CLOSER TO HOME
24 actress Marisol Nichols walks Closer through her serene Hollywood estate.
She’s best known for portraying government agent Nadia Yassir on 24, but channeling her inner real estate agent is what led Marisol Nichols to find her Tudor-style dream home. “When the housing market crashed in 2008, I peeked over a brick wall, saw this secluded house and fell in love. All I could think was, Is it for sale?” says Marisol, 43, who was pregnant and living in a condo nearby. “A realtor friend said, ‘Actually, it is,’ but no one was interested because the family wasn’t doing a great job selling it. We had to wait three months until the price dropped low enough for us. Thankfully, nobody else found it before we did!”
Today Marisol and her director-editor husband, Taron Lexton, 33, happily share the three-bedroom, three-bath North Hollywood house they fell for with their daughter, Rain, 8, in mind. “I hadn’t even seen the inside, but the backyard was so magical, I said, ‘I have to raise my little girl here!’ ” Marisol enthuses of the green space with a large pool, basketball court and barbecue. “It really is a little paradise!”
If anything, the home may have been a bit too heavenly. “Everything in the house was shellacked — the ceiling and walls had glow-in-the-dark white glossy paint,” she explains. “The kitchen was sweet grandmother — daffodil yellow, with roosters and flowers on every surface. I appreciated that but wanted to start over with my own vibe, so it had to go.”
And she saw the potential of spaces like the large, semicircular family room, where “all that light made it feel just like being outside.” They didn’t initially have all the money for what they had in mind, but over the years, Marisol’s pal Melinda Brownstone
of Brownstone Designs worked with her to “redo everything room-by-room” in the nearly 3,000-square-foot space.
“When I got [the show] Riverdale, I said, ‘That’s it! I’m redoing the bathroom and closet in my bedroom.’ ” And outside on the half-acre lot, they converted a guesthouse into Taron’s editing studio. “That’s where he makes his magic,” she says proudly.
Aside from the pool, Marisol most enjoys the “cool gypsy-pirate vibe” of the gold and turquoise office with its dark wood beams that she and Melinda redesigned three years ago. “The rest of the house is very neutral, as it goes with everything, so I wanted the office to be my domain,” she says.
And Marisol has even more ideas. “I want to add a second story and raise the ceilings in the formal living room,” she says. “It’s just a dream, though.” For now, she’s in love with what she’s done, making it “really hard to leave” when she jets off to Vancouver, Canada, to shoot Riverdale. “I really like the life there, but I miss my house. It’s my home.”
— Reporting by Steve Gidlow