...that east coast bound Tinseltowner Jennifer Aniston is not buying two apartments in a white-glove pre-war building in the West Village as has been reported here, there and everywhere, but three.
According to a source Your Mama freely admits we do not know, Miss Aniston plans to purchased not only Sally Hershberger's itsy-bitsy but exquisite jewel box penthouse listed at a mind-altering $5,900,000 and the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment directly below that's listed at $1,800,000 but also the unit next door.
The third unit, owned by a Canadian gal, measures 850 square feet according to listing information and like the other two units includes just 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom. Records reflect that the apartment was purchased just one year ago for $1,650,000 and the apartment first showed up on the listing services in early April with an asking price of $2,100,000, a number that has since been slivered to $1,995,000.
The asking prices for the three units combined comes to a staggering $9,695,000. It's unlikely Miss Aniston will be paying that amount for all three units that measure up to under 2,500 square feet of interior space and include a wrap around terrace with multi-million dollar views. Even if her Real Estates and Business Managers manage a 20% discount on each of the three units she's still looking at shelling out nearly eight million clams for three apartments that could quite easily cost Miss Aniston another couple million more to combine, renovate and decorate.
The children should note that the listing for this third unit that we heard through the celebrity real estate grapevine that Miss Aniston is purchasing is still marked "active" so this is all just rumor and gossip at this point, children, rumor and gossip.
UPDATE: Jennifer Aniston
It's such a lovely day Your Mama thought the children might enjoy a little afternoon picture pretty in the form of newly released listing photos of the Beverly Hills, CA mansion that sitcom and romcom actress Jennifer Aniston has on the market for a mouth-drying $42,000,000.The new photos show previously unseen areas of the house such as both of the master bathrooms plus a dressing/sitting room and the all stainless steel galley-style kitchen that looks more like a machine for cooking that a cozy gathering place.
As many of the children surely already know, according to all the tabs and gossip glossies Miss Aniston plans to her bags and move from L.A. to N.Y.C where the always tanned and well-turned out Miss Aniston (allegedly) has in contract , as we type our fingers to the nubbins, two small apartments in New York City, one directly atop the other.
The one bedroom and one bathroom lower apartment, in a plum pre-war full-service dowager in the West Village, was last on the market for $1,800,000. Very high but not unheard of for a well-configured high-floor apartment with a dining nook, fireplace and stunning city views.
The second unit Miss Aniston is said to be acquiring is the itty-bitty jewel box-like penthouse pad directly upstairs. The apartment, also just one bedroom and one bathroom, is owned by hair honcho Sally Hershberger, a crafty gal who will pillage your pocketbook for close to a thousand clams to cut your hair. The eensy-weensy but painstakingly renovated apartment became quite well-known last summer among New York City real estate watchers after the well-heeled scissor sister heaved her downtown aerie on the market with an audacious, but apparently not unrealistic, price tag of $5,900,000. Miss Sally knows more than hair. Beehawtcha knows that the higher you price something, the more desirable it becomes to those who can afford it.
Your Mama expects that Miss Aniston will hire smart architects and nice gay decorators to combine the two units into a pristine duplex penthouse. We've already sketched out a possible plan for Miss Aniston's merger in the West Village but we'd love to know what her people come up with.
listing photos: Coldwell Banker Previews International
Ed O'Neill Is A Thoroughly Modern Man
BUYER: Ed O'NeillLOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,050,000
SIZE: 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Since the early 1990s and until 2004 or 2005 actor Ed O'Neill (Modern Family, Married With Children) owned a house on the canals in Venice, CA. At that point he and the family swapped the gritty urban density of Venice for peaceful Sullivan Canyon, a decidedly rustic but none-the-less uppity area of Los Angeles nestled on the border between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.
Records indicate that Mister O'Neill, a black belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu who will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year, acquired his Sullivan Canyon crib in February 2004 for $2,600,000. The Los Angeles County Tax Man shows the privately situated residence measures 3,165 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and a swimming pool.
Recently Mister O'Neill and Catherine Rusoff, his lady-wife of 25-ish years with whom he has two youngish daughters, snatched up a second house in Sullivan Canyon. The new house, a modestly scaled but architecturally significant house on a thickly treed lot, is separated from the O'Neill's current crib by two driveways to two other homes.
According to the property records Mister O'Neill paid $3,050,000 for a 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom modern ranch house originally designed and built in 1953 by much-coveted and ballyhooed California architect Cliff May as his personal residence. Mister May, for all those who live under an architectural rock, is the man responsible for the classic California contemporary ranch house that are typically designed to engage in a taut but intimate dialog with the surrounding landscape that results in a barefooted and seamless integration of indoor and outdoor living.
The house, which the Los Angeles County Tax Man says measures 1,944 square feet, sits on a lush .26 acre. Busted-looking brick pillars mark the entrance to a tree-shaded gravel driveway that rises gently to a large gravel motor court where the low profile, single story wood, stone and glass residence extends discretely into the natural landscape.
Say what you will about Los Angeles and its overly cliché and over-played plasticity, but real estate-wise there aren't a lot of other major urban centers in the world where a person can live in the middle of the city in serene circumstances that feel downright rural.
The understated board and batten exterior disguises airy and–dare we say–dramatic interior spaces that–bless the hearts of every previous owner of this home–still retain original architectural features that include a magnificent 23-foot long sky light that runs along the peak of the beamed and vaulted ceiling. Smooth grey terrazzo floors run throughout the entire house that was recently refreshed by west coast starchitecture firm Marmol-Radziner. The pre-fab promoting architects remained rightfully respectful of Mister May's original design-spirit of the house while they re-worked, updated and upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms and installed miles of lustrous, meticulously custom-crafted and utterly delicious walnut cabinetry.
A stone wall with extra-wide fire box gives necessary anchor and spatial order to the living room area of the vast open room that opens itself wide to the outdoors via a full wall of sliding glass doors. At the other end of the room the open, center-island kitchen not only has clean-lined walnut cabinetry but chunky solid walnut cabinetry so delectable Your Mama just wants to get up on counter and roll around nekkid. The kitchen, warmed by all the wood, is also a multi-tasking and hard-working state of the art kitchen with breakfast counter, top-end commercial grade appliances, two sinks and a glimmering stainless steel tile back splash. We love love love the sharp glint of the stainless steel tile back splash against all the walnut wood but, in all honesty, Your Mama could have done with something else, something still brilliantly luminous but in a more organic color range.
Irresistibly caressable walnut paneling and banks of walnut-faced closets envelop both of the bedrooms. The smaller bedroom has a built in desk and the much larger master suite has a built-in entertainment center, glass doors that slide open to a private terrace perfect for a post-coital smoke, a dressing room lined with walnut cabinets and built in dresser, and a surprisingly well-scaled bathroom with double vanity, soaking tub for two, a separate marble-lined and glass-enclosed shower and, yes, even more walnut cabinetry.
Every room in the house opens through over-sized sliding glass doors to a variety of terraces and patios that surround the house. In addition to the aforementioned post-coital smoking terrace off the master bedroom that's shaded by mature trees and surrounded by ferns and other shade loving foliage, there's an an intimate courtyard-like area off the living room bordered by a towering wall of bamboo and at the front of the house large concrete pavers define an outdoor dining terrace that looks over the sloping and untamed front yard. A sliver of a patio–a path really–runs alongside the secondary bedroom and a concrete pad on the hillside high above the house takes advantage of a sunny clearing in the trees.
While we can appreciate and even swoon over a worked over garden, we rather love how the simple mass of the house works in both opposition and harmony with the rugged and mostly undomesticated landscaping. If this were Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's house we'd probably consider the installation of a simple swimming pool but otherwise we admit to a rare ache of real estate envy.
Since we don't really know a Easter egg from a Girl Scout cookie, we can only speculate why Mister and Missus O'Neill purchased a house very close to but not contiguous with their current residence. Perhaps it will be utilized as a guest house or maybe as office space for their personal staff. We like Mister O'Neill. Well, we like the characters he plays on the tee-vee. We do not, of course, know him personally. Therefore we have to hope and pray to to all the real estate and decorating gods out there that Mister O'Neill is not the sort of fella who will use this sensitively updated mid-century jewel box as a–gulp–man cave. Oh lowerd, somebody get Your Mama a nerve pill. It gives Your Mama the honest-to-goodness heebie-jeebies just to think about the word man-cave and we fall immediately into a catatonic state iffin we ever run across a description or picture of one of those places. That, hunnies, is a freaky modern-day decorative theme that Your Mama feels we are better off pretending just doesn't even exist. In fact, Rule No. 47 of Your Mama's Big Book of Decorating Dos and Don'ts declares that theme decorating of any kind–even in children's rooms–must be approached with extreme caution. These so-called man caves are all too often a perfect example of why themed decorating can be dangerous and disturbing in the wrong hands.
The O'Neill's nearby neighbors in Sullivan Canyon include Emmy-nominated actress Barbara Bosson who was married for nearly 30 years to prolific and successful writer/producer Steven Bochco and who records show paid $6,250,000 in September 2009 for her bucolic 8.5 acre spread. Next door to Miz Bosson is the the late Bea Arthur's Cliff May-designed house, currently available for lease at $32,500 per month.
listing photos: Michael Andrew McNamara for Sotheby's International Realty Beverly Hills
Your Mama Hears...
...that another big real estate deal has just gone down in Los Angeles that makes the $23,000,000 sale of tech entrepreneur turned art collector and philanthropist David Bohnett's sprawling mansion in the flats of Beverly Hills, CA look like child's play.According to both Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air and another well-placed Platinum Triangle property yenta we know–let's call her Bernice Belairresident–Your Mama has learned that financial services widow and philanthropic powerhouse Iris Cantor has, finally, at long last sold her exceedingly opulent and profusely gilded Bel Air mega-mansion for $40,000,000.
In cash.
Brenda Belairresident snitched to Your Mama that the new owner of Miz Cantor's (approximately) 35,000 square foot pile she dubbed La Belle Vie is a filthy rich financier but she was unable (or unwilling) to name the buyer. Our Fairy godmother in Bel Air suggested that the buyer may be a certain athletic mergers and acquisitions specialist from Goldman Sachs who looked at the house and another well-connected informant–let's call this one Johnny Jabbermouth–told us that he heard Indonesians connected to the powerful and controversial Suharto family toured the property "several times."
Miz Cantor, a Brooklyn-born former model, was married and divorced twice before she became a stock broker, a lucrative gig through which she met and married Bernie Cantor, the now-deceased co-founder of the influential investment services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Mister and Missus purchased the gated 18th-century style pile in the early 1990s for an unknown price when it was only half completed. The well-heeled and lavish living pair dropped several more pretty pennies, dimes and millions to have architect Michael C.F. Chan and New York-based designer Bebe Winkler complete and decorate the civic-center-sized 9 bedroom and 21 bathroom behemoth that's crafted from Texas limestone, priceless marble, twenty-two carat gold leaf detail, carved paneling and elaborately crafted iron and gilt bronze fittings. This is a house so correct that even Marie Antoinette would wet her bloomers over it.
Miz Cantor first attempted to unload her elegant real estate white elephant in 2000 when she listed the humongous house squeezed on to a tight lot with a $45,000,000 price tage. After 2.5 years on the market, the property was de-listed only to appear on the open market years later, in early 2009, with a much higher asking price of $53,000,000.
Although Miz Cantor stuck to her real estate guns and never lowered the published asking price for her unrepentantly decadent digs, Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that, in the end, the (alleged) forty million dollar purchase price was roughly and substantially 25% less than the fifty-three million she wanted.
Neither property records nor online listing information reflect a transfer of ownershp. In fact, listing information currently available online shows the status of the property as "active." and available for showings. However, according to Miz Belairresidnet, the deal is done and all the necessary docs have been signed on the appropriate dotted lines.
If case any of the children wondered or were worried, the child-free Miz Cantor is far from homeless. In late 2009 the high-society doyenne traded in a nearly 4,000 square foot penthouse on New York's swank Central Park South that she never reportedly occupied for a recently rehabbed six story townhouse on East 74th Street (just off Fifth Avenue) that she'd acquired earlier in the year for $18,125,000. She also maintains a water front spread in Westhampton, NY–known in some snobby circles as the Wronghampton–that she picked up in November of 2000 for $2,650,000 and it appears that the wealthy widow also keeps a posh place in Palm Beach, FL where prop records show her name attached to a property with Intracoastal Waterway access that was bought in May of 2002 for $8,635,000.
No doubt this over-sized transaction will no doubt send electric ripples of glee up and down the spines of all the Real Estate and home owners in Tinseltown who deal and dwell in residences priced at the tippy-top of the market. Given Miz Cantor's real estate good fortune, maybe it doesn't seem so far-fetched then that Jennifer Aniston may get close to the $42,000,000 asking price for her Bev Hills mansion or that Ellen Degeneres could find a deep-pocketed buyer willing to edge up close to the $60,000,000 at which she's (allegedly and according to multiple sources) shopping her Bev Hills compound?
We shall see, puppies, we shall see.
photo: Bing
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