Part freewheeling early 1970s hippy pad, part trophy, part Hollywood Hills retreat and part inspiring creative workspace, the marvelously eccentric estate musician Frank Zappa called home for decades might just baffle the straight set.
No matter; as there was Lady Gaga to take over as custodian of the tour-de-force residence, so there will be another genuine left-fielder to buy it turn. They’re getting harder to find, but they’re still out there. This summer, one with $6.45 million came along to take over the property’s ownership from her Ladyship. She’d owned it for about five years, paying $5.3 million for it in 2016.
L.A. life would be so very dull if all the homes in the city’s vast environs were spec-built by developers, wouldn’t it? And so a property like this is a contemporary tonic of sorts. Its most unusual details — the hand-made masonry stone wall that allowed the right side of several brains to work in tandem toward a common goal, the mural, the painted ceiling, the mix-and-match reclaimed elements, the abstract wall and ceiling ornaments — greatly expand on the original build, a rustic-minded Tudor-inspired Laurel Canyon dwelling from the 1930s.
The house sports three different spiral staircases, itself an amenity for those who love that particular functional design embellishment, as well as a wide variety of flooring materials and window styles and, of course, a recording studio, rehearsal space, and the media vault that was explored in an article on Magnolia Pictures’ Zappa in The New Yorker about a year ago.
But it’s the property’s shifting atmospherics that are perhaps most effective in accumulation; the home is something of a pop-cultural kaleidoscope. With seven bedrooms.
Lady Gaga stars in the biographical crime drama film House of Gucci, with Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, and Al Pacino.
On the music side, Lady Gaga has sold over 129 million records. She’s released five solo studio albums, all of which went to number one on the Billboard 200 chart save the first, which peaked at number two. She’s also released two collaborative albums with Tony Bennett; the first, 2014’s Cheek to Cheek, went to the top of the Billboard 200 chart and the second, 2021’s Love for Sale, reached the top 10. She’s also topped the Billboard 200 chart with the 2018 soundtrack album for A Star Is Born with Bradley Cooper.
