Reese Witherspoon Buys Nashville Fixer (EXCLUSIVE)
Your Mama’s Notes: It’s no secret among property gossips that Reese Witherspoon and husband Jim Toth have been on a long and exhausting house hunt in Los Angeles and that, in June, their three parcel Brentwood compound popped up as an off-market listing with a $14 million price tag. What was less known — at least it was to this property gossip — is that the Witherspoon-Toth’s also wanted to upgrade their residential circumstances in Nashville, TN, where — as we first learned from The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial — they quietly dropped $1.95 million on a fixer upper estate in the leafy and affluent, Nashville-adjacent city of Oak Hill.
BUYERS: Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth
LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $1,950,000
SIZE: 3,855 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
It might seem odd to some of the children that the Tinseltown couple would purchase a multi-million dollar property in Nashville but it shouldn’t. Miz Witherspoon, who hasn’t really had a bone fide hit movie since 2006 when she picked up an Oscar for “Walk The Line,” grew up in Nashville and her parents still live in the area. Indeed, the still very busy movie star — she has starring roles in (at least) four upcoming films — has owned a home in Nashville since (at least) 2005 when she paid $760,000 for a nearly 6,000 square foot mini-mansion in a gated enclave in the upscale Belle Meade area southwest of downtown.
The 6.51-acre spread in question was last purchased in May 2013 for $1.5 million by the wife of a local automobile dealership mogul who, it seems, caught a classic case of The Real Estate Fickle and flipped the estate back on the market in January (2014) for $2.1 million. The property was sold, as per property records, in mid-July for its full (if reduced) asking price of $1.95 million.
Listing details show the existing residence was originally built in the 1930s by a prominent local family and measures in at a fairly modest 3,855 square feet with four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms. The two-story residence, with it’s pilastered and shuttered front façade, maintains an air of southern gentility and stately elegance but, as digital marketing materials suggest, the downtrodden dwelling is need of a full renovation. Some architectural details and medium brown oak floors — probably original — remain in place but the kitchen, laundry room and main floor powder pooper have already been removed.
A gracious, double wide center hall entry is flanked by formal living and dining rooms — the former with fireplace, and there’s also fully paneled library/study with non-working fireplace and a window-lined breakfast room with built-in corner cupboards for storing dishes and other knickknacks and bric-a-brac.
The oak floors continue throughout the upper floor where at least one of the bedrooms has a vintage fireplace (that may or may not be functional) and at lease one of the other bedrooms has a built-in dresser underneath a classic six-over-six sash window. There’s a detached three car garage set behind the house and, off to one side, a picked-fenced swimming pool with a dumpy, flat-roofed guesthouse of unknown size.
Your Mama really hasn’t a clue if Miz Witherspoon and Mister Toth intend to renovate and occupy the premises on a full- or part-time basis or if they’ll attempt to fix it and flip it for a profit. What we do know is that the estate sits among those owned by a number of other Nashville notables. Just half a mile down the road is the Tennessee Governor’s Mansion and others in the immediate area include country king Ronnie Milsap, country queen Martina McBride and Matthew Followill of Kings of Leon who, it turns out, owns the former manse of legendary comedienne Minnie Pearl.
Listing photos: Freeman Webb Co. (via Zillow)
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