Reported by the Wall Street Journal, Aerosmith lead singer and American Idol judge, Steven Tyler, bought an oceanfront home on the exclusive South Maui coast. Makena is also said to have other notable owners from the entertainment world such as Jennifer Aniston, and Clint Eastwood and Oprah, and from the financial luminaries including Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.

Mr. Tyler's new abode is 2 bedroom / 3.5 bathroom Makena home on 1/4 acre, which was originally offered at $6.495M but sold for $4.8M (one of the best values in Makena real estate). Featuring over 3,000 square feet of interior space boasting a floor-to-ceiling aquarium, the interior is seemlessly paired with 1,400 square feet of covered outdoor living space, showcasing a very distinctive 'Old Hawaii' feel to it reminiscent of Hawaii's rich history. A salt-water pool overlooking the ocean provides the ideal setting for outdoor entertaining and relaxation. It also enjoys a very unique location on a promontory, surrounding the property on 3 sides by the ocean.

For the fortunate few qualified buyers who are interested in enjoying a life of luxury in the ultimate island setting, the Makena and Wailea real estate will offer among the best options in the world.

This blog post was contributed by Alex Cortez, a Realtor with Island Sotheby’s International Realty, specializing in Wailea Luxury Condominiums.

Looks like it's time to update the Celebrity Real Estate Heat Map: A-lister of A-listers Jennifer Aniston has reportedly scooped up new mansion for herself in Bel-Air, Calif.

The pristine 8,500-square-foot four-bedroom was designed in 1965 by noted Los Angeles modernist architect A. Quincy Jones; after first hitting the market for $29 million in 2008, the house was reduced to some $24 million, at which point Aniston swooped in and scored it for even less: $21 million.

And as if this lucky lady didn't already have enough of them, here are yet some more perks: more than three acres of land, views of the city and ocean, a pool, a guesthouse, a wine cellar, and—last but certainly not least—a vineyard. Let's not forget to look inside: those distinctly midcentury-feeling interiors boasts gleaming wood floors, full-wall expanses of glass, and some pretty stunningfireplace detail.

Aniston's had quite an impressive year in terms of real estate. The actress listed and then sold her spectacular Ohana estate, a Beverly Hills beaut that was once featured on the cover of Architectural Digest. She swiftly found another Beverly Hills estate in which to shack up with new beau Justin Theroux.

Heath Ledger's former home in the Hollywood Hills is back on the market. The home, which includes 1,861 square feet of living space and an additional 2,500 square feet of outdoor entertaining space is nestled on an "ultra-private" lot, among aging sycamore trees and lush hills. Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams purchased the home in 2005 from talk show host Ellen DeGeneres for $2.1 million and lived in it with their daughter until the couple split in 2007. The home sold following Ledger's untimely death for $2.5 million, and has been on and off the market numerous times since then.

The "Tree House", built in 1951, includes two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Spances of outdoor space include a projection cinema, a gourmet barbeque area and multiple other seating and entertainment areas. Like most other A-list homes in the area the property includes a long gated driveway and state-of-the-art security monitoring systems.

Ledger's home is currently being offered at $2.995 million and is located in Laurel Canyon.

Photos and Blog Zillow Blog

The world's most expensive estate, "The Manor", is about to be purchased by 22-year-old British heiress Petra Eccelstone - daughter of British billionaire and Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone - after being on the market since 2009.

The 57,000-square-foot property is currently owned by Candy Spelling, widow of the late TV producer Aaron Spelling. When the estate was initially listed, Mrs. Spelling put a price tag of $150 million on it and refused to lower the price during the height of the housing market downturn. The sale price has not been disclosed.

The Manor sits on five acres and has multiple luxury amenities, including a bowling alley, a beauty salon, several gift-wrapping rooms, parking for 100 cars, a double staircase inspired by "Gone With The Wind", a flower-cutting room, a china room, and a library where Mrs. Spelling bound her husband's scripts.

Photo via Luxist; story via Wall Street Journal.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi recently listed their estate in Beverly Hills for $49 million. The pair purchased the 12,000-square-foot home in 2007 for $29 million, and also purchased three adjacent properties to expand their estate and get their privacy (for $60 million total, you can buy these adjacent properties also). [ShelterPop]

Sarah Palin allegedly bought this mansion near Scottsdale, Arizona to serve as her campaign headquarters for a presidential or Senate run, even though she hasn't announced a bid for the presidency or for Senate. One thing we do know is that Bristol lives about an hour away from Phoenix, so maybe Sarah wanted to escape the cold weather of Alaska and spend time with her daughter... if she even did buy this house. [StateBrief.com]

The late Elizabeth Taylor's Bel-Air estate is up for sale for $8.6 million. She bought the estate in 1981 and lived there until she died recently. The house is approximately 7,000 square feet and on 1.2 acres of land, and has five bedrooms, a living room with a beamed ceiling and fireplace, an office that used to be a screening room, a pool, a terraced English garden, and a koi pond. Her son, Christopher Wilding, says that the home was where the family gathered for holidays. [Wall Street Journal]

Tennis star Anna Kournikova has put her Mediterranean-style Miami Beach house on the market for $9.4 million. The 7-bedroom home boasts both canal and bay front views, a coral rock pool deck, a private sauna, and a 2-story guest house... but no tennis court.

Via Yahoo! Sports

It was announced last week that Prince William and Kate Middleton will be living in the Clarence House after they get married tomorrow, and the house has been in the Royal Family for quite some time. It was built in 1825 for Prince William Henry, the Duke of Clarence, and he lived there from 1830 to 1837 as King William IV.

Queen Elizabeth also lived here, from 1953 to 2002, and nowadays is home to The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, as well as Princes William and Harry, and very-soon-to-be Princess Catherine.

The house itself is valued at approximately $76.68 million, which is worth 343(!!) times the amount of a starter home for a newlywed couple in England. The Clarence House doesn't quite compare to Windsor Castle (valued at $279 million) and Buckingham Palace (worth $1.6 BILLION). Once William and Kate become king and queen, they'll live in Buckingham Palace. Not too shabby!

History of the Clarence House via The Official Website of The British Monarchy.

Pictures and values of Royal Residences via AOL Real Estate.

Wriiten by James Reginato/Photographed and Produced by Todd Eberle Via ArchitecturalDigest.com

The relationship between hair and architecture has perhaps not been properly appreciated. But a visit with legendary stylist Vidal Sassoon and his wife, Ronnie, rectifies that.

“My whole work, beginning in the late 1950s, came from the Bauhaus,” explains Vidal, whose geometric, easy-maintenance cuts sparked a revolution in hair. “It was all about studying the bone structure of the face, to bring out the character. I hated the prettiness that was in fashion at that time.  “My whole work, beginning in the late 1950s, came from the Bauhaus,” says Sassoon.  “Architects have always been my heroes,” he adds. “I could not have been more honored than when I met Marcel Breuer and he told me he knew my work. And Rem Koolhaas said he had one of my original cutting books in his library.”

Fittingly, this conversation is taking place inside the couple’s Los Angeles home, a seminal work by modernist master Richard Neutra, which they recently restored. Known as the Singleton House, it was commissioned in the mid-’50s by industrialist Henry Singleton for a site on a spectacular peak atop Mulholland Drive. Views from the property take in the Pacific and the shiny skyscrapers of downtown, as well as the desert and San Gabriel Mountains.

When Ronnie, like her husband a passionate architecture buff, first saw the house it was in dire shape, though the Singleton family had done their best to maintain it. After relocating in 1969, they had rented it to a series of tenants, then put it on the market in 2002, three years after Henry’s death. The 4,700-square-foot house languished unoccupied—its systems too rudimentary (there was no air-conditioning, just Neutra’s ingeniously designed cross-ventilating windows) and its bedrooms too small and dark for contemporary families—until the Sassoons purchased the sleeping beauty. They were living between London and Beverly Hills at the time and bought the home as an adventure, one they weren’t completely sure would be positive. Indeed, just two weeks after the closing, in 2004, part of the roof collapsed, and a few months later a huge chunk of the property slid into a neighbor’s yard. But Cincinnati-born Ronnie, who had worked as a fashion designer and an advertising executive before she married Vidal almost 20 years ago, was committed to the project and immersed herself in a study of Neutra’s work. She pored over images of the Singleton House taken by Julius Shulman (1910–2009), the preeminent architectural photographer of Los Angeles. “They were my bible,” she says.

Little did she know how much she’d need the visual documentation. The Sassoons discovered that, due to dry rot and modern code requirements, they would have to do extensive rebuilding. Working with contractor Scott Werker of GW Associates of L.A., they replaced damaged ceilings and poured new terrazzo floors, and they removed a number of walls in order to create larger, brighter interior spaces. They also added a master bedroom suite, which Ronnie designed with Werker and building planner Tim Campbell.

Read full article here.

By Sarah Kershaw via NYTimes.com/blog

The market for multimillion-dollar residences has picked up lately, but you don’t see this very often: a mansion built in the early 1900s for a daughter of the dime store magnate Frank Winfield Woolworth is being put up for sale for $90 million. It can also be rented, for $210,000 per month.

The mansion is one of three homes Mr. Woolworth had built for his daughters at 2, 4 and 6 East 80th Street. The middle one, a 35-foot-wide French Gothic town house with a limestone facade and more than 18,000 square feet of space, is being sold by the family of Lucille Roberts, the fitness entrepreneur, who was living there when she died in 2003.

A French Gothic mansion with seven floors and more than 18,000 square feet of space.  According to the listing, being handled by Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens, the interior spaces, which the owners renovated in a prewar style, create the “sensation of immense scale.”

To wit: The seven-floor house with elevator includes a paneled library the width of the structure; a formal dining room that can seat 50; a parlor floor with 14-foot-high ceilings; 10 bedrooms, 11 and a half bathrooms; and 3 kitchens.

Ms. Del Nunzio, who has brokered some of the most expensive residential deals in the city, said it was unusual for a turn-of-the-last-century mansion to come on the market having already been renovated. Records show that the property sold for $6 million in 1995, when it was being used as a men’s gym, according to Ms. Del Nunzio.

By Emily C. Dooley via LATimes.com

The once-grand white house watches over Long Island Sound from the tip of Sands Point, its days numbered.  Lands End, the 25-room Colonial Revival mansion that local lore says was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's home in "The Great Gatsby" faces demolition this month.

In the 1920s and '30s, Winston Churchill, the Marx Brothers and Ethel Barrymore attended parties there. Fitzgerald was perched on the back deck, drinking in the view. Rooms featured marble, parquet and wide wood-planked floors, Palladian windows and hand-painted wallpaper.  Now, the front door is off its hinges, wood floors have been torn up for salvage, windows are missing and the two-story Doric columns are unsteady.

Sands Point Village in January approved plans to raze the house and divide the site into lots for five custom homes starting at $10 million each.  Lands End is the latest Gold Coast estate to fall. With each demolition, the North Shore loses more of its gilded past, when sea breezes and social events attracted the rich and famous. Historians say hundreds of the mansions have been lost in the past 50 years as owners faced increasing taxes and high maintenance costs.  "The cost to renovate these things is just so overwhelming that people aren't interested in it," said Clifford Fetner, president of Jaco Builders in Hauppauge, N.Y., and Lands End project construction manager. "The value of the property is the land."

Taxes, insurance and maintenance of the 24,000-square-foot house and 13-acre grounds total as much as $4,500 a day, said David Brodsky of 4B's Realty, which is redeveloping the site. His father, health care entrepreneur Bert Brodsky, bought Lands End for $17.5 million in 2004 from Virginia Kraft Payson, the late wife of former Mets owner Charles Shipman Payson.

"You can't save everything," Ullman said, adding that some historic homes "are being restored. Maybe that's the best we can do."  Some of the grand houses became part of parks or were used by religious groups, schools, hotels or nonprofits, said William Conklin, 49, who grew up on the Peacock Point estate in Locust Valley, where his father was caretaker.

The 40-room Ormston House in Lattingtown is now a monastery, Sefton Manor in Mill Neck is a school for the deaf and the Chrysler estate in Kings Point is part of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.  But about 500 historic North Shore homes were knocked down in the 1950s and '60s, Randall said. More have fallen in the past 30 years.

"It's becoming more and more of an epidemic," said Alexandra Wolfe, director of preservation services at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities.  The senior Brodsky has said he bought Lands End with plans to live there, but his family objected. He put it up for sale in 2006 for $30 million.  The subdivision plan wasn't the Gold Coast's first. After serving for decades as a home to steel magnate Henry Phipps' family, the Knole estate in Old Westbury was divided and developed several years ago.

La Selva, a 40-room Italian Renaissance villa in Upper Brookville, also was targeted for subdivision. Sylvia Kumar, wife of imprisoned former Computer Associates chief Sanjay Kumar, bought the 24-acre estate in 2001. It has been for sale for more than three years, now at $9.9 million. Kumar filed subdivision plans last year, but withdrew them, village Building Department clerk Linda Giani said.

Also for sale are a $15 million estate in Mill Neck and a $39.5-million estate in Kings Point called The Point.  "There are many of these in all degrees of condition and all degrees of pricing," said Barbara Candee, vice president of Daniel Gale Sotheby's. "The stories are wonderful and it's very sad if these are taken down."

By ROXANA POPESCU via NYTimes.com

POSITANO, ITALY — The Mediterranean cliff side town of Positano has long called to artists and writers. John Steinbeck, Andy Warhol and Coco Chanel all spent time here, enjoying its beautiful sunsets and lazy afternoons.  The Palazzo Santa Croce, recently restored with a focus on authenticity, is on the market with an asking price of €8.5 million, or $11.2 million.

Higher still, in the mountains above the town, is the Palazzo Santa Croce. The house, built between 1700 and 1716 as a bishop’s residence, has been host to its own series of celebrity visitors, including Picasso, the Italian novelist Dino Buzzati and, more recently, the Hollywood actors Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel.

The stately property, recently restored with a focus on authenticity, is on the market with an asking price of €8.5 million, or $11.2 million.  Trekking up to this four-bedroom, three-terrace villa, which is painted Pompeii red and overlooks the Bay of Naples, takes considerable commitment. Step 1: Arrive in Positano by car, boat or bus. Step 2: Take a taxi or a local bus up the hill and get off at the bar. Step 3: Walk up dozens of steps, wondering where they will ever end.

But the moment visitors set foot inside the palazzo, they forget that effort, said Raphael T. Harris Jr., owner of World Real Estate Immobiliare, an agency in Messina, Italy, representing the current owners in the sale. (There is vehicle access on a small side road, but there is still a short walk to the house.)

Mr. Harris noted that the luxury market along the Amalfi Coast has been stable in recent years, partly because of the region’s time-tested appeal and the enduring value of properties like this one.

The 557-square-meter, or 6,000-square-foot, house has two master bedroom suites, both with coffered ceilings, on the main level; two additional bedrooms upstairs, and a rustic, roomy kitchen with a pair of pizza and bread ovens. The furnishings are included in the sale.

There also are three large terraces, totaling 325 square meters, as well as an indoor swimming pool, a steam room and a Jacuzzi.  Several details recall the house’s origin as a bishop’s home, including the small wall altar in one of the master bedrooms.

The house’s renovation was as grueling as it was exhilarating, said Giacomo Cinque, a fashion designer here who is a co-owner. It took four years, he said in an e-mail, to work on everything from the basement floors to the ceiling frescoes, using seven mules to haul building materials up the steep hillside.

“The hardest part of the restoration was the phase in which we restored all the paintings from the 18th century that were present in the villa, paintings on the ceiling, where skilled artisans worked for years to uncover them,” he said.

Along with the restoration, the owners decorated parts of the house, including the indoor pool, with antique tiles made in the Pompeii area.  The pool “is where one can relive the days of beauty and luxury of ancient Rome, when the rich summered in Pompeii,” Mr. Cinque said. “It wasn’t hard to make the home luxurious by today’s standards. All that was necessary was to follow its architectonic roots.”  Over all, the designer said, he felt the result was well worth the effort: “You can relive history here, with all the advantages of modern life. It’s like living two lives at once.”

By Paul Owers via sunsentinel.com

Former NBA star Scottie Pippen is selling his Fort Lauderdale palace for $16 million.

The nearly 10,000-square-foot home in the exclusive Harbor Beach subdivision has been on the market for about two years now. Former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino saw how tough the housing market is; he needed more than five years to sell his Weston home for $7.2 million -- less than half of his original asking price.

Pippen's six-bedroom home with 215 feet of water frontage is "extremely special," but it will take time to sell, listing agent Barbara Panton said, adding that the average market time for luxury properties across the U.S. is three to four years.

"There are not that many ready buyers," she said.  Panton said Pippen has listed it on and off since January 2009. She said Pippen hasn't shown any interest in reducing the asking price. The photos above are from the MLS listing.

One Broward County real estate broker says Pippen and wife Larsa, star of The Real Housewives of Miami, have an especially tough sell because the house was built on a double lot and looks across a canal. It’s a magnificent home, but it should have been built closer to the Intracoastal Waterway, the broker said.

Pippen – Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s – paid $1.34 million for the house in 2000, property records show.  Pippen and Jordan won six NBA titles together. Pippen was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last year. His presenter Jordan, of course.

By Margot Patrick via wsj.com

 LONDON (Dow Jones)--Google Inc. (GOOG) is expanding its operations in Dublin by agreeing Thursday to pay EUR99.9 million for the city's tallest office building, in one of Ireland's largest property deals since the financial crisis.

The 67-meter Montevetro building in Dublin's Grand Canal Dock district, has 15 stories, 210,000 square feet of office space and can house about 2,000 staff.  Google Ireland head John Herlihy said the new building will give it extra space to relocate some teams at other Dublin sites, including its European headquarters on Barrow Street, and "have the space and flexibility to support our future operations."

The technology company has about 1,700 people working in the Irish city, and said last month is aims to add about 1,000 people in Europe in London and other parts of the region. International revenue made up just over half of Google's total take in 2010.  

Montevetro's developer, Treasury Holdings, started construction in March 2008, just as property prices were starting to slip into what would become a dramatic plunge. After running out of cash to complete the project, Treasury Holdings got working capital from Ireland's National Asset Management Agency, the government-body that has bought up large slugs of banks' impaired real estate development loans, including those that backed Montevetro.  The seller of the building is Anglo-Irish property investment fund Real Estate Opportunities PLC (REO.LN), a vehicle of Treasury Holdings whose largest holding is London's Battersea Power Station.

REO Chairman Ray Horney said the sale is one of the largest in Irish commercial property for several years, "and the company believes it has achieved a very good price in the current market environment."  NAMA Chairman Frank Daly said it got more than its money back on the bank loans it received, as well as on the additional funding it extended for the building's completion.

"The successful completion of the Montevetro development and its sale again reflect the positive potential of NAMA to support the commercial property market in Ireland without compromising its objective of recovering monies owed to the taxpayer," he said.

Ireland set up the agency as part of its effort to restore its banks to health but has since needed a EUR67.5 billion bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. The country's biggest banks were hit hard by huge losses on loans to property developers, as a decade-long real-estate boom turned to bust.