Midweek Floor Plan Porn: 120 East End Avenue

LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $18,000,000
SIZE: 9,000 square feet, 6-8 bedrooms, 7 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It's a tad bit dull on the celebrity real estate front this morning so Your Mama thought it might be fun to shift gears a little and, thanks to our unofficial aide de camp Hot Chocolate, help the children get over hump day with some good, old-fashioned New York City real estate porn in the form of a vast, 9,000-ish square duplex maisonette with 6-8 bedrooms, 7 full and two half bathrooms and an $18,000,000 asking price.

A maisonette, for those not familiar with with the the variety or urban living spaces, is usually located on the ground floor of a multi-story building. It is not just however, just an ordinary ground level apartment. A maisonette, by definition, has direct and private access from the street. In addition to one or more service entrances, a maisonette typically but does not always have a secondary public access point through the building's lobby or other common spaces. This is convenient so that on bitter winter days when Heidi Housekeeper goes to pick up the mail, flirt with the doorman or accept a delivery from Bergdorf's or Dominos she need not go through the trouble to bundle up and make mad dash along on the sidewalk to the building's main entrance.

Of course, there are those who think it's unspeakably inelegant to live on the ground floor in a dirty and dangerous place like Manhattan even if it is a 9,000 square foot spread in an architecturally understated—even dour—and punishingly expensive limestone edifice (above) built in the early 1930s by Gilded Age heir and philanthropist Vincent Astor. Mister Astor long and famously occupied the top floor of the building with two of his three wives, first Mary and then Brooke who, of course, eventually became the undisputed dowager queen of uptown high society and moved on from 120 East End Avenue to her duplex residence at 778 Park Avenue with its six terraces, five fireplaces, four staff rooms, two dozen closets and internationally renown blood red lacquered library.

Anyhoo, while New York City hardly lacks for roomy apartments and titanic townhouses for the fortunate few who can afford them, it is fairly rare to find 9,000 or so square feet of living space that does not feel like an ill-conceived, frightfully cockamamie and utterly perplexing puzzle-like amalgamation of previous separate but contiguous units. New York is filled with those places. But 9,000 square feet of elegant and well-resolved residential space? Not so much.

The massive maisonette sits very and way too far east for some high-nosed folks but is none-the-less directly across from Carl Shurz Park, the location of Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of New York City that Mister Mayor Bloomberg declined to inhabit in favor of his townhouse. Both the street entrance and lobby entrance function in harmony and connect to a grandly scaled reception gallery with party-sized walk-in coat closet and and two nearby powder rooms, both separated from the common areas by a small, privacy enhancing antechamber.

The formal living room, about the size of a suburban tract house three car garage, has a wood-burning fireplace at the far end, simple but heavy duty moldings, a magnificent trio of park-facing floor-to-ceiling multi-paned windows outfitted with decorative security screens and a narrow-gauge chevron patterned hard wood floor that's been—regrettably, in our humble and meaning opinion—bleached, stained or otherwise painted white.

The day-core in the living room, as throughout the mammoth maisonette, is eclectic to the point of being downright weird. That's not necessarily a bad thing, puppies. Although we're quite certain the better glossy shelter publications are beating down the door to photograph this place, we'll take a dynamic and decoratively mystifying set up like this long before we'd go in for one of those behemoth proto-suburban beige-fests furnished with a ship load of heavy, carved wood furniture that looks like it came from someplace with the word "warehouse" in its name.

Across the reception gallery from the ballroom-sized living room, three steps flanked by turquoise-colored glass vases lead up to an almost as large room marked as the "library" on the floor plan. Howevuh, hunties, despite the built-in bookcases Your Mama does not spot a single book in the listing photograph. What the room does have is the same white chevron pattern hard wood floors as in the gallery and formal living room, a second wood burning fireplace, three more floor to ceiling park- and street-view windows also with decorative security screens and at least on piece of really good art.

The formal dining room, plenty big enough to host a well-attended holiday party, is accessed from the foyer down a wide, picture-lined corridor and through an the main stair hall with its sweeping spiral staircase that's screaming to have someone dramatic swoon down it in a caftan and bejeweled princess heel slippers.

The stair hall's day-core is predictably unpredictable and, well, a bit of a flummox. We feel sick over the white-painted wrought iron work that swoops up the partially carpeted staircase and Your Mama would, of course, pick up and remove that silly ewer set on the ground beneath the table. We also can not bear an overstuffed vase of yellow lilies. But, children, the steroidal sunburst mirror mixed and mashed with the three-legged round table, the Old-Timey cyrstal chandelier and that freaky bust of some Roman emperor atop the white veined black marble pedestal all kinda work for Your Mama in that can-be-terribly-chic, ugly-duckling-in-a-tiara sort of way. The bland walls, although probably hand troweled Venetian plaster, need some pizazz. The lifeless stair runner has gotta go and something needs to be done to better disguise or highlight the awkward door wedged under the stairs that leads directly—and conveniently—into the kitchen. Speaking of the kitchen...

The very contemporary, open concept eat-in kitchen is, but for the daring and vivacious jewel-toned rainbow colors provided in juicy pops by an expansive collection of probably very expensive glassware. The are several windows in the kitchen but, alas, they face a narrow and probably quite dark channel between this and the neighboring building. The almost monochromatic sweep of space has snow white cabinetry topped with stone slab of unknown material, two work islands, two dishwashers, three sinks, one walk-in pantry/storage closet, and a double-wide industrial-style glass-fronted fridge/freezer that makes Your Mama's knees turn to jelly with appliance envy.

The service and staff wing—located back behind the kitchen, natch—includes a rear staircase for easy access to the upper level bedrooms, a bedroom-sized laundry room with slop sink, compact—and windowless—bathroom and two rooms for live-in domestics, one very narrow, one unusually generous and neither with a proper closet according to the floor plan. Of course, so few rich people choose to live with their domestic staff anymore. Today's super-rich are increasingly inclined—for obvious reasons—to put up their full-time help in and off-site location so this suite of rooms is quite likely and very comfortably utilized as a home gym, household office, meditation lounge, Pilates studio, etc.

In addition to a sitting room with fireplace and book laden book shelves(above, left) that connects through to the corner bedroom of the park-facing master suite, there are a total of six bedrooms upstairs, each with—we're thrilled to report—direct access to a private bathroom. Iffin Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter were in the market for a 9,000 square foot maisonette on on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—and we are not and will never be—we'd probably opt to co-opt the sitting room for exclusive use of the master suite occupants and also to incorporate the middle bedroom—the one with the bay window—into the master suite to create a much more substantial bathroom/closet/dressing room complex.

That alteration would still leave a room and private park-facing guest bedroom with walk-in closet at the front of the apartment (above, right) plus two more decent-sized guest/family bedrooms at the rear. There's also an itty-bitty bedroom off the tail end of the service entrance corridor that would very well work for a favored live-in domestic worker or might otherwise be pressed into use for a small child or house guests who do not sufficiently warrant over night occupation of the larger guest suite.

'Tis a pity—at least as far as Your Mama is concerned—to pay nearly twenty million clams and not get a square foot of outdoor space but such are the brutal sacrifices even the wildly wealthy sometimes have to make for 9,000 square fee of deluxiocity in one of the more expensive if not exactly central neighborhoods of one of the biggest, baddest and most urban centers in the world.

For almost half the money we'd much prefer—say—this much smaller and less pricey but rigorously executed Anabelle Seldorf designed townhouse in the West Village that maintains its original architectural envelope from 1869 around a meticulously conceived and strikingly modern interior. But that's just us...

exterior photo: Kate Leonova for Property Shark
interior listing photos and floor plan: Sotheby's International Realty

Jodie Foster Buys in Beverly Hills

BUYER: Jodie Foster
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $11,750,000
SIZE: 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Yesterday we awoke at the crack of dawn to a delicious series of covert communiques from our prodigiously plugged-in informant Freddie Finefellow who gleefully tattled to Your Mama that child star turned Oscar-winning actress/director/producer Jodie Foster (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver) recently and very quietly paid $11,750,000 for a canyon and city view residence in Beverly Hills, CA.

Well, natch, that bit of scuttlebutt snapped the gauze from our gin saturated morning brain and, since Miz Foster—bless her heart—is notoriously famous amongst property gossips for hiding her real estate tracks with the energetic fastidiousness of a feline, embarked us on a good ol' fashioned celebrity real estate investigation.

Our Mister Finefellow figured the whole thing went down off-market because he was unable to locate on online listing for the pricey pad that's privately situated behind a Peeping Tom thwarting row of tremendously thick and tall hedges. Howevuh, hunties, just because the internet has been all but scrubbed clean of most listing details does not mean that Your Mama can't call on one or another of our clued-in resources to help sort out the situation.

Fortunately for y'all, our ever-efficacious and laudably efficient Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills was able to provide us with a wee bit o' documentation that reveals the residence was originally listed in March 2012 for $14,700,000. The price quickly dropped to $13,750,000 and just about every property records data base we consulted show the property was acquired by an deliberately opaque entity in late June for—as aforeindicated—$11,750,000.

The house was sold, according to property records, by English super-producer Colin Callender, the former president of HBO Films who now heads up his own production company, Playground Entertainment. Mister Callender, as per property records, picked up the property in July 1999 for $1,625,000, a number that means he and the missus cashed in to the tune of ten million clams, not counting carrying costs, renovation expenses, real estate fees and etc.

Anyhoodles poodles, the two story center hall traditional, perched on a flat ridge top parcel of more than half an acre high above Franklin and Coldwater Canyons, is practically hidden from the street behind a towering wall of thick hedges and secured gates. This may technically be what's known as the Beverly Hills Post Office where services are provided by the city of L.A. and not the city of Bev Hills but—to be honest, butter beans—we're not sure and it doesn't seem important enough to figure out at this point. We are sure, however, there are scads of high-fallutin' zip code snobs out there who, we hope, can and quickly will clarify that for Your Mama and the children.

Property records show the house was originally built in 1952 and measures 3,752 square feet, although we suspect it may actually be larger. Documents surreptitiously provided by Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills show the house is of undefined square footage with five bedrooms, six bathrooms and four fireplaces. There are formal living and dining rooms, a library/study and a den, and office, and eat-in kitchen and a media room equipped with a projection system.

Out front there's a gated driveway and two-car garages and a slender front yard pinched between the hedge and the house. Out back, the long, north side of the house opens to a several patios and trellised decks that spill out to a flat, narrow and long swathe of green grass. A covered terrace on the south end overlooks a dark bottomed and perfectly rectangular swimming pool backed by a visually impenetrable wall of trees and shrubbery.

Naturally we don't have any idea what Miz Foster plans to do with her new house in Bev Hills but we have a sneaking suspicion—let's just call it a hunch based on vague intel—she'll have it leased it out for the next couple of years. 

The fiercely private but out and proud lesbian lady owns at least one other house in the Los Angeles area, a 5,357 square foot Spanish-style nido,* set behind high hedges in the high priced Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip, that she bought way back in 1995 from former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs.

In July 2005 Miz Foster reportedly paid $8,100,000 for a 1949 Connecticut country/Cape Cod style rancher in the flats of Beverly Hills that was once owned by Dinah Shore. It's not clear if Miz Foster ever actually moved into the house but property records show she sold the 7 bedroom and 8 bathroom estate in September 2011 for $8,300,000.

*That's nest in Español.

listing photo: Hilton & Hyland

Did Tamara Ecclestone Snatch Up Fleur de Lys?

For the last several days Your Mama's inbox has been deluged with breathless queries from curious folks who want to know if unfathomably pampered 28-year old British heiress and globe-trotting socialite Tamara Ecclestone really bought Fleur de Lys, the internationally renown and ridiculously conspicuous 12 bedroom and 15 bathroom French chateau style pile in Los Angeles's hoity toity Holmby Hills 'hood owned by wildly wealthy haute couture clad divorcée Suzanne Saperstein and listed since 2006 with a pie in the sky $125,000,000 asking price.

She did not, at least not according to property records and as far as any of Your Mama's better connected canaries deep inside the Platinum Triangle real estate game know.

Tamara Ecclestone is the daughter of diminutive Formula One racing bigwig and multi-billionaire Bernie Ecclestone and the dark haired older sister of brassy blond jet setter Petra Ecclestone who—and the children sure recall—(in)famously dropped a toe curling $85,000,000 on Candy Spelling's grotesquely gargantuan 50-some room mega-mansion in Holmby Hills after she made an unsuccessful eighty million dollar bid to buy Miz Saperstein's Frenchified pile of super-luxe imported limestone.*

The flood of requests for clarification re: the possible sale of Fleur de Lys to Tamara Ecclestone stem from a loquacious report late last week in the British tabloid The Daily Mail that stated the high-heeled, well-heeled, and newly single Miss Ecclestone—she recently booted her man-friend after she discovered he made sordid amateur sex video with another woman—"plans to rent the lavish property before buying it." For be if for Your Mama to slice hairs but planning to rent and/or buy is not the same thing as actually renting and/or buying. We plan to fit into our size 30 waist APC jeans one day but that does not mean we actually will. right?

While it's quite possible, of course, that Tamara may have arranged to lease the grandiose 4.25-plus acre estate, which would most certainly make a magnificent backdrop for her shockingly shallow reality program Billion $$ Girl, but Your Mama finds it almost unfathomable that she would cough up tens upon tens of millions of dollars for her sister's real estate sloppy seconds. Stranger things have happened but this snarky and cynical real estate gossip is not holding our boozy breath.

Interestingly, The Daily Mail printed and posted loads of photographs of the screamingly opulent Fleur de Lys all done up in a style Marie Antoinette might swoon over but everyone in Los Angeles who knows anything at all about the highest of the high-end properties currently on the market well knows that while the liberally gilded and heavily ornamented architecture remains intact Miz Saperstein recently had much if not all of her ludicrously expensive and finely pedigreed Frenchy frou-frou furnishings replaced with much more clean lined, comfortable and contemporary day-core.

Back in London, Tamara owns an historic 16,000 square foot mansion in the ultra-exclusive and hyper-secure Kensington Palace Gardens that she bought last year for about $70,000,000. Renovations will cost another $20-30 million add another 4,000 square feet, according to reports, and include a two level basement with indoor pool, nightclub and bowling alley. The  multi-room master suite was designed, so the stories go, with separate cocktail and Champagne bars because, well, why not? Her new, across the street neighbors will be Prince William and the newly preggers Duchess Catherine but we can't imagine they'll be borrowing much sugar from each other.

*We can't confirm it, of course, but several sources have told Your Mama that Miz Saperstein turned down an $80 million offer by Petra just as several years ago—so the stories go—she also rebuffed at least one other offer of $100 million. If either of those gossip nuggets are true, she had to be kicking herself in her perfectly tailored real estate pants.

aerial photo: Pacific Coast News

Your Mama Hears...

...from a seemingly well informed southern source—let's call her Stella Mockingbird—that newly single A-list actor and occasional musician Johnny Depp may have set down some multi-million dollar real estate roots in the swanky, semi-rural suburbs southwest of Nashville, TN.

It's hardly a secret amongst all us naughty-naughty celebrity real estate gossips that Mister Depp has been on the hunt for a house in NashVegas and, according to Miz Mockingbird, the three-time Oscar-nominated actor has (allegedly) settled on a massive mansion in a small gated enclave about 15 miles south of downtown Nashville and about equidistant between the historic towns of Franklin and Brentwood.

The almost absurdly opulent mansion in question sits on more than 47 sumptuously bucolic acres tucked into a tight curve of the snaking Harpeth River and was built in 2001 by Tennessee banker Gordon Inman who christened the palatial pile Bella Rosa. As far as we can tell, the double-gated estate first popped up on the open market earlier this year with a tongue-twanging $17,500,000 price tag but Miz Mockingbird snitched to Your Mama that word around the gated enclave is that Mister Depp snagged the place for significantly less.

Listing information we ferreted out of the interweb shows the massive, 19-room behemoth measures just over 19,000 square feet on three floors with four bedrooms, seven full and two half bathroom, nine fireplaces, one elevator, numerous wet bars, garaging for at least seven cars, and a pair floating spiral staircases the flank the center hall foyer.

Although we would expect Mister Depp to bring in a team of lady or nice-gay decorators to do the place up in a manner that suits his fancy, the existing day-core as seen in listing photographs show the gargantuan residence was worked over but good for the seller in decidedly swellegant fashion. There are dozens of chunky Doric columns, acres of faux-finished and richly paneled walls, miles of intricate and beefy moldings, expensive marble inlaid wood floors, a bazillion yards of swagged and heavily pasamenteried drapery and scads of glimmering crystal chandeliers, all of which are probably antique and most assuredly were fantastically expensive.

At almost 700 square feet with capacious double height ceilings and towering 20-ish foot tall windows the formal living room is notably baronial and the adjoining formal dining room easily seats ten or more at a chatoyant Louis the Something-style table.

The library strikes a masculine tone with fully paneled walls, built-in book cases and a heavy coffered ceiling that were all—no doubt—hand-rubbed by an expensively imported artisan. Furnishings include a couple of riveted wing back chairs upholstered in the most marvelous caramel colored worn leather, a carved wood desk the size of a shipping container and a small flat screen t.v. mounted about the carved wood fireplace between two identical gold-toned urns.

Less formal family quarters include a super-sized center island kitchen outfitted with a prodigious—and potentially lethal—pot rack laden with stacks of gleaming copper pots (above, bottom left), a separate breakfast room with rustic river rock fireplace (above, bottom right) and a tile-floored den/sun room with a second river rock fireplace (above, top right).

A spacious family/game room has a vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling, built-in cabinetry for the t.v. and a third river rock fireplace (below, top left). The family room connects through a wide and shallow arch to a billiards area (below, top right) with full-height wrap-around windows and French doors that provide a long view of the meadow that stretches out from the back of the house to the tree-lined edge of the Harpeth River.

Listing information also indicates there's a second, gigantic family room with campy leopard print carpeting and built-in entertainment unit and wet bar (above, lower left). There's more than two thousand square feet of finished basement space, according to listing information, with fitness room and massive media lounge equipped with state-of-the-art screening area with glowing ceiling treatment and and built-in bar with under-lit bar and temperature controlled wine cellar visible behind glass doors (above, lower right).

Although the size of a small department store, the house has just four bedrooms that include a main floor master suite (above) complete with columned entry vestibule, over-sized bedroom area with sitting area, and a fireplace over-mounted with a flat screen t.v. and flanked by French doors that open to a private terrace. There's copious closet space—natch—and dual bathrooms, one clearly done up for a him with lots of columns and a brown marble lined shower and the other all decked out for a her with a barrel vaulted ceiling painted like a cloudy sky, a make-up vanity and a plunge-pool sized soaking tub set into a columned and window-lined niche.

Numerous patios and terraces extend off the rear of the regal residence and include a grand space tucked into a double-height portico off the formal living room with expansive views over the 30-plus acre backyard.

A long colonnade runs along the swimming pool and sunbathing terraces and connect the main house to the garages and rear motor court and the open air pool pavilion with chevron pattern brick flooring, outdoor fireplace, full kitchen with industrial-grade range, and changing facilities that–we imagine but can not confirm—include at least one bathroom.

Although the immediate environs around the house are fully landscaped and include a sizable circular rose garden, much of the land is a flat expanse of prairie-like pastureland perfect for a herd of goats or—even better—a flock of llamas.

Now children, we ask that y'all keep in mind that as of today none of the property records databases that Your Mama consults show a transfer of ownership (yet) so this is all just some southern style celebrity real estate gossip for now. Howevuh, if the juicy scuttlebutt is true, and he really did acquire Bella Rosa, Mister Depp will be surrounded by a slew of Nashville notables. Just a few doors down, for instance, is the 9,200+ square foot home of ice skating legend Scott Hamilton and just outside the gates of the exclusive community is the 23-acre former spread of Roy Orbison, now owned by a fiber-optics tycoon who has it listed for $5,399,000. Just over the narrow Harpeth River are the the sprawling equestrian estates of sick rich businessman Orrin Ingram II and big-time booze distributor Robert Lipman as well as Sweetbriar, the 135-acre estate country music king Alan Jackson sold in mid-2010 for $28,000,000 to auto salvage magnate Willis Johnson.

Mister Depp, who needs another house like he needs a hole in his head, owns a healthy handful of high-priced properties around the globe that include but may not be limited to Little Hall's Pond Cay—a 45-acre private island in the Caribbean, a house in the upscale Paris suburb of Meudon and a country estate in Plan-de-la-Tour, about 10 or 12 miles from St. Tropez in the South of France.

In Los Angeles the somewhat mysterious and idiosyncratic superstar owns at a significant estate and at least four other homes on the same winding lane just above the Sunset Strip and over the summer (2012) he dropped $4.4 million on a five bedroom Mediterranean style villa in the Hollywood Hills for his ex-lady friend and baby momma Vanessa Paradis who is said to have also been granted the family estate in Plan-de-la-Tour.

There are unsubstantiated rumors Mister Depp also owns a canal front palazzo in Italy's water-logged Venice and a spread on the Isle of Wight, just off the southern coast of England but, for the record, Your Mama is highly skeptical of both of those real estate canards.

listing photos: Karen Morgan Realty