24/7

Monday to Sunday

Location

Worldwide

Contact us

info@zonezi.net

Compare Listings

Tour Lionel Richie’s House in Beverly Hills

Tour Lionel Richie’s House in Beverly Hills

I feel about my home the way I feel about my music: You have to take chances,” says Lionel Richie. “When I wrote All Night Long’ as well as Three Times a Lady,’ it was dangerous, because at the time black guys were singing neither calypso songs nor waltzes. But since you only get one shot at life, let’s make it a challenge. That’s how I feel about this house.”

 

Tour Lionel Richie's House in Beverly Hills 2

“If I can’t find a lyric, I walk to the end of the garden and say, ‘OK, God, they’re expecting me to be famous; I have things being delivered for the house tomorrow; I need a second verse,’” Richie says. At the rear of the 17,000-square-foot house are a series of limestone terraces, a swimming pool and a stone poolhouse. The lush grounds feature cypress and magnolia trees and ‘Iceberg’ roses.

And a challenge is exactly what the singer-songwriter got when he snapped up the 28-room mansion, built in 1929 for Carrie Guggenheim by architects Harry Koerner and William J. Gage on a knoll overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club. “It’s a house you don’t find anywhere, much less 10 minutes from the center of Beverly Hills,” he says of the Italian Renaissance Revival structure that hadn’t been updated for almost a decade.

“Everybody looked at it and had the same response: Beautiful, but we don’t want to do the work.’ And in fact I was reluctant,” he admits. It was his then wife, Diane, who said, “This is fabulous.”

And may never be, since Richie admits that creating music and homes are simultaneous pleasures. The first job for the couple, who remain “great friends,” Richie says, was simply uncovering the splendid bones under the kitsch: the gorgeous wood floors, pristine due to years buried under white carpeting; the entrance’s luminescent limestone walls, darkened—and hidden—under varnish. “A house is like a human being,” muses Richie. “There’s something wonderful about an 80-year-old with wisdom, but what did it look like when it was 19? What was the inspiration when the house was first built? That white stone was the house’s youth.

 

via@rchitecturaldigest

 

Continue Reading

img

Zonezi

    Related posts

    Cindy Crawford’s dressing room inside $7.5million home is so unexpected

    The 55-year-old shared a look inside her surprisingly homely walk-in closet, in what appears to be...

    Continue reading
    Zonezi
    by Zonezi

    Prince Philip’s childhood home could be a castle – inside

    The Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen have lived in many beautiful homes over the years, including...

    Continue reading
    Zonezi
    by Zonezi

    Gordon Ramsay’s view from £6million Cornish home is insane

    Gordon Ramsay has been spending most of the coronavirus pandemic at his Cornwall home –and we...

    Continue reading
    Zonezi
    by Zonezi

    Join The Discussion