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The property, built in 1974 and sitting on 2.66 acres, is on the market for $2.995 million.
By Mark David, Dirt.com
In 1971, Linda Gray, then a successful TV commercial actress — she eventually appeared in more than 400 TV ads — and her husband Ed Thrasher, then the art director for Warner Bros. Records, who designed album covers for seminal bands of the era, including The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Grateful Dead and The Doobie Brothers, drove out of L.A. with some visiting friends from Tennessee who were looking to buy a horse ranch.
The foursome ended up about 35 miles due north of Beverly Hills, in the secluded Canyon Country area of the Santa Clarita Valley, where Gray and Thrasher quickly became so smitten with the area’s rolling, oak forested hills that they acquired an unusually triangular parcel of nearly 2.7 mostly flat acres for themselves.
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At the time, modernist architect A. Quincy Jones was designing the Warner Bros. Records Building in Burbank, Calif., a woodsy International-style affair completed in 1975, and the young couple had the prescience to hire Jones to design their Canyon Country retreat in a similarly rustic-modern manner. The three-bedroom main house was completed in 1974, the year Gray landed her first credited TV role, a small one-episode part on Marcus Welby, M.D.
Gray went on earn Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her iconic portrayal of “neurotic, psychotic, alcoholic weirdo” Sue Ellen Ewing on the original 1980s primetime soap Dallas, and its reboot, which ran from 2012 to 2014. She and Thrasher divorced in 1983, and the city of Santa Clarita, incorporated in 1987, has become a sprawling edge city composed of suburban housing developments, shopping malls, and nearly a quarter million people. The Canyon Country area, however, remains much the bucolic equestrian hideaway it was fifty years ago.
Aptly dubbed Oak Tree Ranch, Gray’s equestrian-zoned estate boasts a total of five bedrooms and four bathrooms in about 4,800-square-feet of living space between the single-story main house and two-story guest house.
Now in her early 80s, Gray unsuccessfully tried to sell Oak Tree Ranch in 2018 with an asking price of almost $3 million. Now, she’s giving it another go, listing the beloved property with Billy Rose, Natasha Sizlo and Andrea Korchek, all with The Agency, at $2.995 million.
All earth tones and ecrus, airy, light-filled interiors make use of sturdy tree trunks stripped of bark to hold aloft the beamed and vaulted ceilings over the sunken living room.
The living room also boasts heart pine floorboards salvaged from an old schoolhouse in New Orleans, a cantilevered hearth that spans the full width of the room, and walls of glass that almost make the room seem as much outside as in.
A huge skylight fills the dining room with light — the bespoke chunky wood table and chairs are among the home’s decorative highlights — and the expansive Josh Schweitzer-designed kitchen incorporates poured concrete countertops and a wood-fired pizza oven.
In a marketing video, Gray explains that she hates to hide regularly used kitchen items, so Schweitzer included a massive pot rack on either side of the professional-grade range over the extra-long island.
In one of the main residence’s guest bedrooms, an organic wooden desk is placed for a relaxed view of the swimming pool and surrounding gardens. A sprawling skylight-topped retreat unto itself, the master suite offers a small sitting area lined in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a fireplace raised off the ground so that it can be enjoyed from the bed.
A large rock sticks up out of the tiled floor of the greenhouse-like bathroom, which has a wood-stove warmed sitting area alongside a sunken jetted tub. A few steps down from the tub is a huge dressing room/fitness area lined with mirrored wardrobes. The main house and two-story guesthouse are connected by weathered decking and concrete terracing around the swimming pool and spa.
The two-bedroom guesthouse includes a spacious double-height living room with massive fieldstone fireplace and kitchen. A serene space, one of the guest house’s bedrooms features custom built-ins and textured walls that look like suede.
The en-suite barn-wood bathroom is prepped for guests with plush white robes and, on the ceramic-tile vanity, a small tray full of various perfumes. Both the main house and the guesthouse spill easily out to the simple rectangular swimming pool and circular spa, which is placed amid large rocks.
Surrounded by ancient oaks, the relaxed grounds also include huge expanses of rolling lawns, a north-south tennis court with an open-air cabana, a chicken coop, a koi pond, and a stabling block for four horses, plus a small barn/tack room.
This story originally ran on Dirt.com, which has additional photos.
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