Comedian Kathy Griffin has dropped the price on her Hollywood Hills mansion. The satirist and pusher of envelopes is now asking $5.5 million for the sprawling home; she had marketed it initially last fall with an asking price of $5.5 million, but pulled the listing during the winter. Griffin purchased the home in 2004 for $2.9 million. It was featured regularly on her Bravo series.
Not an understated house by any means, the modern-influenced residence is an imposing 8,100 square-foot monster called ‘wings,’ and it simultaneously suggests the ethereal and the leaden. It’s centered by a cantilevered second-floor living room, and flows out and back in two directions from that point. The home’s bowed roofline is a functional shift from the troubled ‘flat’ roof of a modern design. Wrap-around first and second floor balconies, each with a catwalk-style baluster, as well as a series of French doors punctuating the façade, cap a cursory look at the exterior of the home.
Within, notable features include a pair of meditation pools sunken into the terrazzo floors, stacked stone accents, an elevator, minimalist fireplaces, ornamental ceilings that vaguely reminisce of deco, a little adventurous wallpaper, and at least one even more adventurous light fixture.
The home took its name because it structurally resembled a bird in flight, but the manner in which the place articulates its notions of spatial boundaries and potentialities might be a more acute reason for the moniker: case in point, the view from the second floor windows of the cloudlike home, looking out over the Hills.
The hardwood floors which run through much of the first floor, and parts of the second, have a marvelous grounding influence, and are less self-consciously palatial than the terrazzo. The finishing of the wood is marvelous, and the woodgrain brings wings down to earth just a little.
Rooms include a truly spacious kitchen, and a large game room/entertainment room/home cinema with kitchen; it also contains a bedroom, and could serve as a self-contained guest accommodation. There are five bedrooms and six baths in the home; three of them are en-suite. The master incorporates a fireplace, a private terrace, a generously-sized walk-in closet, and a spa/bath.
Griffin’s series for Bravo—‘Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List’—may have been the most worthwhile reality-T.V. show to date, managing to skewer the genre while making a buck doing it, Joan Rivers style. Awards for her work include a pair of Emmys and a Grammy.
