SELLER: Kate MossLOCATION: London, UK
PRICE: £7,000,000
SIZE: 4,640 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Starting in late 2010 scads of rumors and reports circulated about globe-trotting British supermodel Kate Moss scooping up an historic house with a deep literary history on a celebrity-soaked street in London's hoity-toity Highgate area. And she did, just down the block as it turns out from the early 19th-century mansion British actors and star-crossed lovers Sienna Miller and Jude Law recently purchased. We digress, but one wonders the fate of that house now that Miss Miller and Mister Law have gone splitsville for about the 900th time.
In addition to all the hoopla about the house Miss Moss acquired in Highgate it's also been reported here, there and every-damn-where that Miss Moss already sold her bad luck abode in London's St. John's Wood area for around £10,000,000, a whopping 16,075,000 U.S. dollars. Turns out the cat walker and single mum hasn't sold her house in St. John's Wood for ten million pounds, sixteen million American clams or any another other amount of chicken scratch. Thanks to Our Man in London, we've learned that Miss Moss just hoisted her house in St. John's Wood on the market, not for ten million pounds but seven. According to Your Mama's trusty currency conversion contraption, that works out for all us peeps across the pond to $11,252,500.
If the children recall, in May of 2010 Miss Moss's St. John's Wood residence was burgled and just a few days later, due to some horrific problem with the plumbing, her basement filled up with crap. That's actual crap as in raw sewage, dear hearts. Imagine that for a second. It simply does not matter what a person thinks of Miss Moss and the multi-millions she rakes in with her string bean body because that's a olfactory tsunami of the worst kind that people should not want visited on their enemies or on a particular celebrity who they do not like for reasons obscure and thin as paper. Anyhoo, given those circumstances Your Mama is not the least bit surprised Miss Moss would want to pack it up and hightail it out to Highgate even though she only procured the property in St. John's Wood in 2007 for somewhere around six million pounds.
Listing information and marketing materials show Miss Moss's mini-mansion in St. John's Wood has a total of 4,270 square feet spread across seven staggered levels and includes–by our count–4-5 bedrooms and a total of 4 full and 2 half bathrooms. The freestanding freehold residence sits at the back of a walled and gated corner property and conveniently offers secured off-street parking for 2-3 automobiles.
In the sky-lit entrance hall a curving flight of stairs descends down to the basement (lower ground floor). A few steps lead from the foyer up to a maze-like corridor that passes by the drawing room, makes a sharp left, goes past the staircase the climbs to the upper levels, leads down half of a flight of stairs and scoots past an intimately scaled study/barroom to the powder pooper, cloak room and interior access to the 1-2 car tandem garage. From there the complicated corridor takes a hard right and opens dramatically into a sky-lit bi-level room that Miss Moss has done up as a kind of formal dining room. The walls are wrapped with graphic black and cream-colored wallpaper and in the lower vestibule an antique crystal chandelier lights an upright piano above which hangs and gigantic profile portrait of The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards with a cigarette hanging out of his wizened mouth.
The piano vestibule gives way to a clean-lined, custom fitted and luxuriously equipped 32-foot long kitchen/dining/sitting room where a wide bank of glass doors fold open to a large lower level dining and entertaining terrace. An "L" shaped hall shoot back from the kitchen to a half bathroom, laundry/utilities room and a cell-sized room with private bath that is probably intended for a live-in domestic. However, we shudder at the thought of live-in staff occupying just one under-scaled room smaller even than your damn closet so we think this particular space might be better utilized as a Pilates studio or for unfavored overnight house guests.
Back upstairs the drawing room stretches grandly more than 32-feet and includes two fireplaces–one at each end of the room–and two sets of French doors that open to a party-sized terrace that looks out over a good-sized garden. While it appears to Your Mama that much of the home's original architectural detailing may have been removed, the original parquet floors in the drawing room were retained. Miss Moss and her team of nice, gay decorators made the dee-voon decision to leave the parquet flooring exquisitely unvarnished resulting in shoe scuffs and stiletto pits that add a welcomed historical patina to the room and act as an effective foil to the high-glam of the shimmery verre églomisé wall panel between the French doors, the matching pair of midnight blue velvet sofas squared off in front of one of the fireplaces and the (looks quite real) leopard skin laid across an ottoman.
Half a flight up from the the drawing room two bedrooms share a single bathing and terliting facility and another half a flight up is the boo-dwar of Miss Moss who currently shares the room with her musician man-beau Jamie Hince, one-half of the rock-duo The Kills. From the looks of things Miss Moss is one of those gals who make their man slumber in a bedroom with super-fem day-core. In her case, it's a girlishly glam blush and cream-colored bedroom and a clean-lined contemporary bathroom bathed in blush pink walls and some sort of fancy cream-colored marble. Listen bread sticks, Your Mama well understands the cliché "Happy wife, happy life." However we just do not, can not, will not understand how a man can cede decorative control entirely over the his woman when it comes to the bedroom. Seriously folks, how can a woman expect their man to, ahem, perform in such lady-like circumstances? Whatever the psychology that's really another confusion for another time and another place. In addition to the two walk-in closets in the master bedroom, there's an additional, bedroom-sized and custom-fitted dressing room located half a flight up from the master bedroom that includes a loft area perfect for stashing dope and out of season fashions.
Across the landing from the dressing room, another bedroom with dramatic vaulted ceiling with heavy exposed beams has an en suite facility located up a short flight of stairs. It's idiosyncratic and probably terribly inconvenient for anyone who can't hold their booze the entire night, but we sort of like this bit of architectural quirkiness. Miss Moss and her team of nice, gay decorators has done up the room with deep gray wall to wall carpeting, blood red drapes that pool languidly on the floor, a campy Betty-Page-ish leopard print headboard and whole family of leopard print pillows to match.
The lower terrace off the kitchen/dining/sitting area steps up to an unusually large and grassy garden encircled by trees. The one decorative concession seen in the listing photos to Miss Moss's young daughter Lila is the wee swing set in the far corner of the yard.
The property is secured with a sophisticated system that includes, according to listing information, closed-circuit televisions. That means, of course, that any of you moe-rons who think it might be cute to jump up and peek over the garden wall will be filmed for posterity and possible prosecution for trespassing. If we've said it once, we've said it a gajillion times, while it's fun to look at these celebrity homes it's foolish, bordering on pathological and just plain stupid to step up on these properties and buzz the bell or otherwise disturb the occupants. You do that and you get arrested (or worse), it's yer own damn fault. Y'all stand warned.
listing photos and floor plan: Marcus Parfitt
