Moves like Levine

News out of Hollywood is that that pop star Adam Levine and fashion model Behati Prinsloo have dropped $32 million in an off-market deal for a sprawling Pacific Palisades, California, compound sold by Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck. This comes to a surprise to many as the couple only recently spent £34 million on a Beverly Hills mansion.

The just over three-acre Hollywood property has become available following the 2018 divorce of Affleck and Garner. The former Tinsel Town power couple had previously purchased it from super-producer Brian Grazer in 2009 for $17.55 million.

The lavish, resort-like property has seen plenty of expensive modifications including a swimming pool and outdoor basketball court. But marketing materials from when the compound was last for sale indicate the multi-winged single-story main house was originally designed and built in 1940 by acclaimed architect Cliff May, father of the now classic California Rancho style, and measured in nearly 8,800-square-feet with five bedrooms, eight bathrooms, four fireplaces and a state of the art projection room.

The compound’s several outbuildings add another 6-7000-square-feet of living space and include a two-story detached structure that at the time of Affleck and Garners’ purchase housed a gym and an art studio along with a couple of bathrooms. Beneath the backyard’s vast expanse of lawn, a two-bedroom and three-bathroom subterranean guesthouse is where Affleck, set to star in “The Last Thing He Wanted,” based on Joan Didion’s 1996 novel of the same name, shacked up for quite some time after their 2015 split. He’s since moved on to his own, more than 13,0000-square-foot Pacific Palisades bachelor pad mansion he picked up in the early months of 2018 for $19 million.

Levine and Prinsloo have become amateur real estate moguls over the last few years. In 2012 the Maroon 5 star paid $4.83 million for a gated estate that occupies a private, multi-acre promontory in a gated enclave above Benedict Canyon in the Beverly Hills Post Office area that he and Prinsloo had comprehensively overhauled in high style by Mark Haddawy before it was set out for sale in June 2016 with an in-hindsight much too aggressive $17.5 million price tag. It took a couple of substantial price cuts before the estate was sold in May 2018 to pop singer John Mayer for $13.4 million, well below its final asking price of $15.9 million.

Almost a year before they sold their Beverly Hills Post Office area estate, Levine and Prinsloo shelled out $18 million for a 1.27-acre property with an elegantly vintage Hollywood Regency villa that backs up to the tony Los Angeles Country Club in the ultra-posh Holmby Hills area. The couple never actually moved in, and flipped the property back up for sale just four months later at $18.9 million and soon sold it, in early 2018, for $18 million.

Shortly after they sold the Holmby Hills villa they never moved into and right before they sold their Benedict Canyon estate to John Mayer, Levine and Prinsloo coughed up an astonishing and eye-catching $33.9 million in a hush-hush, off-market deal with “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick and entertainment attorney Erik Hyman to buy their spectacularly overhauled 1930s Tudor mansion that sits on more than an acre in a particularly plum pocket of Beverly Hills.