Has Katy Perry’s years-long pursuit to purchase a former convent in Los Angeles fizzled to an end? In 2015, the bubble-gum pop star agreed to pay $14.5 million — $10 million in cash and another $4.5 million in property — for the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary compound, a Medieval-style religious center that sprawls across eight acres in the eastern part of Los Feliz. A second claim to purchase the property, by local businesswoman Dana Hollister, resulted in a bitter, expensive and years-long legal battle for the compound. Hollister said she was given the go-ahead to acquire the property by two nuns who opposed selling to Perry. But in 2017, a judge determined Hollister’s claim was not valid and ordered her to pay $15 million in damages for interfering with the sale.
The judgment would seem to have cleared the way for the quick completion of Perry’s much-desired purchase. However, her formal option to acquire the former convent has since expired, according to a statement released by Adrian Marquez Alarcon, spokeswoman of the Archidiocese of Los Angeles. Earlier this year, there were unsubstantiated reports that the property had become available at $25 million, but they were quickly shot down and, according to the archdiocese, Perry and the church are still in communication about her ongoing interest in the property.
Though she sold two adjoining residences at the top of Runyon Canyon earlier this year for a combined $12.3 million to famed restaurateur Mr. Chow and, whether or not she decides to move ahead with the convent purchase, Perry is hardly without a house to call home in Los Angeles. In early 2017, she made a $19 million off-market deal for a five-bedroom European-inspired villa hidden down a long, gated drive in a notoriously star-studded neighborhood in the upper reaches of Coldwater Canyon in the Beverly Hills Post Office area. And late last year, she plunked down $7.5 million for a second home in the same nabe for family and friends. As for her movie-star fiancé Orlando Bloom, he’s recently chopped the asking price of his own ultra-modern bachelor pad in a particularly fashionable area of Beverly Hills to just under $8.5 million from its original ask of nearly $9 million.
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