It’s nowhere near the highest price ever paid for a single-family home in L.A.’s historic and historically hoity-toity Hancock Park neighborhood — that honor goes to a the baronial red-brick Tudor Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins sold in early 2020 for $19 million — but the recent $13.8 million sale of a fashionably rehabbed Italian Renaissance Revival-style mansion that anchors a prominent corner of the exclusive neighborhood does represent the to-date highest amount paid this year for a single-family home in that particularly fancy-pants part of town. Completed in 1930, the grandly proportioned house was built for prominent L.A. developer Joseph A. DeBell — he gifted 100 acres to the city of Burbank in 1954, which he then developed into the DeBell Golf Course, and tax records show the nearly two-third-acre spread was sold by real estate developer and hospitality entrepreneur Lorenzo Boucetta and his wife Kaya Boucetta. Though the Boucettas, who bought the place in 2018 for $7.2 million, spent considerable time and money transforming the vintage estate into a showplace for modern family life, the couple decided to move house when the opportunity arose to purchase a property they’d previously rented in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. The new owners of the Hancock Park mansion are married television writer/producers Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil, she a writer on the late 1990s TV series “Moesha,” and the creator of the long-running early Aughts sitcom “Girlfriends,” and its spinoff “The Game,” before she and Salim co-created, developed, wrote, directed and/or produced the ill-fated series “Love Is…,” the successful series “Being Mary Jane” and, most recently, “Black Lightning,” the latter a superhero series based on a character of the same name in the DC Comics publications. Elegantly embellished with carved eave supports, arched windows and carved stone columns on either side of the front door, the imposing manse spans close to 10,000 square feet with four bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms, plus an attached one-bedroom guesthouse with a full kitchen and 1.5 baths. The estate was listed with Viktor Aaberg and Fredrik Eklund of the Eklund/Gomes Team at Douglas Elliman, while the Akils were represented in the deal by Stephen Sweeney at Oak Brook Realty
