Bargain Hunter Alert: Erika Jayne and Tom Girardi’s California mansion gets another gigantic price chop

By Mark David | Variety

Despite its choice location on almost two gated acres in a hilly, wooded and wealthy neighborhood above the Annandale Golf Club, despite its baronial opulence and idyllic privacy, despite six months of publicity and a series of heavy-duty price cuts, the longtime home of once vaunted but now disgraced attorney Tom Girardi and reality TV star/pop diva Erika Jayne, a.k.a. The Pretty Mess, has yet to entice a buyer serious enough to sign on the dotted line.

In an effort to flush out a buyer, the price for the hilltop estate was slashed again this week, by a whopping $700,000, bringing the ask to $8.2 million, 37% below its initial, pie-in-the-sky price of $13 million. Though the asking price remains on the high side for the area, it’s not unheard of for a vintage mansion in the historic and affluent community to sell for more than $8 million. Indeed, more than 15 homes have over the last handful of years, including an extravagant 1920s mansion that was acquired earlier this year for $13.3 million by former Facebook employee Ezra Callahan, among the social media colossus’s first six hires.

Girardi acquired his stately spread back in 1980 for $1.3 million, two decades before he married Jayne, and shared it with his two previous wives. With its front door flanked by a pair of carved stone guardian lions, the buff-stucco and stone manor house was designed by prolific and acclaimed architect Myron Hubbard Hunt and built in 1928 in what amounts to an elegant and sumptuously embellished pan-Mediterranean style. According to listings held by Ted Clark and Heather Lillard of Compass the manse measures in at almost 10,300 square feet with four bedrooms and five bathrooms plus four more powder rooms.

Proceeds from the sale of the home, as well as the divorcing couple’s other assets, will be used to pay back Girardi’s clients, many who are victims of freak accidents and natural disasters. The clients’ multimillion-dollar settlements are alleged to have been embezzled by Girardi to fund his and Jayne’s famously over-the-top lifestyle of private planes (they had two), high-priced baubles (her diamond and emerald Panthère de Cartier ring retails for $187,000), and fancy cars (her Lamborghini Huracán will easily set a rich person back more than a quarter of a million bucks). The until recently hyper-pampered “XXPEN$IVE” singer even once bragged on “The Wendy Williams Show,” that she spent about $40,000 a month on her hair, makeup and clothing. That’s right, kids. It takes half a million a year to look like a pretty mess.

In addition to grandly proportioned and fussily appointed formal living and dining rooms, there’s a paneled entrance gallery with a tiger-print carpeted curved staircase and a hidden telephone closet.

The walnut-paneled library showcases Parquet de Versailles wood floors and two fireplaces, one at each end of the long room.

Equipped with terra-cotta floor tiles, wood beams across the ceiling and an imported range that cost about as much as a Suburu, the eat-in kitchen is where Jayne somewhat improbably told her “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” castmates that she and Tom would sit and have dinner together every night during the COVID-19 lockdowns, right before she made her surprise divorce filing in November 2020.

One of the mansion’s more unusual features, which Jayne proudly showed off to her “RHOBH” pals, is a petite private chapel that’s lined in champagne-colored brocade and packed with antique reliquaries beneath a hand-painted groin-vaulted ceiling.

There are a couple of guest bedrooms on the second floor, along with a family room that’s convertible to another bedroom, while the sprawling primary suite occupies a wing of its own. In addition to a fireplace and dual dressing rooms there are also two bathrooms, his slathered in chocolate-brown marble with stained-glass windows in the oversized shower and hers with a built-in shampoo bowl, a makeup vanity, and a huge soaking tub enveloped in rich wood paneling, beige stone and tufted red silk walls.

Outdoor spaces include a loggia outside the living room where a water channel cascades down a series of steps to the swimming pool and what promo materials describe as a “chandelier lit pavilion.”

The grounds offer seclusion and serenity with ornate iron lamp posts, rose gardens, wisteria covered pergolas and a rustic walking path that encircles the entire estate.