SELLER: Kelsey (and Camille) GrammerLOCATION: Bridgehampton, NY
PRICE: $9,995,000
SIZE: 8,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 7.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The other day we dissed and discussed the Beaver Creek, CO ski-house that much awarded and lavishly paid actor/producer Kelsey Grammer (Frasier, The Simpsons, Cheers) recently heaved on the market with an asking price of $7,900,000.
Today we're going to stick with Mister Grammer's great real estate sell-off and head east to Bridgehampton, NY where Mister Grammer and ex-Missus Grammer–the undisputed villainess of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have their Hamptons hideaway on the market with an asking price of $9,995,000.
Property records and previous reports show that Mister and ex-Missus Missus Grammer bought the property in January of 2006 when they shelled out $8,517,000 for the 1.7-ish acre estate tucked down a private tree-lined lane just a quick jaunt by bicycle to downtown Bridgehampton where the Wall Street and Lily Pulitzer sets can shop for bargains at Kmart and then scoot down the road and pick up some of the $100 per pound lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes.
The Grammers' shingled "cottage" was first listed–as best as Your Mama can tell–in mid-October of 2007 with the rather absurd asking price of $16,100,000. For the life of Your Mama, we can't fathom what was done to the property to justify an asking price nearly twice what was paid for it less than two years previously. Whatever the reasoning behind that unsuccessful maneuver, the house has become a bit of an albatross around Mister Grammer's neck and 3.5 years later the property remains up for sale but with a far more practical asking price of $9,995,000.
Current listing information for Mister and ex-Missus Grammer's 8,000-ish square foot mansion shows there are a total of 7 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms spread over three levels of space serviced by an elevator, at least five fireplaces and a three car garage luxuriously equipped with radiant heat. That's right, radiant heated floors in. the. garage.
A blue stone walk connects the parking pad to the front door that opens to an impress-the-guests-style double height entry with hardwood floors, painted paneling on the walls and a sizable chandelier that more than just a little resembles a pineapple. As the children surely know, the pineapple is a symbol for hospitality and that's why so many newel posts in Victorian homes have carved pineapples sticking up off of them and why it's always appropriate to arrive at some one's home bearing the gift of a pineapple.
The primary public spaces on the main floor include a formal living room with a row of French doors that open to a large terrace, a formal dining room outfitted with a table for 12, a wood-paneled library with coffered ceiling and a sun porch with classic diamond-paned sash windows and a somewhat incongruous and unexpected basket weave pattern terra-cotta tile floor. Less formal areas include an all-beige "great room" and gourmet eat-in kitchen with distressed wide-plank wood floors, white cabinetry and marble counter tops.
Four guest bedrooms on the second floor each possess a private pooper and the private master suite offers a number of features favored by–and only available too–rich-folks such as a fireplace, private library/sitting room, private covered porch with farm field views, and spacious terliting and bathing facilities that include a jetted tub and steam shower.
In addition to a home theater–spelled "theatre" on the listing, which makes it appear more chi-chi–wine cellar and fitness room with full bath, steam shower and dry sauna the lower basement level includes a two bedroom and one bath suite for staff or less-favored overnight guests who don't rank high enough on the food chain to get on of the private guest suites on the second floor. Presumably these second-class staff rooms in the basement were shared by Camille's army of nannies when they were in residence. Of course, our imperious housegurl Svetlana would pull the hair right off Your Mama and the Dr. Cooters' heads iffin we ever asked her to bunk the basement. Ol' superstitious Sveta does not, under any circumstances, lay prone below ground level because it's too closely mimics the position of a dead person.
The grounds, ringed by trees and hedges that promote privacy, include a gravel drive that bends one way to form a parking pad and curves the other way to stretch around to the attached three-car garage. Expansive lawn areas surround the house, a pergola next to the sunken Har-tru tennis court provides dappled shade for the sun weary and a wide blue stone terrace off the back of the house over looks the heated swimming pool, spa and adjacent pool house/guesthouse. Tucked up along the property line, in an out of the way location between the garage and the guesthouse, a wee bit of land was given over to a jungle gym contraption for Kelse and Cammy's youngins.
Anyhoodles poodles, like the rest of their homes, the day-core of the Grammers' Bridgehampton bedsit, while expensively done and "correct," is so upsettingly harmless and mind numbingly benign that it provokes peeve and makes us feel a bit unsteady on our decorative feet. We can only hope that this house was staged for the listing photographs. Otherwise the day-core just makes us feel sad and lonely. This is what too often happens, children, when a person owns 7 or 8 expensive and large homes. Its near impossible for all or any of them to appear as if they are homes that are lived in and loved. These high-cost and high-maintenance homes that are part of the extensive private portfolios of the wildly wealthy only get used a few weeks or–at most–a couple months a year and as a result they take on neither the comforting patina of daily life nor the joie de vivre that occurs when a home gets decorated with the cherished odds and ends that person collects and accumulates over time.
In addition to their ski-house in Colorado and their summer cottage in Bridgehampton, NY, Mister and ex-Missus Grammer also have a house in the high-toned Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles on the market, first listed at $19,900,000 in the summer of '08 and now listed with an asking price of $18,900,000. That property, which appeared in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest, no longer appears on any of the real estate listing aggregators like Redfin but it does still appear on the website of listing agent Mauricio Umansky. Reality television watchers will recall that on one episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, ex-Missus Grammer told Mister Umansky's wife Kyle Richards that due to their ongoing cat fight they will no longer be doing business with Mister Umansky. Obviously it was not, in the end, Cammy who got to make that decision because the listing was never, as far as we know, pulled from Mister Umansky's real estate purview.
Will their mansion in Maui be the next house up on the chopping block as a consequence of their dee-vorce? We shall see, puppies. We shall see.
UPDATE (next day): The New York Post reported today that Mister Grammer's house in the Hamptons has a signed contract at the full $9,995,000 asking price. Well good for him. I guess that shows all us chickens who thought nearly ten million bucks was a lot of money for the property.
When asked if he and his new wife Kayte–a trolley dolly nearly half Mister Grammer's age–planned to buy another house in the Hamptons the actor replied, "While that's likely, it's entirely up to Kayte to decide what we do with our new life."
listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty
