Sharon Stone Puts House Back
On Market After Four Months
Actress Sharon Stone has put a Beverly Hills, Calif., home she bought just four months ago on sale -- at a $1.5 million markup.
Ms. Stone bought the seven-bedroom home for about $11 million in March, but never moved in. According to listing agent Susan Smith of Westside Estate Agency, Ms. Stone changed her mind about the house and decided to sell it. She's asking $12.5 million for the property, which hasn't been renovated since the sale.
The 9,000-square-foot home, built in 1991, sits on about five acres on North Beverly Drive and borders the Beverly Park gated community that's home to stars such as Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. The property features a five-bedroom main house and a two-bedroom guesthouse with media room and gym. Other amenities include a pool, spa, tennis court, wine cellar, 15-car underground garage and a meditation garden surrounded by fruit trees.
Ms. Stone, 48, recently starred in "Basic Instinct 2," which brought in less than $6 million at U.S. theaters, according to the box-office tracker BoxOfficeMojo.com. Last year, Ms. Stone sold her seven-bedroom San Francisco home, which she bought in 1998 with her then-husband, San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein, for close to $15 million. The actress declined to comment.
Back and Forth in Big Apple
Wealthy Texas businessman B. Edward Ewing has pulled off the market a New York apartment listed for more than a month for $15.3 million, his broker said in an email. Mr. Ewing said yesterday that the apartment isn't for sale.
The head of Dallas-based Ewing Management Group, which focuses on acquiring and managing underperforming companies, bought the condominium, on the third floor of Trump Park Avenue in Manhattan, last year. Public records put his purchase price at nearly $8.6 million; Mr. Ewing disputes that but wouldn't say what he paid.
The Trump Park unit underwent a major renovation in the last year, according to its listing, turning the original six-bedroom apartment into one with four bedrooms, including two master bedrooms. The approximately 5,500-square-foot space has five marble bathrooms, two libraries, an office, a terrace and a formal dining room. The building, constructed in 1929 as the Hotel Delmonico and reopened as a condo development in 2003, also has a fitness center and offers maid, valet, and laundry services. Kedakai Lipton, a broker for Corcoran Group, had the listing.
Black History on Vineyard
A Martha's Vineyard, Mass., home that once served as a summer retreat for leaders of the civil-rights movement is on the market for $2,575,000.
Built in the 1870s, the 18-room, 4,590-square-foot Victorian house, known as Villa Rosa because of its pink exterior, has nine bedrooms and four bathrooms on about 6,000 square feet of land. The home includes a Victorian oak bar, marble bathrooms and wraparound balconies with views of Nantucket Sound. It sits near the island's northern tip in the town of Oak Bluffs, a summer retreat for generations of African-American families.
Joe Overton, a union leader and political organizer in Harlem, owned the house during the 1950s and 1960s and hosted such leaders as A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., according to local historian Elaine Cawley Weintraub, who adds that the home was known as the "summer White House" of the civil-rights movement. Neighbors recall Dr. King reading and writing on the porch and swimming at the beach. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected African-American senator, owned homes nearby.
Mr. Overton's heirs sold the house in 1996 to software entrepreneur Peter Norton, who says he planned to create a retreat house for artists and scholars of black culture. When that plan fell through, he sold the house to former radio executive Faith Zila and her husband, Bruce, for $415,000 in 1998. The couple say they completely restored the house -- though not before discovering Mr. Overton's address book containing the old five-digit phone numbers of many prominent blacks.
The house was recently added to the island's African-American Heritage Trail. Idalyn Macchia Gilstad of Coldwell Banker Landmarks Real Estate has the listing.
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