Room for All Her Friends

COURTENEY COX, who plays Monica on the hit NBC show “Friends” and portrayed the private eye’s girlfriend in Jim Carrey’s box-office smash “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” has bought a home in the Brentwood area for slightly more than $2 million and sold her Santa Monica house for $1.1 million, sources say.

Cox, 31, has been part of the ensemble comedy “Friends” since it first aired in September 1994. She was the cover girl of People magazine’s 1995 issue of “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World.” Before the 1994 movie “Ace Ventura,” she played Lauren, the girlfriend of Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) in the sitcom “Family Ties.”

She will appear in September in the black comedy film “Commandments,” co-starring Aidan Quinn (“Legends of the Fall”) and Anthony La Paglia.

Cox, who is single, has been linked romantically, on and off for several years, with actor Michael Keaton.

She has described herself as “a home person . . . who loves to fix things.” In January, she was reported in Ladies Home Journal as saying that she likes to buy houses, then renovate and sell them.

She listed her Santa Monica house a couple of months ago at slightly more than its selling price. She had owned the house since 1992, when she bought it for $950,000.

Built in 1924, the French country-style house has four bedrooms in about 2,300 square feet, a black-bottom pool, spa and deck.

Her new home was built in 1949 and has four bedrooms in 3,500 square feet. The owner, an investor who had been using the house as a rental since he bought it in 1992, was considering refurbishing it but decided instead to sell.

Scott Sandler of GWP Inc. had the listing on the Santa Monica house and represented Cox in buying the Brentwood home, listed by Chrys Stamatis of the Prudential-Jon Douglas Co., other sources said.

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BARBRA STREISAND has put a 6.5-acre Beverly Hills-area parcel that she has owned since 1989 on the market at $4.9 million.

“She has no plans to build on this property now that she has her place in Malibu,” a source said, referring to Streisand’s three-acre Malibu compound. Streisand created the compound last year by buying three houses for a total of about $12 million.

She just completed filming “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” a remake of a 1959 film about an ugly professor and her quest for inner and outer beauty.

Streisand, 54, co-stars with Pierce Brosnan and George Segal, and she is also director and producer of the film, due to be released in November or December.

Her Beverly Hills-area property has a gatehouse, barn and house, built in 1937 as a hunting lodge for pioneer film maker King Vidor and designed by architect Wallace Neff. Actor Richard Harris, singer/songwriter Mac Davis and Broadway composer/lyricist Jerry Herman also owned the property at various times. The site has a view from downtown to the ocean.

Joe Babajian and Mindy Williamson, both of Fred Sands Estates in Beverly Hills, share the listing.

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NANCY HELLER, who made a name for herself during the 1980s for her designer sportswear, has purchased a contemporary house in Brentwood from ELI BROAD, chairman of SunAmerica Inc., a financial-services company with multibillion-dollar assets. A member of the Forbes 400, Broad, who is also a philanthropist and art collector, was a co-founder in the ‘50s of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., a major real estate company.

Listed last at just under $4 million, the seven-bedroom, nearly 7,000-square-foot house built in 1972, is said to have sold for $3.4 million. The house, on a bit more than an acre, has a tennis court, pool and two-bedroom guest house. Broad, 62, built another residence nearby.

Heller, in her 40s, also just sold her Malibu Colony home for $4.75 million, sources say. That house is about 3,500 square feet in size and has been described as “a showcase home.” It had been listed at about $5 million but was once listed at $7 million, sources say.

Claudia Beck and Jerry Jolton of the Prudential-Jon Douglas Co., Brentwood, represented Heller in buying the Brentwood house, and James Respondek of the Prudential-Jon Douglas Co., Pacific Palisades, and Linda May of Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills, represented Broad.

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TOM LANGAN, executive producer of the NBC daytime soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” has purchased a vacation home in the desert for about $1 million, sources say. Langan, in his 40s, has been renting in Mountain Gate while his Bel-Air house, which suffered damage in the Northridge earthquake, is being reconstructed, a source said.

His desert home, in Rancho Mirage, was completed in 1994 and is Mediterranean in style with 6,500 square feet of living space, carved into the side of a bluff 20 feet above street level.

The home also has a pool with a waterfall and swim-through grotto; five climate zones to conserve energy and an underground watering system for the tropical landscaping, accented by granite boulders.

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BARBARA VAN CLEEF, the widow of western character actor LEE VAN CLEEF, has put their weekend waterfront retreat in the Channel Islands Marina on the market at about $500,000.

Van Cleef, whose first film role was as the sardonic killer who dies in the showdown with Gary Cooper in “High Noon” (1952), died at 64 in 1989. He played villains in American westerns but went on to become an international star playing heroes in Italian spaghetti westerns of the 1960s.

The Van Cleefs, who lived primarily in the San Fernando Valley, bought their waterfront retreat, with a 40-foot boat dock, in 1985.

After he died, his widow sold their boat. Now she has decided to move, possibly to Hawaii, said listing agent Sheldon Berger of Cosby-Tipton Real Estate in Port Hueneme.