type='html'>SELLERS: Phil and Robin McGraw
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $6,250,000
SIZE: 6,980 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Way back in April 2008 Your Mama heard from several sources inside the Platinum Triangle real estate game that blustery and thickly mustachioed tee-vee talking head Phil McGraw and his wife Robin quietly put their Beverly Hills, CA mansion on the market as a pocket listing. More than two years later–in July 2010–the 11,036 square foot mock-Med manse located on uppity Lexington Road was officially listed on the open market with an asking price of $16,500,000.

The same month they put their 8 bedroom and 7 bathroom Lexington Road residence on the market they coughed up a staggering $29,816,500 for a bigger and better mock Med-manse with 16,079 square feet, 5 bedrooms and 9 full and 2 half bathrooms situation on a gated promontory high above Beverly Hills. It seems to Your Mama almost like cruel and unusual punishment that a publicity hungry man whose sometimes controversial and bully-like psychological style that can be summed by his frequent mantra to "get real" can afford a thirty million dollar mansion in Beverly Hills but, like it or not, such are the far from fair ways of showbiz and capitalism, puppies.

Anyhoo, the Mister and Missus finally sold their florid Lexington Road pile in April 2011 for $12,000,000 to, according to property records, a manufacturer of undergarments. That's far less than the $16.5 million they'd pined and prayed for but still substantially more than the $7,500,000 they paid for the place in December 2002.

In between their shuffling of primary residences, Mister and Missus McGraw made several other real estate purchases including a pair of homes above the Sunset Strip for their two adult sons. One of the McGraw boys–Jay–recently moved with his former nude-model wife to an 11,127 square foot mansion in a double-gated enclave in Calabasas, CA called The Oaks. The Calabasas crib was bought in early 2011 for $6,575,000 according to property records.

Perhaps the most perplexing of Mister and Missus McGraws real estate acquisitions in and around Tinseltown was the January 2007 purchase of a somewhat recently remodeled contempo-mock-Med mansion in an expensive but lackluster area of the Beverly Hills Post Office. Although we scoured the internets looking for a sale price, our few minutes in the trenches didn't turn up a number. However, we do know that just this week the McGraws put the privately situated but architecturally specious abode on the market with an asking price of $6,250,000.

To be honest puppina-weenuhs, Your Mama really hasn't any idea whether Mister and Missus McGraw themselves lived in this house themselves or whether it was occupied by their son Jay and his wife Erica–the ones that recently bought a house in Calabasas. What we do know is that title records and deed documents show the names of the elder Mister and Missus McGraw.

Listing information shows the house sits up a long gated drive, well away from the street on a mostly flat .45 acre lot tucked into a steep hillside. The 6,980 square foot mock-Med mansion–the McGraws do love their mock-Meds don't they?–includes 5 bedrooms and 5 full and 2 half bathrooms that include a master "retreat" with and stone and tile pooper and separate his and her closets.

Listing photos don't show the interior spaces but if we know the McGraws–and we do not actually know the McGraws–the Missus had the interiors of this house done done duh-un in a similar style as their lavish Lexington Road residence that we described in a previous discussion as "an over-stuffed frenzy of faux-Tuscan extravagance mixed with glittery nouveau riche excess." Just our opinion, puppies. Listing information does tell us that the interiors include a double-height entry with "sweeping stairwell," formal living room that opens to the back yard, formal dining room, "chefs kitchen" that opens into a "theater style" family room, home office, sun room, den and a temperature controlled wine storage facility.

The exterior spaces are, however, well represented in listing images and include a motor court with detached front-facing three-car garage and petite but exuberantly landscaped front yard fountain and pathways lined with orange flowers. Out back stone terracing surrounds a free-form swimming pool and raised spa with hand-laid mosaic tile detailing. There's also an outdoor fireplace (there are three more fireplaces inside the house) with small seating area, a built-in grill station with long curving snack counter and a tented cabana with stacked stone walls, heat lamps and privacy curtains perfect for pulling closed for when the Mister and Missus of the house want to get down and dirty outdoor but don't want to be peeped (or photographed) by their domestic staff.

listing photos: Hilton & Hyland

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SELLER: Leeza Gibbons
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $6,895,000
SIZE: 6,333 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It was only just over a year ago that cougarlicious celebrity gossip, make-up purveyor and philanthropist Leeza Gibbons spent $6,600,000 to buy a Beverly Hills, CA mansion where she reportedly lived in unmarried bliss with her younger man-friend Steven Fenten, the former president of the Bev Hills Unified School Disctrict Board of Education who is sometimes described as a talent manager and sometimes as the "head of a private career management company."

A few months ago, during an intimate roof top ceremony officiated by two of her three children from two previous marriages and covered by the gossip programs and scuttlebutting blogs everywhere, Mister Fenten become Miz Gibbons' fourth husband. As is often the case with rich and famous types–even those who opt to live in sin before getting hitched–a new marriage means a new house.

Your Mama is entirely ignerrent about what Mister Fenten and Miz Gibbons' real estate plan is once they pack up and move on but thanks to real estate buddy-pal Brenda Blabsitall, it's come to Your Mama's attention that the newlyweds recently flipped their 2007-built mock Med mansion on the market with an asking price of $6,895,000.

Listing information for the mansion, located just around the corner from the La-la Land estate of The Soccer Player and The Spice Girl, does not indicate square footage but does show a count of 6 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms. The L.A. County Tax Man shows the two-story residence measures 6,333 square feet and includes 8 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms, which makes Your Mama's pea brain think The Tax Man's number may (or may not) reflect the stats of whatever house stood on the property before it was knocked down to make way for this–ahem–bulky bee-yew-tee.

Listing information also shows the walled and gated two-story tile-roofed pile, separated from the street bya narrow strip of terraced and landscaped front yard, has a 3-car side-facing garage plus off-street parking for "at least 4 additional cars," 4 fireplaces, 2 main floor "bonus rooms," and 1 screening room with built-in wide screen. Lowerd Jeezis in heaven we just hate that term "bonus room" almost as much as we loathe "great room," an over-worked, generic and just plain awful real estate descriptive that always makes Your Mama want to vomit with ennui.

Anyhoo, interior spaces include a slim but airy double-height center entrance hall with walnut floors and a curving staircase with authentic-looking Spanish tile risers. A formal living room has a gently arched French doors on two opposite ends of the room, stone fireplace, walnut floors and dark wood beams that we'd bet our long-bodied bitches Linda and Beverly are faux. We don't mean fake wood but rather we think that the beams have zero to do with the structural framework of the house. There's also a formal dining room, a library, an exercise room, office, and a sizable center-island kitchen outfitted with top-grade everything and done up to look like that quasi-Tuscan "style" seen almost exclusively in recently erected American mcmansions and almost never in Tuscany or any other region of the Mediterranean.

The well-equipped kitchen opens into breakfast area and large family room with more walnut floors and yucky, half-assed (and possibly faux) wood beams. Dark wood French doors with gracefully arched tops open the room to a covered outdoor lounge with fireplace that overlooks the skinny swimming pool and raised spa. The terraced backyard, really more of a cozy courtyard than a typically vast Beverly Hills back yard of rolling lawns and formal gardens, also includes a couple of Yorkie-sized pee-patches of grees and an open-air bar cabana with bar and grilling station.

Although Miz Gibbons' crib in Beverly Hills is nearly new and lacks the sort of authentic patina one pines for in a "Mediterranean" style residence, it is surrounded by scads of Hollywood historic mansions and estates previously owned by some of early Tinseltown's greatest movers and shakers including Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, Loretta Young, Harold Lloyd and Jack Warner. Nestled right in amongst the stars, the former house of often outrageously chapeau-ed ur-gossip Hedda Hopper.

Previous to buying in Bev Hills in 2010, Miz Gibbons and her third hubby, architect/actor/artist/Parabounce inventor Stephen Meadows, owned a West Hollywood, CA compound once owned by Mommie Dearest's Joan Crawford. The erstwhile couple parted ways in 2005 but still co-owned their once happy home in West Hollywood in December 2006 when it was on the market with an asking price of $7,995,000. They had a devil of a time selling the historic spread but finally unloaded their white elephant in June 2010 for $4,795,000 to–according to a Little Birdie we know–Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and his accomplished and much-published architect wife Linda Brettler.

listing photos: Keller Williams Realty / Beverly Hills