Abbot’s Habit from “The Truth About Cats & Dog”

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Last Saturday, after stalking the Venice exterior of O’Hara’s Pub from Bad Santa (which I blogged about here), the Grim Cheaper and I decided to walk around Abbot Kinney Boulevard for a bit.  At one point during our stroll, we passed by a corner coffee shop named Abbot’s Habit and I recognized it immediately as a location from the 1996 romantic comedy The Truth About Cats & Dogs.  So I dragged the GC right on over to do some stalking of it.  And that right there is what I love about L.A. – you never know what adventure is waiting around the corner.  It turned out to be quite a fortuitous stalk, too, because it led to me meeting my very favorite blogger and style icon, Emily Schuman from Cupcakes and Cashmere.  But more on that later.

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Abbot’s Habit, which was founded in 1991, is actually Abbot Kinney Boulevard’s oldest coffee shop.  Aside from that small tidbit, though, I could find no information whatsoever about the eatery’s history online.

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I already had a Starbucks in hand (duh!) at the time that we stalked Abbot’s Habit, but the GC did not, so I encouraged him to try some of the place’s java.  He didn’t end up to be a fan, but he did really enjoy their “bacon, egg & cheese” breakfast sandwich.

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While the GC was eating his sandwich, I happened to check Instagram and almost had a heart attack when I saw that Emily Schuman had just posted a photograph of herself dining at Gjelina.  I had heard of Gjelina before via Emily’s site and from my mom’s hairstylist in Palm Springs who had told me a few months prior that the place was his favorite restaurant in all of L.A.  And while I knew that the establishment was located on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, I was unsure of exactly where.  So imagine my elation when I saw that it was about three doors down from Abbot’s Habit!  I mean what are the odds?  Barely containing my excitement, I grabbed the GC and marched right on over there to ask Emily for a picture.  And I am thrilled to report that she could NOT have been nicer, even though I was interrupting her during a meal.  She didn’t even seem at all put off by the fact that I had totally Instagram-stalked her.  Emily is an absolute doll and meeting her was one of the highlights of 2013 for me – particularly when she told me she “loved” my “ensemble.”  The GC had been making fun of my outfit all day (especially the boots), so to hear my style guru compliment it was major validation.

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In The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Abbot’s Habit is where Noelle (Uma Thurman) and Abby (Janeane Garofalo) grab coffee shortly after becoming friends.  While there, a fellow patron very humorously tries to protect Noelle from a bee that has flown into the café.

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That scene took place in front of the window in Abbot’s Habit’s main room.

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The café was also the site of Becca Moody’s (Madeleine Martin) poetry reading in the Season 6 episode of Californication titled “Hell Bent for Leather.”  Both the exterior . . .

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. . . and the interior of Abbot’s Habit were shown in the episode.

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Becca’s poetry reading took place towards the back of the café’s rear room.

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And while the Venice California History Site states that Abbot’s Habit was featured in the 1997 comedy Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, I scanned through the flick yesterday and did not see it pop up anywhere.

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Abbot's Habit Truth About Cats and Dogs (10 of 20)

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online.  And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Abbot’s Habit, from The Truth About Cats & Dogs, is located at 1401 Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice.  You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.

The Mulholland Drive Boat House

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I am extremely excited to announce (to those who haven’t already heard via Facebook or Twitter) that I was recently invited to contribute a weekly blog post to the CityThink section of Los Angeles magazine online.  (I’m feeling so very Carrie Bradshaw!  Winking smile)  My post, Scene It Before (thank you, fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, for the title!), will chronicle filming locations (duh!) then-and-now and will run each Thursday.  I could NOT be more floored about this new endeavor and hope all of my fellow stalkers will check it out each week.  My first column, which was published this past Thursday, can be read here.  (I actually wanted to make this announcement last Friday, but felt weird mixing in such happy news with a blog about the assassination of JFK.)   And now, on with the post!

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Back in September, my mom texted me to ask if I had ever stalked a huge, white boat-shaped house on Mulholland Drive.  Such a property was being featured on an episode of Million Dollar Listing that she was watching at the time and real estate agent Josh Altman had mentioned that the site was often rented out for movie and TV shoots – so much so that the owner was said to make about $700,000 a year on filming alone!  (In fact, during the episode Altman loses the listing because a movie production company swept in and rented the place for four months – for $320,000!  When Altman learned the unfortunate news, he asked if the flick being filmed was Titanic 2.  LOL)  I had never even heard of such a structure before, but was, of course, immediately intrigued.  Thankfully, I found the pad rather quickly that very same night via a Google search (there aren’t that many houses shaped like ships on Mulholland Drive, I guess).  One look at the images Google kicked back had me absolutely drooling.  The place was easily one of the most architecturally unique residences I’d ever laid eyes on.  So I ran right out to stalk it while the Grim Cheaper and I were in L.A. two weeks ago.

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Before arriving at the property, I had an inkling that it would not be very visible from the street, so I was floored to discover the opposite to be true.

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Kinda makes you want to scream out, “I’m the king of the world!”, huh?

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The 5-bedroom, 8-bath, 4-level, 11,000-square-foot residence, which was originally built in 1992, offers glass walls, 300-degree views, 2,500-square-feet of outdoor living space, an office, a pool, 2 spas, a fire pit, a gym, a nightclub/theatre, a wine cellar, 2 kitchens, and parking for 8 cars.  It was last offered for sale for a cool $6,749,000.  You can check out the real estate listing, complete with interior photographs, here.

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For such a unique dwelling, the entrance to the property is actually quite non-descript, as you can see in the below Google Street View image.  (Unfortunately, Mulholland Drive is a very busy thoroughfare and there was absolutely nowhere for me to pull over to snap photographs in the vicinity of the, ahem, stern area.)

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I was floored to discover while doing research for this post that the abode has quite a few celebrity connections.  According to MailOnline.com, pop group One Direction stayed there for seven nights this past August during the last week of the North American portion of their Take Me Home tour.  Harry and the gang shelled out $27,000 for the privilege.  Yep, $27,000 for seven nights!  (While the article also states that the boat house is located in a gated community, that information is actually incorrect.  As you can see above, the home is situated right on Mulholland Drive and is quite accessible.)  According to Virtual Globetrotting, model Katie Price and then-husband, singer Peter Andre, leased the residence back in 2008 and Curbed LA states that Prince rented the pad for a time, but, for whatever reason, never actually lived on the premises.

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The episode of Million Dollar Listing my mom had watched back in September was Season 6’s “All Aboard,” in which Altman and his assistant, Mikey, hosted a broker’s open house at the boat-shaped residence.

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Of the property, Altman said, “Some houses, they sell themselves.  This one, not so much.  Not only is it shaped as a ship, but it probably needs about a million dollars worth of upgrades.  It looks like the freaking Love Boat in here!  This thing is straight out of the ‘80s.”  LOL  The place is definitely unique – you gotta give it that.  It is not very hard to see why the pad has been utilized so often as a filming location.

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Thanks to Curbed LA, I learned that in 2002 the top ten finalists from the first season of American Idol were put up in the mansion.  (Once I heard the news, I ran right home and watched our American Idol: The Search for a Superstar DVD, which chronicles the series’ first year.  Man, that season was great!  In my mind, no other season has even come close to comparing.)  Quite a few areas of the house were shown in those episodes, including the front exterior;

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the kitchen;

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several bedrooms;

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the pool;

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the living areas;

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and the carport.

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That same year, the boat house was featured in Eve’s “Gangsta Lovin’” music video.

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You can watch that video by clicking below.

In the Season 3 episode of Californication titled “Slow Happy Boys,” which aired in 2009, the abode was where Sue Collini (Kathleen Turner) lived and threw a rowdy party.

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The interior of the property also appeared in the episode.

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For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Los Angeles magazine onlineAnd you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to my mom for telling me about this location!  Smile

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Mulholland Drive Boat House is located at 15105 Mulholland Drive in Bel-Air.  You can check out a good view of the residence from Woodcliff and Cody Roads, which run just north and east of it.

Farralone – Frank Sinatra’s Former House

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While doing research on the Chaplin Court apartment complex, which I blogged about last Thursday, I came across some information about an oft-filmed-at Chatsworth-area estate formerly owned by Old Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, that, for some inexplicable reason, I had somehow not previously known about.  The mansion, which in most circles is known simply as Farralone, is a marvel of modern design that just came on the public market for the very first time in history a couple of weeks ago.  And, let me tell you, I took one look at the photographs featured on the real estate listing and became just a wee-bit obsessed with stalking the place.  So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there last weekend to do just that.

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Farralone, or the “Great Glass Mansion” or the “Sinatra Compound” as it is also sometimes called, was commissioned by Chase-Manhattan-Bank-heiress Dora Hutchison in 1951 and was designed by Pereira & Luckman, the architecture firm who also gave us the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the Theme Building (aka The Encounter Restaurant & Bar) at the Los Angeles International Airport, and, my personal favorite, the Disneyland Hotel.  Dora built the house to be used as a party pad and regularly hosted rousing soirees where she counted Ava Gardner, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, and Vincent Minnelli as guests.  When Dora moved back to her native New York, she leased the property to none other than Frank Sinatra, who remained there for almost ten years.  Sadly though, as you can see above, not much of the property is visible from the street.

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But that’s why God created real estate listings!  The estate, which was just put on the market earlier this month for a cool $12 million, boasts sweeping views, parking for over 200 cars, 10,000 square feet of living space, 4 bedrooms, 6 baths, 3 private offices, a conference room, a detached gym, a 50-foot swimming pool, 14 acres of land, a vineyard, a production studio, 16-foot ceilings, glass walls, and a 1,000-square-foot, 1-bedroom, 2-bath guest house (with its own separate pool) where my girl Miss Marilyn Monroe supposedly lived in for a time.

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Farralone has seen so much filming over the years that, according to a December 2nd, 2011 Forbes article, it not only nets up to $2 million a year in location fees, but also “comes with a property manager who acts as a liaison with the studios, paid for by the studios.”  The article further states that the “main house also boasts a lower level production studio equipped with conference room, edit bays, private office and a separate entrance, all paid for and maintained by the studios.”  Ironically enough, when we showed up to stalk the property some filming was actually taking place.  The super-nice security guard on duty informed us the the shoot was for a reality dating show of some sort, but she was unsure of the name.

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In the Season 4 episode of Californication titled “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, Farralone showed up as the residence belonging to Stu Beggs (aka Stephen Tobolowsky), where Marcy Ellen Runkle (aka Pamela Adlon) made a house call to give Stu a “full Kardashian” body wax.

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In the 2001 thriller Swordfish, Farralone was the house where Gabriel Shear (aka John Travolta) lived and where Halle Berry famously shed her top for the very first time onscreen – an act for which she was supposedly paid a whopping $500,000.  Thanks to some crafty CGI, the Sinatra compound was made to appear as if it was located in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles for the film, instead of Chatsworth.

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Farralone was also the home where Jack Wyatt (aka Will Ferrell) lived and threw his post-divorce party in the 2005 romantic comedy Bewitched.

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In 2006’s Dreamgirls, Farralone stood in for the residence belonging to pop star Deena Jones (aka Beyonce Knowles) and her music-producer husband, Curtis Taylor Jr. (aka Jamie Foxx).

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In the Season 2 episode of Mad Men titled “The Jet Set”, Farralone was used as the supposed-Palm-Springs-area home where Joy (aka Laura Ramsey) took Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) while he was visiting California.

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In the 2002 flick The Salton Sea, Farralone was the home where Nancy Plummer (aka Shirley Knight) and Verne Plummer (aka R. Lee Ermey) lived.

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In 2001’s Tomcats, the Sinatra Compound was where Kyle Brenner (aka Jake Busey) lived.

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The real estate listing mentioned that Farralone had been featured in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and I really have to pat myself on the back for this one because as soon as I read those words I knew immediately that the episode in question was Season 9’s “Kill Me If You Can”.  I was not even watching CSI regularly back in 2008 when the “Kill Me If You Can” episode aired, but I had caught it on TV at some point and when I saw CSI mentioned in the listing, my mind immediately flashed to an image of Lawrence Fishburne standing by the Farralone pool while investigating the death of an art dealer.  Why these random, useless bits of location information remain stored in my head is beyond me, but they do.  Smile

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Thanks to commenter Becky on the Design Public blog, I learned that in the Season 1 episode of Six Feet Under titled “An Open Book”, Farralone stood in for the home belonging to the parents of Brenda Chenowith (aka Rachel Griffiths).

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And thanks to the HGTV website, I learned that Farralone was where the Design Star contestants lived during Season 4 of the reality series.

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Location manager Scott Trimble also let me know that Farralone was where Optimus Prime came out of the swimming pool in the first Transformers movie.

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Fellow stalker Jason informed me that the estate also showed up as the party location at the very beginning of 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

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Farralone also popped up in the 2004 music video for Usher’s hit song “Burn”.

Usher–Burn–filmed at Farralone in Chatsworth

You can watch the “Burn” video by clicking above.

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Several articles have also claimed that the home appeared in the 2001 biopic Ali, but I scanned through that movie yesterday and did not seen anything resembling it pop up onscreen, so I am fairly certain that information is incorrect.  I am thinking that the house might have instead been featured in the similarly-named television movie Ali: An American Hero, but because I have never seen it and was unable to find it anywhere online,  I cannot verify that hunch.  One rumor that I can put to rest is that the Farralone pool was not actually the site of Marilyn Monroe’s second-to-last photo shoot, as the real estate listing and several articles about the property have claimed.  Truth be told, that photo shoot was not really a photo shoot at all, but simply consisted of photographer Lawrence Schiller snapping some stills of the starlet while she filmed scenes for her very last movie, Something’s Gotta Give.  The shoot, which took place a few days before Marilyn’s death and featured her skinny-dipping while talking to co-star Dean Martin, was not actually shot on location, but on a set that was built inside of Stage 14 on the Fox Studios lot in Century City.

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As you can see above, the pool from Something’s Gotta Give does not match the real estate listing photographs of the Farralone pool.

You can watch a YouTube video of the Something’s Gotta Give pool scene being shot, during which it is stated that filming took place on Stage 14 of the Fox lot, by clicking above.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Farralone, the former Frank Sinatra estate, is located at 9361 Farralone Avenue in Chatsworth.  You can visit the home’s official real estate listing here and you can check out some fabulous interior pics of the property here.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ Former Mansion

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I recently finished reading Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography which was written by Andrew Morton, the legendary celebrity biographer who also penned Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, and I have to say that it was absolutely FABULOUS!  I honestly cannot more highly recommend it.  Not only was the book, which became a 2008 bestseller, a fascinating read, but it also got me completely obsessed with Dawson’s Creek once again and I just started re-watching the series from the beginning last week.  SUCH a great show and one of these days I have GOT to get myself to Wilmington, North Carolina to do some stalking of the locales, but I digress.  Anyway, one of the locations talked about in Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography was the Beverly Hills manse that the actor called home when he first started dating Katie Holmes and which Katie also later moved into.  So I, of course, just had to drag the Grim Cheaper right on out there to stalk the place as soon as I finished reading the book.

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Sadly though, as you can see above, virtually no part of the mansion is visible from the street.

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But, as I’ve said before, that’s why God created aerial views.  As you can see above, Tom and Katie’s former house is absolutely gargantuan.  In fact, it would be more appropriate to call the place a “compound” rather than a “house”.  The English-Country-style abode, which was originally built in 1927, features a 6,685-square-foot main house with five bedrooms and five baths, a guest house which is comprised of three separate apartments, each with their own kitchen and bath!, a screening room, formal gardens, a sunken tennis court, a pool, a spa, and almost three full acres of secluded land.  According to the Berg Properties website, Tom Cruise first leased the residence in 2001, shortly after his separation from then-wife Nicole Kidman.  TomKat moved out of the home sometime in 2007, at which point it went on the market at a rental rate of $100,000 per month.  Not kidding!  According to fave website The Real Estalker, Russell Crowe may have lived there for a time after the Cruises left.  And it appears that the property is once again available for lease.  You can check out the real estate listing – and see some fabulous interior photographs of it – here.

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And, amazingly enough, not only was the abode once the home of one of the world’s biggest movie stars, but the place is also a filming location!  In 2001’s Blow, the mansion was where George Jung (aka Johnny Depp) lived with his wife, Mirtha (aka Penelope Cruz).  It was featured in the memorable scene in which George shows his father, Fred (aka Ray Liotta), his extensive collection of cars.  The home was also where George was arrested by the FBI during his 38th birthday party.

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The interior of the house was also used in the filming.

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In the Season 3 episode of Californication titled “Wish You Were Here” the mansion was the residence of Dean Stacy Koons (aka The O.C.’s Peter Gallagher) and his wife, Felicia (aka Embeth Davidtz), where Hank Moody (aka David Duchovny) attended a dinner party.

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The real life interior of the mansion also appeared in that episode.

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And the mansion also shows up each week on the ABC Family series Switched at Birth as the residence of the Kennish family – Bay (aka Vanessa Marano), Toby (aka Lucas Grabeel), John (aka D.W. Moffett), and Kathryn (aka Lea Thompson) – and the Vasquez family – Daphne (aka Katie Leclerc), Regina (aka Constance Marie), and Adrianna (aka Ivonne Coll).

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Although the interior is, I believe, just a set.  As you can see in the screen captures above, it does not look at all like the real life interior of the former Cruise home.

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But the backyard, pool, and guest house scenes all take place at the actual house.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ former house is located at 918 North Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills.