SELLER: Loui Eriksson
LOCATION: Dallas, TX
PRICE: $2,495,000
SIZE: 7,141 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A few days ago Your Mama chit-chatted with the children about a glassy, modestly scaled mid-century modern that beau-hunky Swedish actor
Alexander Skarsgård purchased in the hills above Hollywood. Today—thanks to an informant we'll call Wanda Slipsomedish—we roll out Your Mama's celebrity real estate red carpet for another strapping Swede, this time professional ice hockey player Loui Eriksson who recently heaved his contemporary twisted traditional mini-mansion in Dallas, TX on the open market with an asking price of $2,495,000.
Your Mama does not follow ice hockey any more than we follow the lesbian rodeo circuit, but children, you should hear our boozy b.f.f. Fiona Trambeau go on a tear about the ice hockey. If there's anything in this world that Fiona loves more than the big ol' backside of a swarthy professional baseball player—word to the wise,
Angel Pagan, Fiona is coming for
you—it's the sturdy blond haunches of a foreign-born puck pusher like Loui Eriksson.
Anyhow, once Fiona stopped screeching and hollering she told us young Mister Ericksson—six-foot-two and just 27 years old—hails from scenic Gothenburg, Sweden, and currently plays the left winger position (whatever that is) for the Dallas Stars, who first drafted the Nordic bruiser in 2003. During the 2008-09 season he played all 82 games, then he played for Sweden in the 2010 Winter Olympics and in 2011 he was selected for the NHL All-Star Game in which he scored the game-winning goal. So, clearly, he's kinda a big deal on the ice. Indeed, Mister Eriksson is such a big deal that his current, six-year contract with the Stars (2010-2015) compensates him with an
average of $4,250,000 per year.
According to the various property records we peeped, Mister Eriksson and his long-time spouse/baby momma, Micaela Kanold, purchased their quarter acre-plus Dallas spread, located on a leafy lane in the posh Preston Hollow neighborhood in December, 2009 for an undisclosed amount of money.*
Current listing information shows the chunky, Prairie House style contemporary was custom built in 2007 by
Geoffrey Grant, a bigwig builder of luxury homes in Dallas. The un-gated and undeniably airy two-story domicile includes, as per listing information, six bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 7,141 square feet of interior space, every inch of it all done up and did over in a glitzy but casual, whimsy-tinged and downright feminine decorative style Your Mama might inadequately describe as Tastefully Flashy Period Pastiche meets Corporate Boutique Hotel Chic.
As we do whenever we come across some intel about an upscale residence in Dallas, we queried Candy Evans, the sassy, entrepreneurial—and
legally embattled—Dallas-based property gossip who works over real estate but good on her fab online endeavors
Candy's Dirt and
Second Shelters. Candy got back to Your Mama immediately—she's good like that—and, natch, she knew all about the Eriksson mini-manse. She was, she told us, at that very moment, sipping champers and typing her manicured fingers to the nubbins on
a rather gushing report of Mister Ericksson and Miz Kaland's thoroughly and opulently decorated Dallas digs. Candy did take a quick break from her scuttlebutting duties—told y'all she was good like that—and, to our delight, further elucidated re: the house, "This is what we in Dallas call a Mini Honey Pot. You are east of the big acreages where the likes of Kelcy Warren and Tom Hicks and George W. nest. This is where you find those who want gigunta homes on a little less land so they can hop in their G-5s and go off to their Vail pads!" A Mini Honey Pot! Die-ing.
Anyhoo, glass and wood front doors painted a high gloss jet black and set into a colonnaded porch open directly and—some will surely feel—abruptly into a Texas-sized formal living/dining room that stretches than 30 feet with impressively lofty 13-foot ceilings, espresso-colored maple floors and wide banks of extra-tall windows and French-style doors. A fireplace centrally set into a paneled wall anchors the living room end of the capacious space and two walls in the dining room are slathered in an over-scaled red, white and pink floral print wallpaper that Your Mama really
wants to detest, believes we really
should loathe and would never, in a million years install in our own home but none-the-less inexplicably—and much to our own decorative chagrin—sort of has a cotton for.
The living/dining room opens on its long, rear wall—directly opposite the front door—to a central stair hall that steps down into second, less formal but equally as decadent family room that's all decked out in a monochromatic yet glittery, sophisticated lady palette of cream, crystal, dusty rose and chrome. A second fireplace is flanked by open display shelves backed with a shimmery brocade-pattern wallpaper and zhuzhed up with framed photographs and perfectly balanced clusters of decorator-curated tchotchke.** Eight foot French-style doors and windows look out and open the family room up to a deep, covered porch with monumental steel fireplace.
Two steps up from and open to the family room a sleek-and-chic galley-style Balthaup-brand kitchen was designed and installed with a center island snack counter (for four), snow white slabs of quartz counter tops, a complete collection of commercial-style stainless steel appliances and a built-in breakfast banquette. A nicely equipped butler's pantry conveniently connects the kitchen to the dining room.
Behind the kitchen—at least we think it's behind or, maybe, beyond the kitchen—a window-lined room currently used as a children's play space (above, top right) has, matte black walls with cutesy artwork, a wall-mounted flat-screen t.v. for tuning the child out, a super-stylish modern-style play kitchen and direct access to the backyard.
A second family room (above, bottom), on the second floor, is perfect for keeping the kids out of the more adult-oriented areas on the main floor and is finished with a row of built-in homework desks and a complete wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets and shelves custom-built around—of course—a wall,mounted flat-screen television.
Each of the home's half dozen bedrooms was, clearly—as seen in the delicious listing photos, worked over but good by a lady or nice-gay decorator with a lot of ideas, a thing for wallpaper and a decent but not unlimited budget.*** The roomy, white and silver-toned master suite (above, left) has a humongous, wallpaper and lattice headboard structure stuck to the wall behind the bed and an attached bathroom with a glass-enclosed—if not particularly private—open-plan bathing suite (above, right) comprised of soaking tub platform and separate multi-head shower area.
One family/guest bedroom doesn't have any wallpaper at all, another has super-graphic black and white vertical striped wall paper on at least three walls and another yet has shimmery silver- and mint-hued brocade-patterned wall paper up on just one wall plus the damn ceiling. Candy's very accomplished and regularly published lady decorator told her a wallpapered ceiling is
de rigueur in
au courant Dallas decoratin' circles.**** Well—all due respect, gurl—we are not convinced. It kind of gives Your Mama the vertigo, like we're standing on the wall, iffin that makes any sense. Anyhoo, you say luminescent patterned wallpaper on the ceiling we say super-matte white paint. Whatever.
Another bedroom—probably intended for a young girl based on an entirely stereotypical reading of the listing photograph—has plum colored walls that we think might be a soft fabric stretched over batting and a fifth bedroom—for an infant, duh—was done entirely—and we mean in its entirety, hunties—in a stunning but not particularly stimulating-to-baby blush kissed beige color.
A (thankfully) removable child-safety fence separates the covered outdoor living/dining area off the kitchen and family room from the over-sized concrete pavers that surround the slightly-raised spa and large, rectangular swimming pool with tanning shelf. There's also a diving board, the fulcrumless kind that hardly bends a smidgen even when ferociously pounced upon by a husky diver and that we imagine an insurance company would label as an attractive nuisance.***** A flat, but fairly petite patch of grass at the back of the house is the perfect spot to let the dogs do their business and/or install a super-sized and high-cost swing set and play structure.
Your Mama has no inside intelligence on where Mister Eriksson and Miz Kaland might be headed next but would anyone be surprised it it wasn't over to the east a little bit where, as Candy said, all the big acreage estates are located? No. We wouldn't either.
*We can not confirm the figure, but Dallas-based property fiend Candy Evans reported this week on her blog that the couple paid somewhere around $1,400,000.**We can not confirm the pottery clusters and etc. seen on the shelves on either side of the family room fireplace in the listing photos were actually curated by a decorator. We only speculate they were because they're just so, well, so that it's a tell-tale sign a professional decorator has been all up in the house.***We can not confirm the day-core in any or all of the bedrooms—or any other room in the house, for that matter—is the actual handiwork of a professional lady or nice-gay decorator. Maybe this was an singular effort by the lady of the house. It could be. It probably isn't. But it could be. We also can't confirm that Mister Eriksson did or did not have "a decent but not unlimited budget" for his furniture and other decorative items. We have absolutely no knowledge of what sort of budget he did or did not have for his obviously very thoroughly decorated residence.****What Candy's Dallas-based lady decorator, Michelle Nussbaumer, actually said about wallpaper on the ceiling was that it's, "very NOW" and not, as we said, "de rigueur in au courant Dallas decortin' circles." It wasn't specified in Candy's report whether Miz Nussbaumer thinks a wallpapered ceiling is NOW only in Dallas or if it's also NOW in well-dressed, upscale homes in other parts of Texas, the U.S. and/or the entire world.*****We really have no idea if an insurance company would term this diving board or any other thing on this property as an "attractive nuisance" or any other kind of nuisance.
listing photos: Dave Perry-Miller & Associates
