If you have any doubts that the seven-bedroom English country manse behind the ivy-covered wall is no ordinary house, they disappear the minute Fred Sands, Brentwood’s real estate broker to the stars, greets you in the curving brick-and-concrete driveway: You realize that he is not talking foundation, but wearing it.
Sands is a 30-year veteran of the high-end home market here, but even his hottest open houses do not usually involve the viewers of the “Today” show and “Good Morning America” or the mob of other media outlets whose bright lights have left melted streaks of makeup smudging his starched white collar by late afternoon. “We’ve never experienced a house with this much media coverage,” he says simply.
Then again, Sands has never sold a house quite like the grandly cozy cottage that he now has listed for $3.95 million at 360 North Rockingham Avenue. It not only has his-and-hers sunken bathtubs, a tennis court, swimming pool with rock slide and cave, three basketball hoops and a temperature-controlled wine storage room. It also has a guest house where an air conditioner once went bump in the night and a family room with an eerily empty built-in glass case that once housed O.J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy.
Simpson lost the house in a foreclosure auction last summer, and the lender that held the mortgage bought it for $2.6 million. Simpson moved out just over a month ago, and the new owner, Hawthorne Savings of El Segundo, Calif., put it up for sale again with Fred Sands Estates and commissioned a whirlwind $200,000 makeover that peeled away layers of old bathroom wallpaper, refinished peg-and-groove floors, resurfaced the tennis court and re-landscaped the lush one-acre grounds of eucalyptus and magnolia that shield the house from the street.
In fact, the house now sits on a virtually private street, with the main entrance to Rockingham from Sunset Boulevard blocked by concrete barriers and with the street sign half covered with a tattered trash bag to deter tourists. Visitors must find it by winding through side streets.
Recently, reporters and camera crews tramped across turf once trod by jurors in a kind of one-house international house tour meant both to satisfy the curious and persuade serious buyers that the house bears no stigma simply because “a very famous person lived here who became infamous,” as Sands puts it. He says he will be “very surprised” if the eventual buyer does not turn out to be someone who first saw the house on television.
But no gawkers need apply. “Unless they’re a studio head or we know them,” Sands says, all prospective buyers will have to show that they have $1 million in liquid assets or produce a letter from a bank certifying that they can meet the mortgage. Bargaining is not encouraged.
“Discounting?” says Star Lawrence, the Hawthorne Savings vice president who is supervising the renovation and resale. “Top dollar or above, this place!”
In fact, home prices in Los Angeles are rebounding sharply after a disastrous six-year slump, especially in luxury neighborhoods like Brentwood, and brokers say they expect Simpson’s old house could easily sell for more than $4 million. The 6,000-square-foot house was built in 1941, and Simpson bought it 20 years ago for $650,000.
But he had not done much to it in recent years, Sands said. Foliage was overgrown around the flagstone terrace, and ivy fell in tangles around the edges of the tennis court. The interior woods were dark, and light fixtures were outmoded.
“It was tired and it was dated,” Sands said.
So under Lawrence’s direction, contractors from La Linda Homes in Orange, Calif., lightened up the oak floors in the main living area, laid new white pile carpet in bedrooms and scoured the terra-cotta paving in the professional-grade kitchen (which has a new Sub-Zero refrigerator and new six-burner Wolf gas range because the old ones mysteriously disappeared). They also replaced the infamous air conditioner in the guest-house bedroom of Brian “Kato” Kaelin–the one on which Kaelin said he heard a bumping sound that prosecutors theorized was Simpson rushing back to his house and dropping a bloody glove on the night his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, were murdered. Now there’s a spanking new Kenmore unit in the wall.
“All the detail work ended up taking a lot of time,” said Rich Hall, a vice president of La Linda, who filled the house with 30 to 40 workers a day to get the job done. “When you do things in a home of this caliber, you want to do it right.”
For all its luxuries, (“expected in this price range,” Sands said), the home’s interior is not that regal. Its space flows naturally for entertaining, with the kitchen, family room, dining room and formal living room all blending into a kind of central hall with high ceilings and a sprawling, suburban feel. “It’s warm,” Sands said. “It’s not supposed to be an `Oh-my-God’ house. It’s supposed to be a warm house.”
There are oddly intimate reminders of a home where little children played and adults partied hard, and where a couple once fought violently on New Year’s Eve. A curious British wooden sign hangs in the cabana-sized kitchen by the tennis court, originally meant to spell out rules for warming-up volleys, but open to interpretation here: “Wimbledon Tennis Club — Mixed Doubles Are Only Allowed 5 Mins. Knocking Up Time on the Center Court.” A blue-and-white children’s playhouse, complete with matching miniature garage, still sits in a corner by the front driveway near where a giant sandbox once held a swing set.
“If you didn’t have children, it could be a sand trap,” Lawrence suggested.
Only one room remains untouched, the study off the foyer, its honey-colored wood-paneled walls, red Oriental carpet and corner fireplace just as they were when it was Simpson’s office.
“It’s the one room we were never allowed in while Mr. Simpson was still here,” Sands said. “We don’t know what was in there.”
And we never will.
