Ellen DeGeneres Makes Off-Market Sale in Montecito (EXCLUSIVE)
Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi made an $11 million off-market deal to sell Rancho San Leandro, the smaller of their two multi-million dollar estates in the fire and mud slide ravaged but still tony and extravagantly pricey seaside community of Montecito, Calif., for $11 million. The couple, two of Hollywood’s most prolific buyers and sellers of high-end residential real estate, earned themselves an impressively hefty profit on the property they purchased only about eight months ago for $7.195 million and plugged in real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketeyyak swears the new owner is Tinder founder and chairman Sean Rad.
The idyllic, oak and eucalyptus dotted equestrian compound, which butts up against Oprah Winfrey’s vast and manicured 40-acre estate she calls The Promised Land, spans almost six ocean- and mountain-view acres and is anchored by a historical adobe hacienda that dates to the middle 1800s with 2,751-square-feet of carefully restored and conscientiously updated interior space. In addition to a downright spectacular 50-foot-long combination living and dining room with matching fireplaces at either end and a soaring trestle and beam vaulted ceiling, the modestly proportioned main residence includes a sunny kitchen and adjoining informal dining area that opens to a deep, wrap-around veranda, a basement level games room or storage space and a master suite with fireplace, small walk-in closet and spacious bathroom.
A giant cobblestone-paved courtyard arranged around a central fountain separates the low-slung main residence from a trio of structures linked by a wide covered porch. One structure houses a three-car garage and another includes a library with a Santa Barbara stone fireplace plus a half bathroom and a gym. The third and largest structure is a self-contained two-story guesthouse of 3,635-square-feet with three bedrooms — the two upstairs are en suite with good-sized walk-in closets — and three bathrooms plus a complete kitchen and a step-down living room with an imposing fireplace flanked by French doors that open to a commodious covered dining and lounging patio with outdoor fireplace and over-the-treetops ocean view.
The property additionally offers a four-stall horse barn with tack room beneath a purple-flowered jacaranda tree and the stable sits next to a fenced riding arena and pasture. It’s unclear what improvements, if any, DeGeneres and de Rossi made during their brief ownership but at the time of their purchase the property did not have a swimming pool or a tennis court.
The DeGeneres-de Rossis, who last year shelled out $18.6 million for a striking ocean front contemporary compound on prestigious Padaro Lane in nearby Carpinteria, continue to own a much bigger estate in Montecito, an almost 17-acre spread they acquired in two 2013 transactions that totaled $28.8 million. Originally designed by Wallace Frost and later owned by internationally acclaimed designer John Saladino, the more than 10,000-plus-square-foot stone-built Tuscan-style villa, surrounded by a couple of outbuildings that include a poolside entertainment pavilion, came up for sale on the open market in March 2017 for $45 million. The price was chopped to $39.5 million in late 2017 and it was taken off the open market shortly after the first of this year.
For now, the famously peripatetic L.A.-based couple’s primary residence remains a nearly 5,300-square-foot mid-century bungalow sequestered behind gates and down a long driveway on a prime street in Beverly Hills they scooped up in late 2015 for $15.995 million. (There are wholly unsubstantiated rumors afoot, first relayed by well-connected tattletale Kenny Kissentell, the property mad pair may be interested in acquiring a neighboring property that, so the Platinum Triangle real estate scuttlebutt goes, has become available off-market with an asking price of around $20 million.)
As for Rad, reportedly worth about a billion dollars based on a $3 billion evaluation of Tinder in late 2017, in 2016 he traded a 5,300-square-foot penthouse atop a luxury high-rise along L.A.’s Wilshire Corridor — it was sold for $7.75 million — for a sophisticated, vine-encrusted European villa of just over 5,000-square-feet set behind gates just above the ever-chic Sunset Strip for which he paid a high-powered 20th Century Fox Film executive $7.65 million.
listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
Launch Gallery: Ellen DeGeneres Flips Montecito Estate to Tinder’s Sean Rad
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