Variety
Sitcom superstar Kunal Nayyar, in recent years one of the highest paid actors on television due to his lucrative, long-running role on “The Big Bang Theory,” and his wife, former Miss India turned fashion designer Neha Kapur, have hung a not quite $4 million price tag on their remarkably private former home that is discreetly tucked into a quiet, little-known pocket of the star-studded Nichols Canyon area of L.A’s Hollywood Hills. Nayyar and Kapur acquired the secluded compound about 8.5 years ago for $2.85 million. Previous owners of the property include actor Jeffrey Duncan Jones, best known as hilariously humiliated Dean of Students Ed Rooney in the seminal 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.
The house and gardens were featured in Architectural Digest in 2017 and, according to current listings held by Markus Canter and Cristie St. James of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties, the just over half-acre spread’s more than 4,100-square feet of living space is spread throughout the three-bedroom and 3.5-bathroom single-story hacienda-style main house that dates to the late 1940s and two one-bed/one-bath guest cottages.
A small gated motor court with garaging for three cars, a densely verdant courtyard garden and a skylight topped entrance gallery lead to a spacious living room designed for both intimate and grand scale entertaining. A fireplace is placed between mirror-backed bookshelves and a wet bar is set in to a curved wall of windows where French doors connect the room to one of the compound’s several serene courtyard gardens. A separate dining room easily seats eight or ten, and the expensively accoutered kitchen is flooded with natural light through a large skylight directly over a doublewide island topped with gleaming black granite. Each of the main house’s three ample bedrooms is en suite.
Outside, a variety of immensely and desirably private tree-shaded terraces strung overhead with twinkling strands of fairy lights are enhanced by carefully trimmed boxwood hedges and vibrant sprays of bougainvillea. Next to the swimming pool, one of the two guest cottages is well suited to a home office or screening room with a full kitchen and marble bathroom.
Hitched in an elaborate weeklong ceremony in India in 2011, the Nayyar-Kapurs, substantially upgraded their residential circumstances almost a year ago when they dropped $7.5 million on a stately English Tudor manor house in L.A.’s tony Hancock Park neighborhood. Once owned by Nic Cage, the nearly one-acre estate includes a snazzily updated 1920s main house of more than 7,000 square feet, two detached guest units plus a fitness pavilion, and park-like grounds that incorporate great sweeps of tree-shaded lawns and a swimming pool.
Variety
By MARK DAVID
original 2017 Architectural Digest article
Property photos by Josh Spooner/ Courtesy of Markus Canter, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties