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Decades ago, before the advent of cellphones, TV legend Bob Barker would unfurl a nearly 100-foot-long cable to stretch his landline phone from the house to the outdoor pool at his Hollywood estate. He’d plonk it down in a basket next to his lounge chair, alongside his towels, AM radio and baby oil.
He never wanted to miss a call, his nephew Robert Valandra said, but “he loved getting sun.”
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Baker, who hosted the game show “The Price Is Right” from 1972 to 2007, died in August 2023. Now the Hollywood home where he lived for more than 50 years is coming on the market. The price? $2.988 million.
Located about 15 minutes from the studio where Barker filmed “The Price is Right,” the house is in a Hollywood Hills community called Outpost Estates, which has drawn celebrities such as Orlando Bloom and Ben Affleck. Barker’s roughly 5,000-square-foot home dates to 1929 and still has all the original detail from the period, including leaded and stained-glass windows, the tile in the bathrooms, and a decorative hand-painted coffered ceiling in the entryway, according to Valandra, who is the co-trustee of Barker’s estate and the property’s listing agent. In the den, there is still an original bar with an icebox.
The home is configured with four bedrooms, though there is room for as many as six, said Valandra. A hand-carved padre’s walk, or outdoor balcony, runs the length of the house. Spanning roughly a quarter of an acre, the grounds contain the pool and a large oak tree for shade.
Barker and his late wife, Dorothy Jo Barker, purchased the home in 1969, said their nephew.
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Barker kept his many Emmy Awards in the library. As he collected more and more over the years, he asked Valandra, who was working in real-estate development, to find someone who could build him a special display cabinet in which to store them.
“He said, ‘I’m going to make this nice and big because I hope to keep winning more and more Emmys,’” Valandra said.
Barker, who served as an aviator in World War II, used one room to store his extensive collection of military memorabilia, including model airplanes. Many of those items have been donated to charity, his nephew said. In his autobiography, “Priceless Memories,” Barker described his decision to become a pilot as “strictly a matter of vanity.”
“One day I was paging through a glossy magazine and saw a full-page picture of a young, handsome naval aviator leaning against a sleek fighter plane…. I took a long look at the picture and thought, ‘If I am going to war, I want to go to war looking like that guy.’”
The television host was proficient in karate and sometimes used the garage to train, often sparring with Chuck Norris, his nephew said. “Barker was incredibly competitive,” he said.
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Dorothy Jo delighted in decorating the house, said Barker’s half-brother, Kent Valandra. She made many of the home’s decorative details by hand, fashioning large flowers out of beads to display throughout the home. She was a prolific cook and spent a lot of time in the kitchen. When she died in 1981, Kent said, he found a box of recipes annotated with the names of people who had particularly enjoyed each dish. Her angel food cake was particularly tasty, he said.
One of the nation’s most famous animal-rights champions, Barker was known for encouraging “The Price is Right” audiences to spay and neuter their pets. The Barkers always had multiple dogs running around the property, including rescues, family members said. One of their most beloved canines, a mix named Lupe, was given to them by a stranger who was moving out of state and knew about the couple’s propensity to adopt. The Barkers initially thought Lupe was a chihuahua but she later grew very large.
“Several times she jumped the 6-foot fence behind my pool,” Barker wrote in his book. “As she bounded across the yard, she looked like a canine version of Bambi.”
Barker submitted the history of the house and its features to the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission and successfully argued that it be declared a historic cultural monument. It was a bid, he wrote, to protect the house that Dorothy Jo loved so much.
“I know nothing is forever. But it’s the best I can do,” he wrote.
Aside from Barker’s ownership, the property has its own storied history. The site once contained a small adobe house owned by Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the first publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who bought the hillside parcel in the late 1800s and used the structure as his “outpost,” a clubhouse for his friends, according to the cultural heritage commission.
Later, the property was sold to developer Charles E. Toberman, who is perhaps best known for building the Hollywood Bowl and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Starting in the late 1920s, Toberman built a series of luxury Spanish-style homes on the land, dubbing the community “Outpost Estates.” Hoping to draw attention to the project, he erected a neon sign in the style of the original Hollywood sign.
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The Barkers, who were married in 1945, first moved to Los Angeles in 1950 from Florida, where Barker had been based as a pilot. They initially lived in an apartment just below Hollywood Boulevard. At the time he had “no job, no agent, no contacts of any kind,” Barker would later say.
“I remember we were up on Los Feliz on the eastern edge of Griffith Park,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We looked out over the city, and it was a blanket of smog. Dorothy Jo turned to me and said, ‘Barker, what have you gotten me into?’”
But Barker quickly booked a gig hosting a weekly radio show for Southern California Edison, the electric power company, his nephew said. Later, radio and television producer Ralph Edwards was impressed when he heard Barker on his car radio and invited him to audition to host the game show “Truth or Consequences,” which made Barker a big name in entertainment. “The Price Is Right” later became the longest-running game show in American television history.
After Dorothy Jo died, Barker had a long-term relationship with animal-rights activist Nancy Burnet, though the two never married.
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Burnet said when she visited Barker’s Hollywood estate, the two would spend low-key afternoons lounging with Barker’s dogs or taking them for walks around nearby Runyon Canyon.
“People think these Hollywood types are always going to parties,” Burnet said, “but that wasn’t Barker.”
Is the price right for Barker’s home? Robert said the property is priced to sell, and the figure reflects the fact that a buyer will likely need to spend significant sums to renovate. The median price for a home in the Hollywood Hills area was about $1.8 million in February, according to Redfin.
Robert said he believes the home’s famous owner will help draw in buyers.
“It’s already a historic home, but you double that by saying it was Bob’s,” he said. “I mean, he was there for over 50 years.”
Write to Katherine Clarke at Katherine.Clarke@wsj.com
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