improvisatory celinka: Celeb Real Estate: Diane Keaton settles down

By Staff, Zillow

This week in celebrity real estate, serial flipper Diane Keaton bought a move-in ready home, Merv Griffin's estate took a price cut and Patty Duke's former home hit the market.

Diane Keaton buys newer Pacific Palisades home for $5.75 million

Zillow

Diane Keaton's new home was built in 2009.

Now this is a surprising role for Diane Keaton. The Hollywood house restorer extraordinaire appears to have bought a house that?doesn't need a thing!

After years of restoring luxurious Hollywood homes and earning a spot as an Architectural Digest mainstay for the way her renovated homes have been re-sold to other celebs, Keaton is trying something new: Buying a house that's move-in ready.

Of course, the home could just be a "placeholder" for Keaton and her two teenage kids. In the latest issue of AARP magazine, Keaton says she is looking for a new challenge.

According to the LA Times, the 7,800-square-foot, 6-bed, 9-bath home has three levels of living space, including an entertainer's space on the lower level that has a large temperature-controlled wine cellar, movie theater and private gym. Sitting on a nearly a quarter-acre, the home embraces an indoor-outdoor lifestyle with a wraparound grassy yard, pool and spa, as well as patio with grill and outdoor kitchen.

Other Keaton properties include:

A Spanish-Colonial revival in Beverly Hills (purchased by Glee creator Ryan Murphy)
Lloyd Wright?s Los Feliz landmark Samuel-Novarro House (she sold to Christina Ricci)
Wallace Neff-designed Spanish-style estate in Beverly Hills (sold to Madonna)
Bel-Air hacienda designed in the style of George Washington Smith
Spanish-style hillside home in Laguna Beach

Zillow

Much of the home is characterized by gleaming dark hardwoods and details like crown moldings and built-in shelving.

Zillow

Many of the homes living areas open out to the patio.

See photos of Keaton's new place on Zillow.

Merv Griffin's 39-acre luxury ranch takes a price cut

Zillow

Merv Griffin's former estate features an enormous pond with fountain.

By the time Merv Griffin passed away in 2007 at the age of 82 from prostate cancer, the entertainer and talk-show host had amassed a fortune estimated at around $1 billion. A lot of that came from his real estate investments, including famous hotels and casinos.

Now, the 39-acre, Palm Springs-area estate that Griffin used as his desert base is available at a significant price cut. The Moroccan-themed property, which is also a horse farm where Griffin bred Arabians, at 81345 Avenue 54 in La Quinta, Calif., has been re-listed for $9.5 million.

The property was one of Griffin's most creative enterprises, as he described it in an interview two years before his death. The property includes 14 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms spread among 20,000 square feet of living space. There is a lavish, 5,000-square-foot main house and four, one-bedroom poolside casitas. The property remains a testament to the old-style Hollywood way of livin' large.

Zillow

Touches of Mediterranean and Moroccan decor are found throughout the home.

Zillow

One of the bedrooms sits under a turreted roof.

See more photos of Merv Griffin's home on Zillow.

Warm feelings about Patty Duke's former home has not resulted in a sale -- yet

Zillow

Patty Duke's former home sits on a shady, private lot in Beverly Glen.

Look hard enough and you'll find a lot of Los Angeles homes for sale?come with their own well-chronicled histories, thanks to generations of entertainment-world inhabitants.

On that note, the Beverly Hills home once owned by Patty Duke is on the market. She owned the property from 1966 until 1970 at 1600 Summitridge Drive?in the Beverly Glen neighborhood of the world-famous 90210 ZIP code.

The 5-bedroom, 6-bathroom house with 360-degree views of Los Angeles has been on the market for the better part of 15 months. Its current list price of $5.395 million is down from the original $6.5 million in March 2011.

The home was built in 1942 and has been maintained in pristine, move-in condition. It has found a new selling point as real estate experts in the real estate market have started to connect its history to Duke, as well as Sharon Tate and Polanski. The later pair were unable to buy the Duke home and instead moved across the street to the infamous house on Cielo Drive (now torn down and replaced) where Tate was murdered by Charles Manson.

Long before Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez or Hillary Duff or even Marlo Thomas, Duke was the talented young star whose television series helped interpret and reflect modern American life and culture circa 1960.

But when Duke was trying to leave behind "The Patty Duke Show" and the persona(s) she created -- she played herself and her cousin, a la Haley Mills in "The Parent Trap'' -- she went looking for new roles. That's how she would end up fighting for a part in the perfectly dreadful, but box-office success "Valley of the Dolls."