A brand-spanking new architectural residence just a minute’s drive from the Sunset Strip in L.A.’s lower Laurel Canyon was recently sold for $4.6 million, much below its original price of $5.25 million, and tax records and other eagle-eyed sources indicate the new owner is action and horror genre filmmaker Len Wiseman. Partly obscured behind a 15-foot tall row of ficus hedging and secured by a slatted iron gate that slides open to a multi-car motor court, the wood, stucco and glass residence perches high on a hillside with five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms in close to 6,000 square feet. Other numbers of note include three separate living rooms, three indoor fireplaces and two outdoor fire pits, a three-stop elevator, and street-level garage parking for three cars with off-street parking for six more.
Under five, pill-shaped glass light fixtures, a 12-foot long island in the sleek, minimalist kitchen is decadently sheathed in lightly veined black marble and incorporates a built-in casual dining table. The far end of the kitchen opens to a comfortably snug lounge dominated by a massive, geometric black stone fireplace and a family room on the second floor spills out to a sun splashed deck with wrap around canyon views. All four of the guest bedrooms have private bathrooms and the master suite includes a suede-walled walk-in closet and a crisply tailored bathroom with a cleverly asymmetrical double-sink vanity and an over-sized shower sheathed in somewhat suggestively patterned, book-matched marble slabs.
Interior living areas and exterior entertaining spaces become virtually indistinguishable when vast banks of floor-to-ceiling glass panels in the living room and kitchen slip into the walls and expose the rooms to a central courtyard with a narrow strip of exotic wood decking around a glassy, zero-edge swimming pool. To one side of the pool there’s a sheltered area for shaded al fresco lounging and, a few steps up, there’s a tiny patch of lawn tucked against a thick and high hedgerow.
The property was jointly listed with Ben Belack at The Agency and Aaron Kirman at Compass, while Wiseman was repped by Redfin agent Julian Heaney.
Property records suggest that Wiseman, best known as a co-creator, writer director and producer of the long-running, half-of-a-billion dollar action horror movie series “Underworld,” continues to own an approximately 3,600 square foot residence in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles that he and his now ex-wife, “Underworld” series star Kate Beckinsale, picked up in 2006 for not quite $3.6 million.
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