Hip-hop superstar Pharrell’s award-winning architectural tour-de-force atop Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles is on the market for $11.95 million, a significant increase from the slightly more than $7.1 million he paid for the imposing gated and heavily fortified property just over five years ago.
Listings held by Kurt Rappaport and Drew Meyers of Westside Estate Agency reveal that the exceptionally long and low-slung residence was designed by innovative architect Hagy Belzberg and offers a total of six bedrooms and five full and two half bathrooms between the five-bedroom main house and two-story detached guesthouse. The approximately 1.5-acre property, resembling a sleek, angular oil tanker resting on a high ridge atop steep, brush-covered hillsides, offers breathtaking 280-degree mountain, canyon, and city views over Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.
The aggressively contemporary and enviably private home is approximately 5,800 square feet in size and features a large, glass-walled living room, a dining area set against a floor-to-ceiling green wall, and a clean-lined, organic modern kitchen with full-height windows that frame a cinematic view of the surrounding mountains. The master suite features a fireplace and a bathroom lined with green dollar bill marble.
The west side of the house was designed to mitigate and absorb the blazing heat of the late afternoon sun, while the glass-walled east side opens to a narrow yard with a narrow stretch of velvety lawn and a long, thin swimming pool and spa. The guesthouse is separated from the main house by an auto-court that functions as an al fresco social space just below a viewing terrace outside the living room of the main house, from which films and images are projected onto the exterior wall of the guesthouse.
The 13-time Grammy winner possesses several residential properties in his hometown of Virginia Beach, Va., including a waterfront estate purchased for $1.85 million in 2001: Prior to spending $30 million on El Palmar, a 17,000-square-foot estate in Coral Gables, Fla., he placed a price tag of almost $17 million on a still-for-sale 10-bedroom mansion of more than 17,000 square feet in the Beverly Hills Post Office area that he purchased from film and television mogul Tyler Perry for $15.6 million two years ago.
