Marilyn Monroe House Up For Sale

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whirlcool

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After 15 years being off the market the house at 12305 Fifth Helena is up for sale again. This time with a $3.6 million price tag. It sold for $800K back in 1995. It was built in 1926.

It's a nice looking house, but they used a lot of tricks to make the photography perfect, like wetting down the tiles around the pool before shooting it. I wonder if it was this nice when Marilyn lived there? Supposedly when she lived there she had almost no furniture as a lot of the furniture she bought in Mexico hadn't yet been delivered when she died.

And let's not forget that Anna Nicoles oil rich husband J. Howard Marshall leased the place for her for a couple of months. Hmph!

Those old black and white photos IMHO always made the place seem dingy. And photos of the place have been pretty limited since 1992. But the home looks very nice in color.

If only the walls could talk! Would you like to have a home as notorious as this one?



www.huffingtonpost.com

PHOTOS: Marilyn Monroe's Brentwood Home For Sale

PHOTOS: Marilyn Monroe's Brentwood Home For Sale
www.huffingtonpost.com www.huffingtonpost.com
 
I would like to have that house simply because I like it, not because of Marilyn. Not sure if I would care if a famous person once owned a house I bought, other than for historical interest. I would buy a house simply because I like it. I did research my current home out of historical curiosity (no one famous owned it), I was mainly interested in how it fit with the local history of Port Arthur. It was built by a prominent business man in 1936.
 
If you look at a lot of the old guard Beverly Hill resident homes a lot of them were more modest than the mansions built today. Think Lucille Ball and Dean Martins house and even Marilyn Monroes house.

One thing that gets me is that a lot of the old classic homes of LA are being demolished to put up those huge tasteless mansions. Homes like Pickfair etc. Beverly Hills doesn't really have any preservation laws from what I remember.

And I remember touring LA in the early 70's where you could actually see the homes from the street. Now all you see is walls and gates.
 
I am pretty sure Lucille Ball's house on Roxbury in Beverly Hills wasn't demolished, but it was extensively remodeled by new owners. Beverly Hills is very strict with regard to what you can put in the front yard, and any changes to the front facade of the house will have to be reviewed and approved by Planning. For awhile they were getting too many new residents who wanted gaudy fountains in the front yard so those were prohibited. BH will allow a 6' fence in the front yard so long as it's set back 20% of the required front yard setback. The upper part must be of open iron construction, but everyone plants ficus hedges behind that for privacy. Believe me, old-line BH residents don't like the gaudy new houses, not one bit.

Monroe's house is of course in Los Angeles, in a nice and very quiet part of Brentwood between Sunset Blvd. and Santa Monica Blvd. LA allows no more than 42 inch tall front yard fences unless you are granted a variance. Lots of people sneak illegally tall fences in as getting that variance involves months and a public hearing, and of course there are many using the old iron fence + ficus hedge trick to assure privacy.

I don't see a lot of really good houses being demolished, but mainly old homes the may have some charm but are very outdated and really not worth saving. This is not to say that the replacement homes are always tasteful or appropriate, but that usually comes down to the owner's level of taste and what design professionals he hires. LA has recently enacted anti-mansionization codes, but IMO they are the usual poorly thought out codes that just limit house size but don't adequately protect neighboring houses or allow reasonable trade-offs for design professionals. Santa Monica has very strict codes that can be a PITA to work with (as can the whole City of Santa Monica, sometimes better known as Soviet Monica), but they really address the problem of mansionization in a thoughtful and relevant way.

I wonder what was in Marilyn's laundry room in '62, perhaps a TOL Frigidaire set, or perhaps a pair of Duomatics . . .
 
Thanks for the update about the laws of "mansionization".

I saw that with Lucy's house. It looks like they just gave it an updated facade. Just tore the front top layer off and put a new one on.

This house must be very strongly built as how many earthquakes has it survived since 1926?
 
Methinks During The HeyDay Of The Studio System

From about the 1930's through approx 1950's or so, many Hollywood stars lived in those grand houses for many reasons.

One, it was expected back then if one had lots of money to live in grad settings. Large houses for many with means were not just for living in, but settings for the mandatory large tea, luncheon,tennis, swimming, dinner and so forth parties one was expected to give.

Domestic help was also cheap then,so one could afford the staff required to maintain both indoors and the gardens.

As the studio system began to die in the early 1950's the new and young stars probably valued the privacy that comes from living in a "small" house. Small homes are easier to keep up, and having less servants around means fewer persons to get into (and report) on your "bidness". Once the studio system fell, a star's priviate life was up for graps without the power and money formerly spread around to keep things hushed up.
 
I doubt anyone would tear it down at this price; certainly Marilyn's ownership adds some glamour and value. I wouldn't be surprised if it were remodeled and enlarged as it is a modestly sized house (2600 sq. ft.) on a large lot (23,000 sq. ft.).

Greater Los Angeles has lots of prewar homes that have survived many earthquakes. Most wood framed buildings hold up fairly well in quakes. Old brick buildings are the most dangerous as they're very weak, but they are uncommon now and houses were almost never built this way. Luck is the best determinant of a building surviving an earthquake: if the ground beneath a structure doesn't fall apart then the building usually stays intact. How the ground performs is a function of how far it is from the epicenter of the quake and how the shock waves travel through the earth. Most flat parts of the LA Basin are subject to liquafaction, which is to say the earth can temporarily become liquid if shaken during a quake. That's disastrous for a building foundation, but luckily a quake will usually cause only limited liquifaction.

I don't worry much about the effect of shaking on old wood buildings, but one thing which is clear is the superiority of newer buildings from a structural standpoint. Homes built in the last thirty years are much, much better than older buildings, and those constructed within the last 10 or 12 years are even better as codes were tightened after the Northridge quake of '94. This also included stricter requirements for soils analysis before new construction. One byproduct of doing a major remodel and addition on an old house is that the new parts will have to meet the new codes, and some upgrading of the old parts will likely be required as well, resulting in a better and safer house.
 
My favourite old house renovation story thus far as to be the one from a year or so back.

It seems a woman hired a contractor (who also happened to be a friend of hers), to redo an older home such just purchased.

Whilst ripping out the walls it seems the man found a large sum of money hidden in the walls. Contractor decided "finders keepers", whilst the homeowner would have none of it, after all whose house was it anyway?

The whole nasty bitter fight ended up in court, as not only weren't the two persons "friends", but not speaking to each other besides. To add more petrol to this fire, the family of the deceased man's estate who sold the home showed up and claimed the funds if not a share.

IIRC, in the end the court ruled according to some very old state law regarding division of "lost" or otherwise hidden property. Homeowner got some, but not all the funds, contractor received a portion as did the estate's next of kin.

Just goes to show you, if one is ripping apart an old home, you never know what could be in dem dar walls or floors.

*LOL*
 
Looking more closely at this house, it looks like it has been "flipped".

I noticed that the spanish style grates over the windows have been removed, the floor plan of the kitchen is different and of course, the appliances are new. (See link)

They painted over the bedroom ceiling which was unpainted in photos taken over the years.

I haven't been out and about in LA for a few years, but I do remember that the hills around town are very much more crowded with homes than they were in the 60's.

The Marilyn Monroe Collection -

www.marilynmonroecollection.com www.marilynmonroecollection.com
 
It's a nice house, and it would be neat to know that it has a famous person attached to it.

But my problem would be looky-loos wanting to see inside. I've always been a person to respect others privacy and I would expect the same. Unfortunately,the rest of the world doesn't think that way.

One famous home that comes to mind is the Mid-Century split level home at 11222 Dilling Street, in Studio City (Or Culver City, I can't remember.) It was used for exterior shots for the Brady Bunch show. The owners complained of trespassers, so they built a fence.

~Tim

bugsyjones++9-11-2010-16-15-34.jpg
 
Look what they did to the Beverly Hillbilly house. They totally moved the driveway to the other side of the property and put up a wall around it. They heavily modified the front too.

The owners got tired of people coming to the front door and knocking on it and asking for Granny, Jethro, etc.

I also heard that after the Manson murders that's when people really started putting up gates and walls.

But I also heard that a lot of celebs eschew BH and Belair for places like Hancock Park, Pacific Palasades, Encino, etc.
 
Very nice, appropriately-sized house! Price seems a bit high vs. 1995 unless it has been restored, considering the overall market. Wonder how the comps are out there?
 
The Brady Bunch home is in Studio City, in the San Fernando Valley. That fence is just awful!

In the late '90s I visited the old O.J. Simpson house on Rockingham in Brentwood on several occasions. This was after the trials, and before the house was demolished. Thank goodness it was surrounded by tall fences and gates, as various tour buses and limos would cruise by slowly even though the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Brown had taken place miles away. Every once in awhile some ghoulish person would try to hold a camera over the fence. Simpson hadn't owned the house for years at that point. The neighbors complained, and finally the City of Los Angeles barricaded Rockingham on the north side of Sunset for many years, forcing drivers to take a circuitous route to the house.

Launderess' story of the hidden cash reminded me of a somewhat similar situation I observed. I was working on an addition for a client in Deep Canyon, which is in the City of LA north of Beverly Hills. The houses here are most all from the '70s, nice but not special, so one doesn't expect surprises of this sort. The project involved adding a new media room and renovating and enlarging the master bath and closet. The owners had mentioned wanting to conceal a safe somewhere in the master closet. Imagine everyone's surprise when the contractor tore out the carpet in the closet and discovered just such a safe in the floor! And it was locked . . .

The owners had been in the house for years, but recalled that neighbors had mentioned there were rumors that the previous owner had connections to gambling interests, and maybe even the mob in Vegas. Everyone was wondering if the safe was full of cash, or maybe jewels, or maybe drugs. It was then trasported to a professional locksmith, who managed to open it with no destruction, whereupon it was discovered that it was full of . . . nothing!

At least the owners got their safe for free, minus relocation and locksmith costs.
 
Don't care for the layout of that MM house on account of the way you have to walk thru the diningroom to get to the kitchen although as it looks you could walk across the patio but then..
 

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