Los Feliz homes – IAMNOTASTALKER

January 27, 2012November 3, 2014

Villa Sophia from the Final Episode of “Entourage”

A couple of weeks ago, while the Grim Cheaper and I were out doing some stalking in the Hollywood area, I received an email from Constantine Vlahos, the owner of a Los Feliz mansion named Villa Sophia. Constantine was writing to let me know that his home had been featured in the final episode of Entourage and that I might be interested in stalking it. Now, I just have to say here that that was most definitely a first – a homeowner not only seeking me out to inform me of his property’s filming history, but also encouraging me to stalk the place! Oh, how I wish more people would do the same! And interested in stalking it, I surely was, so I dragged the GC right on out there later that same day.

In real life, Villa Sophia is quite breathtaking. And while the Mediterranean-revival-style mansion, which was originally built in 1927, appears to be absolutely gargantuan from the street, in reality it “only” boasts 3 bedrooms, 4 baths, and 4,525 square feet – which is large, don’t get me wrong, but from the looks of the exterior, I expected the place to be a whole lot bigger.

As you can see in the above aerial view, the residence seems to be massive!

Villa Sophia was originally designed by Henry Harwood Hewitt, the L.A.-area architect who also gave us The Ebell Club of Los Angeles (an oft-used filming location that I really should have already blogged about being that I have stalked it twice!), the L.A. County Hall of Justice (also an oft-used location that was featured in the television shows Dragnet and Get Smart), and Bob Hope Patriotic Hall (yet another filming location that appeared in the movies Patton and Flashdance). Villa Sophia was commissioned by Clement E. Smoot, an Olympic-gold-medalist golfer turned industrial lighting manufacturer, and his wife, Margaret Miller Smoot. During the 1930s, the property became home to James Whale, the famed British film director who made Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Show Boat, and The Man with the Iron Mask, and who was also the subject of the 1998 flick Gods and Monsters. In the late 90s, the dwelling was purchased by Constantine, my new favorite homeowner Smile , who had spent years fantasizing about owning the place and who immediately began a massive renovation and restoration process, during which he added on a 15-foot retaining wall, a pool, a pool house, upper and lower rear terraces, a loggia, and a dining pavilion. Constantine even rents the 750-square-foot pool house out to vacationers, so if you are in the area and would like to stay at an Entourage filming location, you can book a reservation here. And you can see some fabulous close-up pictures of the home here.

[ad]

In the final episode of Entourage, which was appropriately titled “The End”, Villa Sophia was featured in the very last, post-credits scene in which Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) and his wife, Mrs. Ari (Perrey Reeves), are shown living their new life in Florence, Italy. It is at the home that Ari receives a phone call from Time Warner chairman John Ellis (Alan Dale), who announces that he is retiring and wants Ari to take over his job. Dun-dun-dun! As you can see above, the landscape of Florence was digitally added to the background of the scene.

Villa Sophia was also the site of a Victoria’s Secret “Bombshell Summer” commercial starring Candice Swanepoel, Chanel Iman, and Erin Heatherton that was filmed in May 2011.

Victoria’s Secret Bombshell Summer commercial filmed at Villa Sophia

You can watch a behind-the-scenes video of that shoot by clicking above.

Constantine also informed me that the home will be featured in the near future in a yet-to-be-released movie starring Kate Bosworth.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Villa Sophia, from “The End” episode of Entourage, is located at 4565 Dundee Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. You can visit the mansion’s official website here. The Lovell Health House, aka Pierce Patchett’s home from L.A. Confidential, is located just up the street at 4616 Dundee Drive.

November 10, 2011October 18, 2011

Dolly Green’s House from “Eye for an Eye”

Taking a break today from my many Gossip Girl posts, I thought I would write about a residence that I stalked with fellow stalker Chas, from the It’sFilmedThere website, way back in mid-July. While he was in town for a little Southern California stalking vacay, the two of us, along with his super-sweet mother, Cynthia, headed out to the Los Feliz area to visit the tiny Tudor-style bungalow where Dolly Green (aka Beverly D’Angelo, who will always be “Ellen Griswold” to me) and her husband, Peter (aka Darrell Larson), lived in the 1996 revenge thriller Eye for an Eye. Chas had somehow managed to track down the property – despite only a small portion of it ever being shown – as well as all of the other locations featured in the movie, a little over a year ago. And while I actually could not even remember what Dolly Green’s abode looked like before we arrived there, let me tell you, I absolutely fell in love with the place on site!

Dolly Green’s little fairy-tale-like dwelling, which was built over the side of a cascading cliff on the winding Glendower Avenue high up in the hills of Los Feliz, is absolutely ADORABLE in person. The abode is so quaint and charming that it looks as if it jumped right out of a Disney cartoon. I half expected the Seven Dwarfs to come walking out the front door, marching along to “Whistle While You Work”, while we were there.

Although calling the home “little” is a bit misleading. While it does appear to be small from the street, the residence is actually quite large. According to fave website Zillow, the dwelling, which was originally built in 1926, boasts 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, and measures 2,972 square feet. As you can see above, though, most of that square footage is located on the back side of the hill, below street level and out of view.

And speaking of views, the home boasts some incredible ones! We happened to stalk the residence on a smog-free day and were able to see all the way to Downtown Los Angeles! Amazing!

[ad]

Dolly Green’s residence only appears in one brief scene in Eye for an Eye, in which Karen McCann (aka Sally Field) and her husband, Mack (aka Ed Harris), spend the night at their friends’ house immediately following the murder of their teenage daughter, Julie (aka Olivia Burnette). Now that I have seen the property in person, I am shocked that only a small portion of it was shown in the movie. I mean, talk about curb appeal! This place has got it in spades! Why more of it was not featured is beyond me. But then again, I am not a filmmaker, so what do I know? Winking smile

Sadly, I was not able to find any photographs of the actual interior of the residence, so I am not able to say whether or not it was used in Eye for an Eye, but I would guess that it was.

Big THANK YOU to Chas, from the It’sFilmedThere website, for finding this location! Smile You can check out Chas’ extensive Eye for an Eye filming locations page here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Dolly Green’s house from Eye for an Eye is located at 2757 Glendower Avenue in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. Quite a few other filming locations can be found nearby – the Doppelganger mansion is at 2421 Glendower Avenue; Donna Martin’s house from the B.Y.O.B. episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 is at 2405 Glendower Avenue; the so-called “Los Feliz Murder House” is at 2475 Glendower Place, and the legendary Ennis-Brown house, which I have yet to stalk, is at 2607 Glendower Avenue.

October 7, 2011September 29, 2017

The “Doppelganger” Mansion

Another location from the 1993 thriller Doppelganger that I dragged the Grim Cheaper out to stalk this past weekend was the mansion where Holly Gooding (aka Drew Barrymore) grew up in the flick. I found this locale, once again, thanks to Tony, my friend and fellow stalker who has the amazing Flickr photostream which I mentioned yesterday. Incredibly enough, Tony has somehow managed to track down almost every single location featured in Doppelganger and he was kind enough to share them all with me so that I could blog about them during my Haunted Hollywood month – well, every location that is except for the supposed-Arcadia-area Our Lady of Mercy Psychiatric Institute which I have now become just a wee bit obsessed with finding. But I digress. Anyway, last weekend, after stopping by the apartment building featured in the movie, the GC and I headed a short two miles north to Los Feliz to do some stalking of the mansion.

[ad]

The Doppelganger mansion is featured twice in the flick. It first pops up in the scene in which Holly and her new roommate, struggling mystery writer Patrick Highsmith (aka George Newbern), meet with Holly’s family lawyer, Mike Wallace (aka George Maharis), in order to get the keys to her former home which has been locked up and sealed since her father’s murder four years prior. While there, Patrick says that the abode is “right out of a Bette Davis movie” – a line which I, of course, loved. Winking smile

The large, English-country-style abode later pops up in the movie’s climactic, rather odd, and definitely spooky final scene in which Holly returns to her childhood home in the middle of the night to confront her evil doppelganger and finally end the nightmare in which she has been living.

Patrick, of course, follows Holly and, carrying a baseball bat, climbs up the side of the house and through a second story window in the hopes that he can save her.

I believe that the interior of the mansion that was shown in the movie was just a set and not the home’s real life interior.

According to fave website Zillow, the Doppelganger mansion, which was originally built in 1923, boasts 5 bedrooms, 2 baths, and 3,500 square feet of living space, although I would have guessed it to be much, much larger. And amazingly, the property still looks almost exactly the same today as it did 18 years ago when Doppelganger was filmed. Even the three large circular trees which flank the home’s front door and front window still look exactly the same. Love it!

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Tony for finding this location! You can check out Tony’s FANTASTIC Flickr photostream, which features countless filming locations, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Doppelganger mansion is located at 2421 Glendower Avenue in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. Donna Martin’s house from the B.Y.O.B. episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 is located just two doors south of the Doppelganger mansion at 2405 Glendower Avenue. And the so-called “Los Feliz Murder House”, which I blogged about back in January, is located just around the corner at 2475 Glendower Place.

January 26, 2011June 9, 2021

The Los Feliz “Murder House”

I can honestly say that out of all of the locations that I have ever stalked in my entire life, the subject of today’s post is hands down the most perplexing and mind-boggling! Last week, when I called up Mike, from MovieShotsLA, to tell him that Geoff, from the 90210locations website, had tracked down the residence belonging to Donna Martin (aka Tori Spelling) during Season One of Beverly Hills, 90210, he fell silent with shock. As it turns out there is another very famous, or perhaps very infamous, property located just up the road from Donna’s house and it is a property that Mike has actually been to countless times in the past. He then proceeded to tell me about the Los Feliz “Murder House”, or “Murder Mansion” as it is also sometimes called, which I had never before heard of. And, let me tell you, once Mike filled me in on the story of the home I was literally up ALL NIGHT reading articles on the subject and I also immediately ran right out to see the place in person the very next day.

[ad]

The story – and it is absolutely fascinating – is as follows . . . On the night of December 6, 1959, Dr. Harold Perelson, a wealthy Inglewood heart specialist, bludgeoned his wife, Lillian, to death with a ball-peen hammer and severely beat his 18-year-old daughter, Judye, while his other two children slept soundly in their bedrooms. Judye survived the beating and ran down the hillside to a neighbor’s home at 2471 Glendower Place to call for help. In the meantime, the two younger children awoke and asked their father about the screaming. Harold told them that they had been having a nightmare and to go back to sleep. He then took a cocktail of pills, killing himself instantly. The police arrived shortly thereafter and took all three Perelson children into custody. The mansion was locked up and the children were sent to live with relatives back east. The motive behind the brutal murder/suicide was never completely known, although some speculate that the Perelsons were in financial trouble. But here’s where the story gets weird.

About a year after the murder/suicide, the Perelson’s 5,050-square-foot, Spanish Revival-style mansion was purchased by Emily and Julian Enriquez via a probate auction. And while the couple, who lived in Lincoln Heights at the time, visited the mansion on occasion and even stored some of their possessions there, for reasons that remain unclear they never inhabited the property, nor did they ever move the Perelson’s belongings out! To this day, over five decades later, the mansion remains in almost the exact same state it was in on the night of December 6, 1959! According to a February 6, 2009 Los Angeles Times article written about the case, not only is the Perelson’s furniture still as it was on that evening, but their Christmas gifts remain sitting on the kitchen table, as if someone was interrupted mid-wrap, and their Christmas tree still stands in the living room!! I’m not making this up! Even stranger still is the fact that even though Emily and Julian have since passed away and their son has owned the property since 1994, it still remains in its December 1959 state. The Los Angeles Times article reports that numerous buyers have contacted Rudy wanting to purchase the home, but that, for whatever reason, he refuses to sell.

The mansion, which was built in 1925 and was quite beautiful in its day, boasts four master bedrooms, three bathrooms, a conservatory, maid’s quarters, a 20-foot by 36-foot ballroom, sweeping views of Los Angeles, and sits on over half an acre of land. Sadly though, the house has fallen into severe disrepair during the past fifty-plus years that it has remained vacant. As you can see in the above photographs, the driveway is severely cracked and the mailbox is almost completely toppled over. Neighbors do what they can to keep the grounds in order and a burglar alarm has recently been installed to keep trespassers out, but other than that the house remains frozen in time and most believe that it will eventually have to be torn down. Ron Shinkman, of The Irony Supplement Blog, wrote a very interesting post on the Perelson mansion back in early 2009 and actually managed to snap a few photographs of the interior of the property, in which some of the Perelson’s former furniture and even one of the children’s former board games are visible. Personally I think there has to be something more to the story and that perhaps the Enriquez family knew the Perelsons and had a personal reason for leaving the house in its 1959 state, but the truth of the matter is that we will most likely never know the whole story.

Another famous property, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis house, is located directly behind the Perelson mansion and is denoted with the pink arrow in the above photograph. The house, which I have yet to blog about, is one of the most famous properties in the entire world, architecturally speaking, and has appeared in such films as 1959’s House on Haunted Hill, The Day of the Locust, Blade Runner, and Rush Hour.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for telling me about this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The former Perelson mansion, aka the “Los Feliz Murder House”, is located at 2475 Glendower Place, just off of Glendower Avenue, in Los Feliz. Donna Martin’s house from the first season of Beverly Hills, 90210 is located at 2405 Glendower Avenue and the Ennis house is located at 2607 Glendower Avenue.

January 25, 2011January 24, 2011

Donna Martin’s House from the B.Y.O.B. Episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210”

One location that I have been wanting to stalk for just about as long as I can remember now is the mansion where Donna Martin (aka Tori Spelling) lived in the Season 1 episode of fave show Beverly Hills, 90210 titled “B.Y.O.B”. For whatever reason, though, I could just NOT seem to track the place down. Over the past few months I had managed to contact a few of the crew members who had worked on the episode and even a few of the actors who had appeared in it, all of whom told me that they did not recognize the screen capture of the house that I had sent them and that the property where filming took place was located somewhere in the Valley. One of the crew members also told me that he was 99.9% certain that the establishing shot of the mansion which appeared in the episode had been a stock photograph and that no actual filming had taken place there. This news pained me to hear as, because stock photographs are most often purchased from stock location libraries, it meant that the chances of tracking the place down were slim to none. So, imagine my surprise last Friday when I received a tweet from Geoff, from the 90210locations website, informing me that he had somehow managed to find the mansion! Let me tell you, I just about died of excitement and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place the very next day! Thank you, Geoff!!

Sadly, while I am VERY happy to report that the mansion still looks almost EXACTLY the same today as it did when it appeared on Beverly Hills, 90210 over two decades ago, the property is gated and is not very visible from the street. Sad smile The house, which was originally built in 1926, is definitely beautiful, though, and absolutely GINORMOUS! In real life, it boasts 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 8,260 square feet of living space.

As fate would have it, when Mike, from MovieShotsLA, went to stalk the home later that very same day, the gate happened to be open and he was able to take the above photograph which matches the screen capture from the “B.Y.O.B.” episode perfectly! So incredibly cool!

[ad]

The mansion pictured above was actually only used as Donna’s residence in the “B.Y.O.B.” episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. In later episodes, two different properties stood in for her home – one located at 18515 Wells Drive in Encino, which I blogged about back in November of 2008, and another located at 1060 Brooklawn Drive in Bel Air, which in real life is owned by Barron Hilton, Paris’ grandfather, and which was also used as the Colby mansion on the television series The Colbys. In the “B.Y.O.B” episode, Donna throws a massive party at the mansion while her parents are out of town, during which Steve Sanders (aka Ian Ziering) spikes Brandon Walsh’s (aka Jason Priestley’s) drink – aka his “mucho ‘mahvelous’ mango margarita”.

As I mentioned above though, all of the actual filming of “B.Y.O.B.” took place at a different residence (pictured above), which, according to all of the crew members and actors that I spoke with, is located somewhere in the Valley, most likely Encino.

While I was scanning through the “B.Y.O.B” episode to make screen captures for today’s post, I noticed something a bit coincidental. In the scene in which Brenda Walsh (aka my girl Shannen Doherty) spots her brother Brandon standing in Donna’s backyard, a green awning-type structure is visible in the background.

Well, as it just so happens, there is a very similar looking – and very similarly situated – green awning-type structure in the backyard of the home located at 18515 Wells Drive in Encino, the very same dwelling which stood in for the Martin residence during the later years of the show. The brick patio flooring of the Wells Drive home also matches that of the home from “B.Y.O.B”. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the property used as Donna’s house in the “B.Y.O.B.” episode from Season 1 was the very same property which ended up being used as her home nine years later during Seasons 9 and 10? Without more close-up images of the backyard, it is impossible to tell either way, but nevertheless I found the whole thing very interesting!

Big THANK YOU to Geoff, from 90210Locations, for finding this location and to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for snapping the incredible photograph of it which appears in this post! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Donna Martin’s house from the first season of Beverly Hills, 90210 is located at 2405 Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz.