The first surprise here is that this house plus barn is in Berkeley, California.
The second is that it’s Whoopi Goldberg’s (or at least it was until very recently).
And the third is that she just listed the place at $1,275,000 – and it sold in about a week, the Los Angeles Times reports, at nearly double the asking price: $2,025,000.
Goldberg moved to Berkeley in the late 1970s and bought this property in 1985 for $335,000, property records indicate. On a local blog, neighbors said in the comments that she lived there off and on in the back barn/cottage, but that it was her brother, Clyde, who cared for their mother there until her death in 2010. Clyde Johnson, with whom Goldberg had been close, died unexpectedly in May of a brain aneurysm, and she listed the property the next month.
The main house is a 1,500-square-foot Victorian built in 1890, with 3 bedrooms and 1 baths. Behind it is the barn. Neighborhood tales have it that the barn was built in 1900 and sheltered horse-drawn ambulances, according to the listing, and then later was fortified for use as a community center.
It has been configured as a separate 1,600-square-foot cottage with its own kitchen and bath as well as a loft bedroom with vaulted ceilings. The buildings, as well as five garages, sit on a lot that’s about a third of an acre in the heart of Berkeley. Yahoo Homes
