Retired actor and dyed-in-the-wool Tinseltown scion Bridget Fonda and New Wave musician turned four-time Oscar nominated film composer Danny Elfman (“Milk,” “Good Will Hunting”) have sold one of their two mansions in L.A.’s fancy-schmancy Hancock Park-adjacent (and somewhat under-the-radar) Fremont Place enclave for $8.75 million, a small bit below the $8.8 million asking price. Though property records don’t yet reveal the buyer, impeccably informed word on the celebrity real estate street is that the new owner is television writer/producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who will share the grandiose Italian Renaissance style mansion with his production stage manager husband Barclay Stiff and the whimsically named pooch Ms. Molly.
Described in a 2018 The New York Times profile as “an auteur of moody, sexy teen angst,” Aguirre-Sacasa is a veteran playwright who got his TV feet wet as a writer/producer for “Big Love” and “Glee” before he created the CW series “Riverdale” and the Netflix series “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Also a comic book writer, Aguirre-Sacasa also serves as the Chief Creative Officer for Archie Comics. He co-created the upcoming HBO Max musical dramedy “Katy Keene,” which is based on the Archie Comics character of the same name, and last year he signed an multiyear overall deal with Warner Bros. Television whispered to be valued in the “high eight figures.”
An imposing and elaborately detailed structure, the historic estate’s main residence was built in the early 1920s. Later the same decade, a 2,000-square-foot Pierpont Davis-designed addition was added to accommodate the owner’s collection of Old Master paintings. Anchored by a massive fireplace with an inlaid checkerboard pattern wood floor, the cavernous room now houses a screening room. All together the there are six bedrooms and eight bathrooms across the mansion’s not quite 8,400 square feet.
In addition to baronial formal living and dining rooms, both with antique carved stone fireplaces, the palatial spread also includes a gourmet kitchen, a sunroom, a small recording studio swaddled in blood-red velvet drapery, and a dedicated breakfast room that opens through arched French doors to a lush courtyard garden. The estate’s three-quarter-acre grounds also include an al fresco dining terrace under a vine-laden pergola alongside a swimming pool and spa set against a pleasantly unkempt wall of foliage that ensures privacy from neighbors.
Lucky for Fonda and Elfman, they nearly quadrupled their money on the property that tax records indicate they purchased in late 2000 for $2.125 million. The property was listed with Branden and Rayni Williams of Williams & Williams at The Beverly Hills Estates, while Aguirre-Sacasa was repped by Jill Galloway at Compass. Fonda and Elfman also own a neighboring Prairie-style home they bought about six years ago for $3.6 million and now have on the market, also with Williams and Williams, at $4.888 million after it first came for sale a couple months ago at $5.8 million.
Given his growing bicoastal property portfolio full of historic residences, it’s not such a surprise Aguirre-Sacasa opted for a 100-year-old home that oozes with original charm and detailing. In 2012, the increasingly powerful TV dynamo dropped $560,000 on an elegant one-bedroom condo in a prestigious Hancock Park building completed in 1926 and designed by illustrious architect Leland Bryant, which he still owns, and a few years later he upgraded to a slightly more than $1.8 million townhouse condo in an exclusive 1930s era boutique complex in the Nichols Canyon area.
Aguirre-Sacasa, who spends a great deal of time in Vancouver, Canada, where “Rivedale” films, also maintains a solid foothold in New York City. Coming up on seven years ago he shelled out $950,000 for a one-bedroom/one-bath co-op in a prestigious apartment house on the Upper West Side, and earlier this year he and Stiff became the proud owners of a $2.2 million one-bedroom fixer-upper tucked up into the attic at the legendary Dakota building across from Central Park.