These are not the girls next door - unless you live in the Hollywood Hills. That’s the beauty of his shows: You feel, on some level, that if you tried hard enough and had the right stylists and doctors, maybe there could be a possibility that you too could live in his world.
(Sorry, Kyle and Dorit, but I would rather eat a pile of nails than be either of your friends.) But when Adam DiVello is producing a reality TV world, it’s hard not to wish you could spend a week or lifetime in it. There are plenty of other reality shows focused on trying to eke out home improvements on a tight budget, or well-heeled women behaving badly, or even other shows about expensive homes for sale, but rarely do you actually want to live in those houses or be around those people. There’s no homebuyer fretting over their budget or dozens of people trying to outbid them on a fixer-upper, because the competition over a $43 million home is, ultimately, slim. Selling Sunset is muted in contrast to other reality programming: The cast is hardly as bombastic as any of the women on a Real Housewives franchise, there’s none of that can-do attitude from other home makeover shows, no inspirational music that swells over a bathroom renovated on the cheap. It’s a show built for binging, even if it’s hard to encapsulate why. With Selling Sunset, he’s once again letting us commoners into a glamorous setting, but this time it’s the rarified world of high-end real estate that somehow feels wholly different from all the other real estate shows crowding cable TV.
On The Hills, which premiered two years later, DiVello plucked the most relatable young woman from Laguna Beach and followed her - and some choice Laguna castmates - as they embarked on a new phase of their lives in Los Angeles.
With 2004’s Laguna Beach, DiVello brought us into a wealthy Orange County enclave full of beautiful teenagers living largely unattainable lives. (His shows aren’t even called reality TV - instead they’re seen as docusoaps.) His brand of television is a lot like the house he was showing me: visually stunning, unaffordable, not really my style - and yet, I would happily be buried in the kitchen. Like most reality TV, the arguments are frequently petty, often rooted in little miscommunications, the conflict largely passive-aggressive, but DiVello knows to add just enough high-end appeal to make his shows feel elevated and compelling. The DiVello brand is built on nearly impossible aspirations, often with a cast of beautiful (but often quite bland) white women fighting over (usually) very low-stakes issues.
It was also the perfect setting for an Adam DiVello production. (It sold for less than the asking price, which means that maybe it could’ve been mine, give or take a few million.) For most of the show’s first season, the 20,000 square foot behemoth was still being built, and it was, at the time, the most expensive listing for the Oppenheim Group. The house, with its five bedrooms, nine (nine!) bathrooms, and home theatre, was listed at the time for around $43 million, and potentially came with a million-plus commission for whoever was able to sell it. But the room was so enormous that a bed that could fit four people still looked doll-sized in comparison. “It looks small, doesn’t it?” DiVello said. Selling Sunset is DiVello’s newest reality offering, a sleeper hit that focuses on a group of seven women who work at the Oppenheim Group in West Hollywood, a realty agency that specializes in selling very, very expensive homes.ĭuring our walkthrough, we wandered into the master bedroom, where we tried to figure out if the bed was a queen or a California king. I followed his crew as they scouted locations for the second and third seasons of Netflix’s Selling Sunset last June, and then again again in November for a couple of days of filming. The person giving me this tour of one of the most expensive homes in the history of the Hollywood Hills was Adam DiVello, the executive producer of the iconic 2000s shows Laguna Beach and The Hills. Oh, your home doesn’t have a wraparound infinity pool or an elevator? How grotesssssque. It wasn’t my house and never would be, but I started to dream about what owning it would be like.
The house had an unobstructed view of Los Angeles, and was so high atop the Hollywood Hills that it made the other mansions nearby look laughably miniscule in comparison.
The 12-car garage had a waterfall inside, the closets were the size of three average New York City apartments, there was a spa, a wine cellar, and a rooftop terrace. Last June, I toured a house so big, one lap around it made me tired.