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Los Angeles

After selling $200M Malibu estate, Bill and Maria Bell buy in Beverly Hills

Soap opera heir and his producer wife buy Hollywood Regency masterpiece for $20M

TV Couple Bill and Maria Bell Buy Hollywood Regency Estate
Bill and Maria Bell with 965 North Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills (Getty, Ramsa Houses)

Bill and Maria Bell have scored a 1960s Hollywood Regency home in Beverly Hills for $20.1 million.

The art collectors who just sold a 40,000-square-foot Malibu mansion to Beyoncé and Jay-Z for $200 million bought the 4,100-square-foot home at 965 North Alpine Drive, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The sellers were Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and his wife, Aileen Roberts, who bought the house in 2016 for $11 million.

Judy Feder of The Beverly Hills Estates represented the sellers. Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency represented the buyers.

The single-story home, designed in 1961 by John Elgin Woolf who had popularized the Hollywood Regency style, has fluted columns, parquet wood floors and “romancing details,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Designed for actress Eleanor Parker, the home was later acquired by the architect, who lived there for a decade with his partner, interior decorator Robert Koch Woolf.

It has floor-to-ceiling windows, a chef’s kitchen with marble countertops, a formal living room, a salon with fireplace, a library, dining room, oval-shaped pool, meditation area and formal gardens.

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Maria Bell, a television writer and producer, described the house as a “jewel box” respectfully renovated by its prior owners. She said she has long been obsessed with Woolf and the Hollywood Regency style.

“There are very few Woolfs left in L.A. and they have all had an interesting, usually Hollywood, pedigree,” Bell told the Journal in an email. “Although it couldn’t be more of a change from our previous home, it was the romance of his design that really captivated us, and the lovely condition of the house itself.” 

Her husband, Bill Bell Jr., is an investor and son of the late soap-opera creators William Bell and Lee Phillip Bell, of “Bold and Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless.” 

In May, they sold their 6-acre Malibu compound at 27712 Pacific Coast Highway to Jay-Z and Beyoncé, breaking a record for the priciest home in California history.

The Bells have made other notable deals in real estate. In 2020, Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James bought the family’s Beverly Hills Post Office estate for $39 million.

Also in 2020, the Bells sold a mansion in the Malibu Colony for more than $18 million. Soap opera creator Bill Bell died in 2005. His wife and business partner Lee Phillip Bell died in 2020.

— Dana Bartholomew

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