Though she owns at least three sumptuous homes of her own — two in New York State and another in Portugal — mononymous veteran pop culture icon Madonna, now 62 and every bit the rebellious iconoclast and sartorial risk-taker she’s always been, has nonetheless opted to spend at least part of the ongoing COVID-19 quarantine (and her recovery from the virus) bunked down in a sprawling Beverly Hills, Calif., compound with a deep celebrity-pedigree.
Originally designed by high-society architect Paul Revere Williams and built in the early 1940s for Bert Lahr, the lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” the Coldwater Canyon spread has reportedly been lived in by a slew of showbiz movers and shakers, Betty Grable and Harry James, Paul McCartney, Alan Ladd Jr. and the Osbourne family among them. In the early 1990s, the almost one-and-a-half-acre estate was owned by then-married actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. The property was gifted to Johnson in 1995, presumably as part of their divorce agreement, and sold in late 1999 for $2.55 million to the current owner, French apparel mogul Guy Attal. Since then, the entire property has been radically overhauled and been on and off both the sales and rental markets many times over the last decade.
So the scuttlebutt goes, “The Voice” coach Adam Levine went for a look-see a couple of years ago, before he paid “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick and entertainment attorney Erik Hyman $33.9 million for a huge Beverly Hills mansion he quickly (and lucratively) sold for $45 million to Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. And, the estate was leased several years ago, at a reported rate of around $100,000 per month, by another legendary international pop star, Mariah Carey, who coincidentally enough has also rented a seriously lavish multi-acre spread, albeit in New York’s bucolic Westchester County, where she’s holed up during the ongoing pandemic with her kids and a handful of staff.
Attal first put the upgraded compound up for sale way back in 2010, with a much-too-high price of $28.5 million, and most recently had it available on the open market earlier this year at slightly below $20 million. It’s not known how much the Instagram-loving star is shelling out for her short-term stay, but the celeb-approved spread was listed at an astronomical (and gag worthy) $120,000 per month before she swooped in and snatched it up.
Hidden behind a tall, precisely clipped hedge and imposing iron gates that swing open between stone pillars, the estate’s three structures, a relaxed, quintessentially Californian take on a classic Connecticut country house, provide plenty of room for the Instagram-obsessed material mother, her half dozen children and their retinue of staff in a combined 15,000 square feet of living space. The sprawling main house offers two master suites and three family bedrooms plus two staff rooms and a total of seven full and three half baths. A separate guesthouse adds another two bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms and an entertainment pavilion alongside the tennis court contains a decadently paneled two-lane bowling alley, a billiard/games room and a VIP bar with another half bath. And, important if you can afford it while quarantining in the Age of COVID, there’s plenty of room to roam and recreate amongst the estate’s rolling lawns, manicured gardens, outdoor kitchen, putting green and, of course, swimming pool and spa.
The “Madame X” singer has previously owned a number of homes in Los Angeles. In 2003 she paid Sela Ward $12 million for a grand Sunset Boulevard estate that she held on to until 2013 when it was sold for $19.5 million to a turns-out-not-very-savvy investor who turned around and sold it at a loss in 2015 for $19 million to energy drink tycoon Russ Weiner. Weiner, who owns a handful of huge, high-maintenance mansions on both coasts, has had the BevHills property on the market more times than anyone would bother to count, initially in 2017 at a woefully rosy $45 million that soon and inexplicably increased to an even more ridiculous $49 million. Since then, the price has plummeted to its current ask of a smidgen under $30 million.
Long before she sold her Sunset Boulevard mansion, and after an exhaustive house hunt, the sick-rich entertainer — Forbes pegs her fortune at well over half a billion dollars — set her real estate sites on New York City where in 2009 she coughed up $32.5 million for a nearly 12,000-square-foot triple-wide townhouse on the Upper East Side. She also maintains an almost 60-acre equestrian estate in Bridgehampton, N.Y., that she hovered up in early 2010 in two separate but contiguous transactions that totaled $7.2 million. The equine-oriented spread, part of which was purchased from Calvin Klein’s ex-wife Kelly Klein, includes a horse barn and a two-story residence custom built by Madonna and reported to include six principal bedrooms plus two staff rooms, a detached three-car garage and a heated swimming pool and spa.
And, finally, since sometime in 2017 Madge and her lively, artistic brood have lived a deep-pocketed ex-pat life in Portugal where she was widely reported to have spent about $9 million for the historic Quinta do Relógo estate, an 18th-century Moorish Revival mansion on 5.5 acres about 20 miles outside of Lisbon in the hilltop village of Sintra. At the time, the eccentric four-story villa, which spans about 16,000 square feet, was in need of extensive shoring up and rehabilitation before it was even habitable.
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