Patten Place: It’s Not Enough

DICK VAN PATTEN, who is perhaps best known for his starring role as the father in the hit ABC series “Eight Is Enough,” has been so busy working on his real estate that he says he sometimes feels as if he is playing Monopoly.

Van Patten--who has appeared in more than 600 radio shows, 27 Broadway plays, 16 feature films and six TV series--just finished making a September HBO movie “The Final Embrace” and is about to start on the feature film “The Flagpole Sitter” with Lloyd Bridges, he said.

He and his wife, Pat, a former June Taylor dancer, recently celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary. They live in the Sherman Oaks area near their sons Nels, James and Vincent.

“I’m always working on our home, but I want to keep the old look to it,” the actor said by phone a few days ago. His three-bedroom, California bungalow was built in 1928, and he added a pool house, sauna and spa after buying the property in 1979.

“It had been (actress) Margaret Sullavan’s house,” he said, “and we bought it from Brookes Hayward (Sullavan’s daughter).”

The property also had been a walnut farm, but Van Patten replaced the walnut trees with a tennis court.

His married son lives next door and his bachelor sons have been living a few blocks away in a 22-unit apartment building that the actor built 10 years ago while doing “Eight Is Enough,” which ran in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“We call the building Patten Place, because Peyton Place was big when I came out here from New York in 1970,” he said.

Next door to the one-bedroom units, he and his sons are just completing a newly built, four-unit condo complex that they call “the Pink Palace” because of its pink stucco exterior. His sons will occupy two of the two-bedroom units, and he plans to rent out the others.

The late director TONY RICHARDSON’S Hollywood Hills home of almost 20 years has been reduced from $2 million to $1,595,000.

The British-born Oscar winner, who died last November, directed such movies as “Tom Jones” (1963), “A Taste of Honey” (1961 ), “The Loved One” (1965) and the as-yet-to-be-released “Blue Skies,” starring Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones.

Built in 1924, his Hollywood Hills home has two pools, a tennis court, guest house, pool house and aviary. Neal Schultz and Stephen Shapiro of Stan Herman, Stephen Shapiro & Associates have the listing.

FREDERICK WEISMAN, a major collector of contemporary art and former head of Mid-Atlantic Toyota, has purchased a home on the Westside for $4.6 million, according to public records.

The newly built Mediterranean-style home was last listed at $5.95 million. The gated home has four bedrooms, nine baths, a motor court and a two-story guest house.

Crestview Financial Group of Beverly Hills, founded and owned by Gloria Shulman, built the house, which had been listed by Shirley Wells, Jon Douglas Co. Weisman was represented by Fintan Power and Nancy Sill, Prudential/Rodeo Realty, Sunset Strip.

A Chatsworth home that was used in the Carol Burnett miniseries “Fresno,” several episodes of “Matlock,” the Peter Falk series “Columbo” and the 1990 NBC Special “Fall From Grace, The Jim and Tammy Faye Baker Story” has come on the market at $3.6 million.

It is also offered at $3.95 million, furnished.

The 7,000-square-foot house has four bedroom suites, seven fireplaces and a loft in the kitchen. The home also has a pool with a waterfall and an eight-car garage.

Designer Gail Claridge and her husband, Joe, own the home; she built it in 1985 as a replica of a 17th-Century, Country English Manor.

She actually built the house twice on the same site: 2.6 lakefront acres in Monteria Estates, which was developed in the 1930s and 1940s as an enclave for such movie stars as Dan Dailey, Veronica Lake, Fred Astaire and Roy Rogers.

The first Claridge house burned to the ground shortly after it was completed; it was rebuilt to the same specifications.

The Claridges are selling so that she can move on to develop 64 lots at Bass Lake near Yosemite. Gloria Katzman at James R. Gary & Co. has the listing.

Home sales are up in the so-called “Platinum Triangle,” says Beverly Hills broker Bruce Nelson, who just completed a study of the area, which includes Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills and Bel-Air.

Last year, there were 11 sales of homes for $5 million or more; this year, there have been 15 to date, “so, if the market continues at the same pace, we should have 30 by the end of the year, for a 300% increase in volume,” he said.