nicolascage

Believe it or not there is even more of Nicolas Cage's real estate to cover. I thought we went over most of it a few weeks ago but the Real Estalker reminds me that there is another Cage home up for sale. It's another New Orleans classic and this one has quite the spooky past.
Cage seems to have a natural love of the macabre, he collects ancient skulls, horror movie posters and haunted houses. The LaLaurie house is a six-bedroom home on Royal Street that was a house of horrors in the mid 1800s. Delphine LaLaurie is believed to have tortured her slaves. Accounts differ as to what actually happened but the stories span the range from starving, beating and imprisonment to far more lurid and unspeakable acts. In 1834 there was a fire at the house and Madame LaLaurie disappeared never to darken the door of her own home again. Some reports say screams and the sound of chains dragging on the ground have been heard in the house and several owners have bought the home and then quickly sold it.

The gray home has a modern interior including a new kitchen and beige walls. This one isn't as charming as his other New Orleans home and he has accented it with red velvet furniture and some rather sinister art depicting vampires, gargoyle-topped buildings and strange monsters (all of which makes the crucifix on the wall in the dining room seem a bit disturbing). Cage bought the home in December 2006 for $3.45 million. Cage put it on the market last fall for $3.9 million but it is now listed at $3.55 million making this one a definite money loser for him.

For a more Earth day friendly estate, check out the Earthship on the Bright and Spacious blog.

The real estate habits of Nicolas Cage are legendary. He does more buying and selling in a year or two than most of us could do in a lifetime. In the U.S. he currently has three properties on the market but overseas he's just sold one of his many homes. Cage bought the 11th-century Schloss Neidstein in 2006 for $2.3 million back in July 2006. It is believed that he spent millions in renovations on the 10-bedroom property which is on a hill and overlooks more than 395 acres of forest and meadows. But after all that work, Cage did what he always does, he moved on. The Telegraph says that Cage spent only one night in the castle.


Cage has a variety of properties up for sale from a $7 million island in the Bahamas to homes in Nevada, California, Rhode Island and Louisiana. While I've covered the other three, I haven't given the New Orleans, Louisiana house estate-of-the-day treatment yet. It seems a grave mistake on my part because it's quite lovely. The Garden District home has six bedrooms and grounds that include a heated pool and statuary. Inside the home's graceful lines, marble fireplaces, plasterwork, stained glass and curved staircase are elegantly preserved. The kitchen seems to be an overly modern off note but otherwise the home is beautiful and the rooms done in shades of periwinkle and pale blue are particularly winning. Cage bought in 2005 for $3.45 million and this home is now listed at $3.7 million.

UPDATE: This home is now listed at $3.45 million.

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[Thanks, Lana!]

Nicolas Cage may have had the box office topping movie last weekend but another movie also put a little more money in his pockets. His copy of a 1931 "Dracula" movie poster sold for $310,700 to a retired financial executive and collector as part of an auction of movie posters by Heritage Auction galleries on March 21. The collector, Ralph DeLuca, also picked up a copy of the poster for the 1932 movie "Freaks." That poster was only bought for just $10 by the owners who found it in an antiques store in the early 1970s. The two-day auction in Dallas and online generated $2.5 million in winning bids.

Like Dakota over at Curbed LA, I've got a weakness for the home Nicolas Cage is trying to sell in Bel Air, California. This vintage Tudor is classic old Hollywood and was once home to both Dean Martin and Tom Jones. Cage purchased the home in 1998 from Jones for $6.469 million and has been trying to sell the home off and on since 2006 when it was listed at $35 million. The seven-bedroom home is on an acre of land and has over 11,000 square feet of space. It's ridiculously, deliciously grand with a large theater, game room, wine cellar and rooms of truly epic scale. It is now listed at $19.75 million.

This isn't Cage's only price cut. The Las Vegas home he put on the market last summer has had a more modest price chop down to $9.49 million. It was listed at $9.95 million when it was our estate of the day. His Rhode Island home, which we covered back in October, remains at $15.9 million.

From the LA Times Hot Property:
--Rosemarie Stack, the widow of Robert Stack has put her Wilshire corridor condo up for sale for $6.5 million, shown above. It is listed here.
--"CSI: Miami" actress Khandi Alexander's Hollywood Hills home is still on the market. We'll be checking it out later as our estate of the day.
--Meg Ryan's Bel-Air home is now officially listed at $19.5 million. The listing is here.
--Roy Schlobohm, whose father founded the Shirley's of Hollywood bra and lingerie manufacturing company in 1948, has listed his Malibu beach home at $13.3 million. It's too pretty to pass up, we'll be checking this one out later this week.
--World champion ice skater Tai Babilonia listed her Sherman Oaks home at $1,085,000 and it was in escrow in less than a week.

From the Real Estalker:
--Venture capitalist Tom Perkins has put his home in the Bay Area back on the market for $20.5 million. It was that same price back in 2006 when we checked it out as an estate of the day.
--Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott have picked up a home in Encino for $2.495 million. Their Westwood home was our estate of the day recently.
--Toby Keith has put his Nashville home on the market. It was our estate of the day on Saturday.
--Jade Jagger has put her London house on the market. We'll be checking out this one on Monday.

From the NY Post's Gimme Shelter:
--Alex Rodriguez has lowered the price of his Park Avenue apartment and is also offering it for rent. He is now asking $12.5 million for the four-bedroom unit Trump Park Avenue or will rent the place unfurnished for $50,000 a month. Braden Keil took a tour and found it "surprisingly elegant" looking "more like the home of a buttoned-down business executive than an athlete." We covered this and A-Rod's other home for sale as our estate of the day last week.
--Model Elizabeth Jagger has moved out of her Greenwich Village apartment after the owner of the five-unit townhouse decided to put it on the market. The listing for the five-story 1853 Anglo-Italianate townhouse, available for $7.95 million, is here.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--Baseball player Steve Finley and his wife, interior designer Amy Finley have put a beachfront home in Del Mar, California on the market for $21.5 million. We'll be taking a closer look at this one on Tuesday.
--Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco, is still in jail but is still trying to sell his Nantucket home. He bought the home for $5 million for the house in 1997. The current asking price of $16.45 million is less than the home's assessed value of $16.92 million. The listing is here.
--In Manhattan, a 10-room apartment at The Dakota is now listed for $19.5 million, down 19% from its original $24 million set in June. The owner is a Wall Street executive and the listing is here.
-- Diandra De Morrell Douglas, the ex-wife of actor Michael Douglas, is in contract to sell her townhouse which was most recently listed at $9.25 million.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
--Corcoran broker Deborah Kern, has two $12 million NYC listings, her own eight-room Majestic co-op which she and her husband, James Kern, a former senior managing director at Bear Stearns, paid j$5.2 million for in 2005 and the Park Avenue home of Mark Goldstein, who became the co-head of Bear Stearns' European investment banking last year who bought his home for $5.275 million in 2006.
--Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz, whose father, the Texas natural-gas mogul George P. Mitchell, is currently ranked by Forbes as No. 349 on the list of the world's billionaires, just bought a condo at 50 Orchard Street for $1.4 million.
--Alice R. Gottesman, whose father is the investor David Gottesman (No. 428 on the Forbes list ), spent $6,957,917 on two neighboring co-op units at 118 West 79th Street.
--Roy Judelson, whose father, David Judelson, co-founded Gulf & Western in 1956 and the biotechnology company Biopure decades later, has a bigger apartment. He and his wife paid $10.5 million this month for an 11-room, four-bedroom, 3,950-square-foot co-op at 33 East 70th Street.
--The Park Avenue home of the late fashion designer turned real estate executive turned Showgirls producer Charles Evans has had another price cut. It was originally listed at $29.5 million and is now at listed at $20 million. The listing for the triplex penthouse is here.

From Newsday's Real LI :
--Kenjocketey, a Lloyd Neck, NY estate that we first covered back in 2005 when it was for sale for $16.25 million is still on the market, now for an even $13 million. The listing is here.
--Fashion designer Adrienne Vittadini has lowered the price of her Water Mill, New York home to $6.495 million. It will be an estate of the day later this week.

From Berg Properties Big Time Listings:
--A four-bedroom house in Los Angeles' Los Feliz neighborhood that the late actor Paul Winfield had owned until he died in 2004 has sold for $3.65 million.

From TMZ:
--Orlando Magic star, Dwight Howard has picked up a new home in Longwood, Florida for around $8 million and it's a former estate of the day which was once listed at $9.7 million.
--Nicolas Cage who recently has listed several of his properties has put one of his New Orleans homes for sale for $3.7 million (Big Time Listings reports he bought the home for $3.45 million in 2005). The listing is here.

From the IHT's Raising the Roof blog:
--Villa Fontana, a 16th Century villa outside the Tuscan town of Cortona is on the market for the first time in 500 years. The 16-bedroom villa is listed at 8 million euros.

The Gray Craig home in Middletown, Rhode Island as been on my radar since it was for sale for $19 million in 2005. Since then it was bought by serial house flipper Nicolas Cage for, as the Boston Globe reports, $15.7 million which is just $200,000 off from the current $15.9 million listing price.

The home is on over 27 acres of land that extends to Nelson Pond and includes views of the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The grounds feature a pool, tennis court, fish pond, stone terrace and heated garages. The brick and stone home has 12 bedrooms and was built in a grand style. Public rooms include a library with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, a formal living room with water views, dining room, vintage conservatory, billiard room, and a kitchen with a stone fireplace, custom hickory ceilings, and antique terra cotta floor tiles.

Like the Real Estalker, I find the fact that the library is now dominated by a flat screen television and a ling dining room table to be a bit disconcerting.The home is full of all sorts of huge spaces that will need more than those charming fireplaces to keep them warm in the winter months. But it is a truly impressive home for someone who has the time and money to maintain it.

Cage seems to be in a selling mood lately. We've seen both his Las Vegas home and his Bel-Air mansion on the market. but he still has plenty of properties all around the world.

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Real estate commenter extraordinaire, Spectacular Bid directs us to the video for the home made the last time it was on the market. It is after the jump.

UPDATE: This home is now listed at $12 million as of August 2009.

From the LA Times Hot Properties:
--Celebrity manager Rick Yorn has sold his Brentwood house for $9.35 million.
-- Wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin listed his 3,881-square-foot house in Malibu for $3,895,000 originally, it just sold for $2.5 million.
--The home belonging to Kanye West's mom, Donda West is expected to get another price cut, to $1.595 million. The contemporary home in the Playa del Rey area of Los Angeles was originally priced at $1.945 million and was dropped to $1.745 million at the end of May. The listing is here.
--The Polaroid house, shown above, is located on Malibu's Carbon Beach, has been home to plenty of A-list parties but with Malibu's new paparazzi crackdown the home is looking for just one owner. The property has 80 feet of beach frontage and has approved plans to build a 6,000 square foot estate with a beachfront pool and spa as well as the existing home. It is listed at $32 million.

From the NY Post's Real Estate section:
--Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger is about to list his Plaza apartment for $50 million. The apartment is located in the northeast dome on the 18th and 19th floors of the building and includes four bedrooms, a formal dining room, large living room, library and gourmet kitchen.
--Paul McCartney is looking for a New York City apartment closer to the Upper East Side apartment of his new flame Nancy Shevell.
--Denis Leary's TV series "Rescue Me" has just signed a six-month lease with Loft 14, the 10-story condominium building at 135 W. 14th St., where taping of their fifth season will begin this month. The lease is for $14,000 a month and the apartment has a real asking price of $2,375 million.

From Berg Properties Big Time Listings:
--Actor Chris O'Donnell has paid an undisclosed amount for a house in Pacific Palisades. The seller bought it last year for $4.675 million. He sold his last house in Pacific Palisades for $5.05 million.
--Jamie Foxx has sold his Tarzana home. It was our estate of the day back in June.
--Nicolas Cage's Bel Air home is back on the market, this time for $29.999 million. It hit the market last September for $35 million and was later pulled. The listing for the classic home which has been owned by both Dean Martin and Tom Jones is here.
--Glenn Frey has paid $7.75 million for a six-bedroom estate in Hana, Hawaii, on Maui.
--Kiefer Sutherland has paid $8.25 million for a t five-story town house in Manhattan's West Village.

From the Real Estalker:
--Looks like neither Donald Trump nor the mystery buyer have picked up Ed McMahon's house. It is still listed at $4.6 million.
--Rumor has it that Cher has sold her Malibu mansion which was listed at $45 million.
--Stevie Wonder has put his home in Los Feliz on the market for $3.2 million.
--Nascar racer Denny Hamlin has put his North Carolina home on the market. It's our estate of the day later today.
----via Boston.com, quarterback Tom Brady is a real estate winner. He converted a Beacon Street town house into four condos and sold three of them saving the top floors floors for himself. As a result he earned back more than he paid two years ago for the building. His total proceeds were $7.95 million which is $1.71 million more than he paid for the entire building, according to public deed records.
--via Nashville City Paper, country singer Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn and his wife Barbara are the buyers in Nashville's biggest home sale of the year. They paid $5.45 million in August for a new house in Forest Hills.
--via the Real Deal, Moby sold his penthouse at the El Dorado, the twin-towered cooperative apartment at 300 Central Park West near 90th Street, for $6.7 million. It was our estate of the day in July of 2007 when it was priced at $7.5 million.
--Dane Cook has picked up a four-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills for $7,078,412.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--Basketball player Allen Iverson has reduced the price on his Villanova, Pennsylvania home by 37%. We will be checking this out as our estate of the day on Monday.
--Basketball player Rasheed Wallace has cut the price on his Portland, Oregon home. It will be our estate of the day on Tuesday.
--Actor Matthew Modine has purchased a condominium in New York's Chelsea section for $1.7 million.
--Leonard Ross who put the Hearst estate in Beverly Hills on the market for $165 million has taken it off the market. He has decided to keep the home.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
-- A co-op penthouse in 1060 Fifith Avenue has sold for $48,836,000 setting a new co-op price record in Manhattan. Hedge fund manager Scott Bommer and wife Donya. The couple bought the home for $46 million penthouse back in January. The buyer is listed anonymously on the deed as Park View Trust.
--Writer Ian Buruma spent $1,495,000 on an apartment at the Kalahari on West 116th Street. He and Eri Hotta, who taught at Oxford until 2005, closed last month.
--Ben Stiller spent $10 million on a duplex in a prewar orange-brick co-op on Riverside Drive in the West 80s, the same building that his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, have lived in for years.

From the LA Times Hot Property:
--Entertainment lawyer and the mastermind behind the Hands Across America and "We Are the World" events, Ken Kragen, has listed his Beverly Hills home, shown above, for $5.595 million. The listing is here.
--Commercial composer Jonathan Elias has sold his 5,865-square-foot Santa Monica home for $4.395 million.
--Nicolas Cage has leased a unit in the downtown Biscuit Company Lofts with an option to buy. He may have picked up a 3,500-square-foot penthouse unit, which was listed at $4.9 million.

From the Real Estalker:
--Rumor has it that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner may have picked up a 1930s Hollywood Georgian in Holmby Hills which has been listed at $27.5 million for around $22 million. The listing is here.
--Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott have picked up a home in the Westwood area of Los Angeles for $2.275 million.
--Anne Heche and James Tupper have put their West Vancouver, Canada home on the market for $2,450,00 (Canadian). Heche and Tupper bought the home for $2.2 million in May, 2007.
--Michael Bolton has put his Westport, Connecticut home on the market for $11 million. It's our estate of the day on Monday.

From Berg Properties Big Time Listings:
A five-bedroom house in Bel-Air that was once owned by Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal has come on the market for $9,500,000. The listing is here.
--Ryan Cabrera has put his Hollywood Hills home on the market, it's our estate of the day later today.
The four-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills that previously belonged to Charlie Sheen's wife, Brooke Mueller is back on the market with a $2.395 million listing price (she sold it for $2.317 million last year). The property website is here.
--Actor Justin Long has listed his home for $1.495 million. The listing is here.

From the Luxury Property Blog:
--A home featured in the movie "Moonstruck" as Cher's character's house recently sold for close to $4 million.

From the NY Post's Gimme Shelter:
--Baseball player Mike Piazza will officially list his duplex TriBeCa loft for $6.8 million in September and is looking for a bigger place in Manhattan.
-- Jocelyn Wildenstein spent nearly $8 million for a 3,000-square-foot condo on the Plaza and now another Wildenstein, thought to be Guy Wildenstein, bought on the floor below his former in-law for $31.7 million. Two apartments - 409 and 411 - sold for $21.926 million and $9.787 million under Wildenstein & Company.
--Model Adriana Lima and basketball player Marko Jaric are looking for an apartment in New York. The couple has been seen checking out the penthouse at 40 Walker, a new residential building in TriBeCa, which is listed at $7 million.
--from Page Six, --Ricky Gervais and his girlfriend Jane Fallon have spent $1.66 million for a one-bedroom condo at the converted Barbizon hotel on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--President Ford's Vail, Colorado ski retreat is on the market for the second time in less than two years. Real-estate investor Kevin Hayes, bought the home in early 2007 after Ford's death for $6.65 million and says he spent over $4 million on renovations. He has listed the home for $14.9 million.
--NFL star Michael Strahan paid between $1.5 and $2 million for a loft in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood.
--Real-estate developer R. Donahue Peebles has listed his Washington, D.C., stone Tudor house for $8.3 million. It was our estate of the day on Saturday.

From Real LI:
--Baseball player Edgardo Alfonzo has reduced the price on his home in Little Neck, New York. It went on the market in late 2006 for $8 million and has now been lowered at least four times since then is now listed at $5.3 million. Alfonzo paid $900,000 for the property in 1999 and has spent nearly as much in remodeling. The listing is here.
--New York Jets linebacker Bryan Thomas has taken his Huntington home off the market and has decided to rent the property instead of selling.

From TMZ:
Michael Phelps spent $1.69 million for a condo on the waterfront in Baltimore, Md.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
--The Kress family penthouse, a 17-room Fifth Avenue apartment with ballroom ceilings imported from 17th-century Venetian palaces and marble staircases carved from Michelangelo's quarry was previously listed for $50 million then pulled off the market. Next month, the penthouse will be back on the market again with a listing price of around $45 million with Leighton Candler of Corcoran.


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Yesterday I mentioned that actor Nicolas Cage had put his Las Vegas home on the market. Cage, who has a variety of properties scattered all around the world, picked up this home in 2006 for $8.5 million. The Wall Street Journal reports that at that time he also picked up a home for $2.25 million on the same street but sold it last year for $2.3 million. Cage is looking to make a little more cash on this one, he's listed it for $9.95 million. The WSJ says that the 14,000-square-foot home with the 16-car garage has been on the market since last fall.

The seven-bedroom home isn't particularly notable. It's blandly extravagant with a sweeping staircase, home theater, elevator and panoramic views of Las Vegas. The home has a pool and spa and is located in a gated community for privacy. It's rich but it's nothing special and given the soft las Vegas real estate market he may have some trouble getting rid of this one.

UPDATE: It is now listed at $9.49 million.

For more prime properties and lush locations, see Luxury Homes and Mansions.

We already knew Nicolas Cage was spendy, Ferraris, his own Bahamian island and a Bavarian castle have been among his legendary purchases. But this week saw a bidding war between Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio over a dinosaur skull. The Daily Telegraph reports that the two stars locked horns at a Beverly Hills auction over a 67 million-year-old dinosaur skull. Cage eventually won, for $276,000.

The article in the Telegraph goes on to chronicle the hot trend in all sorts of dino artifacts reporting that other dinosaur collectors include director Ron Howard and Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft chief and amateur paleontologist. Like art prices, the prices of fossils have had a steady uptick over the past ten years. This has been good news for the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial fossil company which has been involved in a variety of excavations including two Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons. The Great Plains area has yielded a variety of fossils and dinosaur bones.

In Italy, Greece and other European countries, some farmers have occasionally supplemented their incomes with finds from their land. The same seems to be true for some farmers in the US with dinosaur bones. For some, finding the bones can be a windfall in a time when drought has plagued the land. The article tells the story of Bucky Derflinger, from South Dakota who managed to buy a 4,000-acre cattle range with his share of the money from finding dinosaurs on his father's land. So perhaps in some very roundabout way, Cage and the other celebs snatching up dino remains at exorbitant prices are actually helping American farmers.