Liz Saying Adios to Puerto Vallarta

ELIZABETH TAYLOR is selling her Puerto Vallarta properties.

The actress put the two-house compound that she and actor RICHARD BURTON purchased in Mexico in the early 1960s on the market, along with a penthouse that she bought there about two years ago.

“Puerto Vallarta holds many special memories for me,” she said. “Though the town is still as inviting and beautiful today as when I first visited it, my children all have families of their own, and with all the traveling I do, I have had very little time in recent years to return.”

Taylor and the late actor bought the hacienda, known as Casa Kimberly, while co-starring in the 1964 movie “Night of the Iguana.” They were also married while filming the movie in Puerto Vallarta. That marriage lasted 10 years; they were remarried in 1975 and divorced again in 1976.

During their first marriage, they created the Puerto Vallarta compound by joining two houses, across a street from each other, by a bridge modeled after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, Italy.

Taylor first put Casa Kimberly on the market in 1987 at $1 million. She’s now asking $350,000, including furnishings.

“She really wants to sell it now,” said a spokeswoman for Fred Sands Realtors, which has the listing. Other than caretakers, nobody lives in the home, which the spokeswoman termed “sprawling” with its seven bedrooms, seven baths, swimming pool, atrium and two kitchens. “It would be good as a restaurant or a bed-and-breakfast,” she suggested.

Taylor also listed her nearby penthouse at $250,000. She bought it new about the time she first listed the hacienda. The condo has four bedrooms and four baths and is in a 156-unit building that has tennis courts, spas, maid service, a restaurant, golf course and views of a new marina.

Elaine Dannenberg and Roger Wall of Sands’ office in Beverly Hills--where the actress lives most of the year, share the listings.

The SULTAN OF BRUNEI recently dropped plans to buy a house in Bel-Air because radon was discovered there, industry sources say.

Radon--a radioactive, gaseous chemical element believed to be a cause, at high levels, of lung cancer--is more commonly found in homes on the East Coast.

The 25-bedroom, 36,000-square-foot estate was in escrow when the radon was discovered. The home had been quietly marketed at $25 million but was in escrow at $18.5 million for eight months, sources said.

While in escrow, a home inspector hired by representatives of the buyer called in a consultant who conducted a test for radon and found higher than normal levels of it in part of the house. That discovery and the facts that the owner has cancer and her husband died of cancer discouraged the sultan from buying the property, sources said.

George D. Baral, president of Reliance Home Inspections in West Los Angeles, is the inspector who hired the consultant, but Baral, who has a master’s degree in chemistry and has extensively studied the radon issue since the Bel-Air discovery, said, “There was no reason for that escrow to have fallen through. . . .

“To do radon mitigation, you just blow air into the building . . . or you can drill a hole in the foundation and vent it with an outside fan.”

The consultant estimated the cost to solve the radon problem at $250,000, according to Baral, but Baral figured it at $50,000 at most “and probably just a few thousand dollars.”

SANTA CLARITA STUDIOS, described as “Hollywood’s first new studio to be built from the ground up in over 60 years,” is expected to open in April.

The $14-million project is in the new city of Santa Clarita, next to the 37,000-acre Newhall Ranch, which is regularly used as a back lot for ABC-TV’s “China Beach” and CBS-TV’s “Tour of Duty.” The studio is also near Magic Mountain, just north of the San Fernando Valley.

The studio--which has six 15,000-square-foot sound stages and an 18,000-square-foot production center with a commissary, offices and other space--was conceived by Herman B. David, who developed it with a group of private investors.

David, now the studio’s president, is a 30-year industry veteran. He was once director of operations for the Burbank Studios and was studio manager for 20th Century Fox when he left in 1987 to build the Santa Clarita Studios.

RON KOSLOW, who created the former CBS-TV show “Beauty & the Beast” and is now developing new programming at ABC-TV, has purchased a Brentwood home that was gutted and redesigned to look like a Provencal farmhouse with an English country garden.

The four-bedroom, four-bath house--with maid’s quarters--has weathered wrought-iron balcony grills and door handles, an antique butter churn and a wheat grinder.

Melissa Love and her Alco West Designs sold the house to Koslow for $1,635,000, and Love also designed the home to include such items as 17th- and 18th-Century doors that she says she bought from Gypsies in France and a wood-burning oven, which is her trademark.

Actress/singer LORNA LUFT, Liza Minnelli’s sister and Judy Garland’s daughter, and Luft’s husband, rock musician-composer JAKE HOOKER, have just purchased a house in the Hollywood Hills for a bit more than $1 million, and they’ve listed their Coldwater Canyon home for $935,000.

Rory Barish of June Scott & Associates represented Luft and her husband in buying the larger house and has the listing.