DeGeneres and Rossi pay $29M for Modernist gem in Bel-Air

Richard Neutra-designed estate, called Brown-Sidney House, sold in off-market deal

Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi and Brown-Sidney House at 10801 Chalon Road (Getty, Marmol Radziner Architecture)
Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi and Brown-Sidney House at 10801 Chalon Road (Getty, Marmol Radziner Architecture)

Ellen DeGeneres has rejoined L.A. Cool by buying a Richard Neutra-designed, mid-century modern home in Bel-Air for $29 million.

The former talk show host and her wife, Portia de Rossi, who own many mansions in Montecito, bought the Brown-Sidney House at 10801 Chalon Road in an off-market deal, Dirt.com reported.

The seller was hedge fund mogul Adam Levinson, who bought it in 2019 for $20 million in an off-market trade from film director Tom Ford.

Built in 1955, the steel-and-glass pavilion is perched on a hill with 180-degree views of Los Angeles. The Brown House, as it’s also known, sits on three quarters of an acre and has not been publicly listed in a quarter century.

It has three bedrooms and six bathrooms with 3,800 square feet.

Neutra’s Modernist home above the Bel-Air Country Club was painstakingly restored for Ford by Marmol Radziner, a design firm based in Sawtelle.

“A palette of muted browns and grays, including dark brown casework throughout the home, unifies the interior spaces outfitted with modern amenities,” Marmol Radziner says of the restoration on its website.

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The home’s walls of floor-to-ceiling glass ushered in an L.A. modernism that blurred the boundaries of indoors and outdoors, imitated around the world.

Its light-filled living room contains a stacked stone fireplace. Its master bedroom bath is awash in jet-black tiles.

On a plateau below the main house, a guesthouse cabana opens to a sunbathing terrace alongside the dark-bottom swimming pool.

Home flippers DeGeneres and Rossi now own at least five properties in celebrity-rich Montecito. Last year, they sold a mansion in Beverly Hills for $47 million.

Levinson, who maintains homes in Tokyo and Singapore, paid $58.5 million last May for a contemporary mansion in Bel-Air. Two months later, he sold an ocean-front home in the Hamptons for a record $42 million.

— Dana Bartholomew

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