 million.
Essentially invisible behind a 20-foot-high hedge and protected by a Fort Knox-worthy security system, the single-story main house has three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, while a detached guesthouse adds another bathroom, plus an air-conditioned workout room. A shallow porch hugs the front of the home where a classic eyebrow portico designates the main entrance. Just inside, a narrow entrance hall has wide-plank wood floors that flow into a combined formal living and dining space. Banker-green marble surrounds the pilaster-accented traditional fireplace and listing photos show a glossy black grand piano in the dining area.
At the literal center of the house, a windowless room, perhaps best suited as a study or home office, is bathed in natural light thanks to a huge skylight. Humble bead board paneling covers the walls and a whitewashed brick fireplace sits at a jaunty 45-degree angle to the just-about-square space. The floor switches to polished antique bricks laid in a herringbone pattern in the adjoining Great Room and kitchen, where the lounge area has a marble-topped bar and the dining space flows out to the backyard though French doors. Featuring whitewashed brick and a pot rack laden with copper pots, the skylight topped kitchen served as the backdrop for “Selena + Chef.”
Two guest bedrooms, one with a snazzy Sputnik-style chandelier and an entire wall covered in mirrored panels, share an updated marble bathroom, while the main bedroom is privately positioned at the back of the house overlooking the backyard where it offers a spacious but otherwise ordinary walk-in closet and a gleaming bathroom slathered in white marble and white subway tiles.
Out back, a spacious brick dining terrace is covered by a pergola cleverly woven with fabric that creates a three-dimensional checkerboard pattern, and a long, slender, stone-lined swimming pool and spa is set against a towering wall of hedging that creates total visual privacy from the prying eyes of any nosy neighbors. A detached two-car garage alongside the pool has been converted to an airy guesthouse with custom built-ins, a full bathroom and a workout room.
Gomez was represented in the transaction by Karen Medved at Compass. The buyer was repped by Wendy Kjorness of Balboa Real Estate.
Gomez, who has an illustrious history of dating enormously famous men — Nick Jonas, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd among them, substantially upsized earlier this year when she shelled out $4.9 million for a Tinseltown-tinged mansion in the celeb-favored L.A. suburb of Encino. The nearly 12,000-square-foot manse, an eclectic mountain lodge meets neo-Mediterranean-style affair, was custom built in the late 1980s for late rocker Tom Petty and his first wife, Jane Benyo, after a fire destroyed the Tudor mansion that stood on the just shy of an acre spread. Benyo retained the six-bedroom and ten-bathroom pile in their 1996 divorce, but lost it to foreclosure in 2015. Eventually, in late 2018, the place was picked up for $4.5 million by music producer Randy Spendlove who soon sold it to Gomez with a $400,000 profit, not counting carrying costs, improvement expenses or real estate fees.
Launch Gallery: Inside Selena Gomez’s Former Studio City Home
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