SELL BUY PROPERTY

SELLER: Jeff Lewis
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,195,000
SIZE: 3,730 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It should come as no surprise to the children—at least not to any of them who give a hoot about the frivolities of celebrity real estate—that famously fickle house flipping designer/decorator and veteran Bravolebrity Jeff Lewis has put his own, freshly rehabbed residence in the artsy and affluent Los Feliz area of Los Angeles on the market with an asking price of $3,195,000. What is a bit of a surprise, at least to this jaded property gossip, is that the perennially itchy footed Mister Lewis owned the house two whole years before he shoved it back on the market for almost twice what he paid.

Armchair psychiatrists who have seen any or all of the six seasons of his reality program Flipping Out* can plainly see that Mister Lewis has a tetch of the OCD. This might—or it might not—explain how it came to be that this is actually the second time Mister Lewis has owned this particular house. The peripatetic property flipper turned decorator purchased the hillside house the first time in March 2004 for $1,265,000. He spent an unknown but, no doubt, substantial amount on a full-scale renovation and sold it just over two years later, in June 2006, for $2,795,000 to a couple of fellas who by the fall of 2010 had lost the house down the ugly abyss of foreclosure.

Without—so it appeared on Flipping Out, anyways—giving his live-in man-friend, Gauge Edwards, a hunty-how-do-you-do Mister Lewis seized the opportunity to acquire the property for a second time in July 2011 when he snatched it out of foreclosure for $1,625,000. Much ado is made on the sixth season of Flipping Out about how much money Mister Lewis blew through on the remodel. It was supposed to be a spit and polish job but once the ball started rolling, he his mister went hog wild and the planned light renovation became an extensive and expensive overhaul that included the painstaking and pricey installation in the circular formal dining room of a downright decadent, hand-cut black and white marble floor laid in a geometrically glam, match booked herringbone pattern.

The two-story 1937 Tudor was originally designed and built in 1937 by esteemed architect Wallace Neff on a .36 acre hillside graced with what listing information describes as "commanding breathtaking city views." In its current configuration, according to online marketing materials, the house has three bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and three fireplaces in 3,731 square feet.

The house co-mingles original architectural features, such as diamond paned and leaded glass windows, with much more modern-minded features and conveniences, such as the open concept kitchen and family room that Mister Lewis created in the course of his first renovation in the mid-2000s. The well-equipped galley style kitchen connects to the family room over a large center work island and the most recent redo by Misters Lewis and Edwards added a separate and fully outfitted, booze hound friendly four-stool wet bar.

A quick comparison of current and previous listing photos suggest Misters Lewis and Edwards are also responsible for, among many other things, the high gloss ebony finish on the hardwood floors in all three of the bedrooms—a murderous finish for anyone, like Misters Lewis and Edwards, with pets—as well as the solid wood panelling hedonistically applied to the walls of a long corridor and a narrow staircase.

The master suite occupies its own wing on the upper level with a sitting area, fireplace and a spacious spa-style bathroom with free standing soaking tub and steam shower for two plus and an "Immense" walk-in closet "reminiscent of the finest retail stores."The exposed brick wall behind the bed seems out of context and is a decorative convention Your Mama thinks is really better left to industrial-edged loft apartments.

In addition to the trellised, red brick lounging terrace set atop the street-level two car garage, several more (herringbone pattern) red brick dining and lounging terraces surround the house and step up the planted slope at the rear of the property. There's a small swimming pool and inset spa, a lounge area with fire pit, a sunbathing shelf, a small patch of grass for the pooches, and what listing information calls a "state-of-the-art outdoor kitchen."

*In addition to his starring duties on Flipping Out, Mister Lewis produces and co-stars with his long-time assistant (and verbal sparring partner) Jeni Pulos Nassos on the eponymous Interior Therapy with Jeff Lewis and he's the sassiest of the permanent panelists on Property Envy, Bravo's newest addition to their growing line up of real estate related reality programs.

listing photos: Partners Trust

BUYER: Ronnie and Janine Dunn
LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $2,000,000
SIZE: 5,751 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Since Your Mama was, so to speak, down in Nashville yesterday dissin' and discussin' the real estate doings of country music's reigning king and queen Tim McGraw and Faith Hill we figured we'd stay camped out in the Music City environs where—we learned from The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial—a dignified Neoclassical villa in an affluent, semi-rural suburb about 10 miles south of downtown Nashville (TN) was quietly scooped up in May (2013) by another couple of country music royals: Ronnie Dunn and his wife of 20+ years, Janine.

For nearly 25 years Mister Dunn was the Dunn half country music's esteemed and accoladed Brooks & Dunn duo who have earned a trophy shop's worth of industry awards including 17 CMAs, 26 ACMs, 3 AMAs, and 2 Grammys. For better and worse, the duo may still be best known for their twangy, 1992 single Boot Scootin' Boogie that, along with catchy ditties like Miley's daddy Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart, reignited the line dancing craze that swept honky tonks from coast to coast in the 1990s. Misters Dunn and (Kix) Brooks parted professional ways a couple of years ago and Mister Dunn now pursues a solo career. His first solo single, Bleed Red, went to #10 on the Top 10 in 2011.

Readily accessible online resources reveal the stately estate was first listed in October 2011 with an aggressive asking price of $4,400,000. By early 2013 the official price tag had plummeted to $2.8 million before Mister and Missus Dunn came along and drove the final sale price down to $2,000,000.

Fun Fact: The 6.41 acre spread is surrounded on three sides, according to property records Your Mama peeped, by the sprawling, 130+ acre, multi-residence compound-estate of Philip Bredesen, a former healthcare/insurance industry tycoon who served as the mayor of Nashville throughout most of the 1990s and, from 2003-2011, as the governor of Tennessee.

The noble Neoclassical villa, an elegant red brick central pavilion symmetrically flanked by smaller, identical wings—sits 500 feet off the road down a picturesque tree-lined driveway and was designed, as per listing details, by noted Palm Beach (FL) architect John L. Volk. Listing information Your Mama perused goes on to indicate the house was built in 1948 for a well to do fella named Philip Kerrigan, a local master metalworker who owned an eponymous iron works that provided the ornamental iron detailing seen throughout the villa and gardens. The Kerrigan family sold the property to its current owners in June 1995 for $1.5 million, making Mister and Missus Dunn only the third owners of the property.

The 1.5 story, 11-room residence measures in at 5,751 square feet, as per listing details, with five bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, 2 fireplaces, and well-proportioned public rooms meticulously embellished with elaborate moldings, pilasters, and pediments that Your Mama imagines were probably crafted on site by the hands of skilled tradesman and not, say, purchased at one of the big box mass retailers of home improvement goods.

Other rigorously executed architectural details include elliptical transoms, concealed pocket doors, jib windows, groin vaulted ceilings, florid iron work—natch, and walls sheathed with scenic, handcrafted woodblock printed wall coverings from the profoundly pricey French wallpaper manufacturer Zuber & Cie.


The garden areas are linked by herringbone pattern red brick pathways and include unusually large boxwoods and slightly unkempt parterre. Oodles of mature shade trees dot expansive sweeps of lawn, and next to the side motor court there's an absolutely lovely, if down on her heels, iron and glass greenhouse with louvered ceiling.

In the far back corner of the estate, past a charming(ly bedraggled) barn/stable, there's a second, self-contained residence described in listing details as a "Caretaker's cottage" but, honestly chickens, cottage is really pushing it as a description of that particular abode. No T, no shade, but that looks to Your Mama like it might actually be a slightly glorified double-wide. At best, it's a prefab situation dressed in some very tired looking wood siding. Whatever the materials and construction method, it's really fine from a functional point of view but it's also—for the more persnickety amongst us—a bit of a wart on an otherwise pleasantly genteel spread. Anyways...

Your Mama's brief and unscientific research shows the venerated country music veteran and his long-time missus own a number of other residential properties including at least one condo in the hip and stylish Nashville nabe known as 12 South. Since 1996, when they bought it for $900,000, the Dunn's primary homestead in Nashville has been a 10,000+ square foot mansion with extensive equestrian facilities on 16 (mostly landscaped) acres about 10 miles south of downtown and in 2007, according to property records, Mister and Missus Dunn spent an unknown amount of money for a large, southwestern-contemporary residence in Santa Fe, NM.

listing photos: Pilkerton Realtors (via Zillow)

SELLERS: Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
LOCATION: Franklin, TN
PRICE: $20,000,000
SIZE: 753+ acres with (at least) half a dozen homes

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Between them, country music king Tim McGraw and pop/crossover country music queen Faith Hill have 8 Grammys, 28 American Country Music Awards (ACMs), 14 Country Music Awards (CMAs), 14 American Music Awards (AMAs), and 4 People's Choice Awards.* The couple's joint Soul2Soul II tours (2006-07) hauled in $141,000,000, at that time and still the highest gross ever for a multi-year country music tour. Together they've sold more than 80 million records and—depending on where you look on the internets—have a combined net worth of around $135,000,000.
Such accolades, accomplishments and riches affords the Miz Hill and Mister McGraw the pampered and profligate lifestyle of the A-list country music super stars they are. The couple—married more than 16 years with three young female children—own a private jet and are well known by property gossips like Your Mama to maintain a frequently in flux property portfolio that would make the ears of a run-of-the mill multi-millionaire bleed with envy and (financial) anxiety.

In 2005 they sold a 10,702 square foot mansion in Brentwood, TN for $1,855,000 and in October 2008 they listed a 10,500 square foot  mock-Med mansion in the "old section" of the bifurcated Beverly Park community in the Beverly Hills Post Office with a $14.8 million price tag. They eventually sold the property, which was famously burglarized in 2007, in June 2010 for $9.5 million to an obviously well-to-do Beverly Hills attorney.

In late 2009 the McGraw-Hills floated their 4.22 acre semi-rural estate on the outskirts Nashville's affluent Belle Meade nabe on the market at an unknown price. We're not really sure when the property was taken off the market but we do know that in late May of this year (2013) they pushed the well appointed estate back on the open market with an asking price of $2,900,000. Current listing details show the existing house was originally built in 1934 and has five bedrooms and four full and three half bathrooms in 6,767 square feet. The couple have also listed a separate but contiguous, 7.37 acre parcel for $2,000,000.

We've now learned, via a short, covert communique from a real estate canary we'll call Chiquita Chirpsalot, that in addition to their Belle Meade mansion, Mister McGraw and Miz Hill have also hoisted their historic and impressively pedigreed 753+ acre farm in Franklin (TN) on the open market with an hefty, hefty, hefty $20,000,000 asking price.

A quick poke around several property record data bases shows the McGraw-Hill's bucolic farm in Franklin, not quite 30 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, is comprised of two adjacent parcels divided by the tree-lined Harpeth River. It appears to Your Mama they purchased the adjoining farms in separate but simultaneous transactions in November 2001. The smaller parcel (353.12 acres) cost the country royals $5,009,560 and the larger parcel (400.7 acres)—an Antebellum plantation that was previously owned by country music legend Hank Williams—cost them another $8,750,000. A few quick clickety-clicks on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus and we tabulate that the McGraw-Hills total outlay for the Franklin farm was $13,759,560. Your Mama certainly ain't privy to the pocketbook(s) of Mister McGraw and Miz Hill but we have to assume they've spent several million more over the last dozen years on taxes, upkeep, and improvements.

Beechwood Hall, also known as the H.G.W. Mayberry House after it's original owners Sophronia Hunter Mayberry and Henry George Washington Mayberry—was built in 1856 as the high fallutin' residential centerpiece of what was then a 1,000 (or so) acre pre-Civil War plantation. Privately situated down a snaking drive deep in the heart of the 400+ acre larger parcel, the grand, Greek meets Italianate Revival style mansion needs a complete, sensitive, and thoughtful renovation/restoration but, children, the bones, as they say in the real estate bizness, are magnificent, are they not? The stately structure measures 6,856 square feet, according to the Davidson County Tax Man, and includes a paneled library with voluminous ceilings and a gigantic, 20-foot by 40-foot entrance hall with a swooping, circular floating staircase that staircase divas like Scarlett O'Hara and Auntie Mame would surely have swooned over and swanned down.

The log-built Greek Revival style house on the smaller parcel was built in 1850, according to listing details, and has three bedrooms, four bathrooms, and at least five fireplaces in 3,330 square feet of totally, renovated, restored, and casually luxurious space done up with a kind of Shabby Chic-y day-core. We're not sure the columned portico on the front façade is original to the house but it certainly lends the otherwise humble log structure a rather regal attitude, doesn't it? A roomy red brick screened porch along the back of the house has a sweeping view over the farm and looks to Your Mama like a divine spot to spend humid late summer evenings nibbling nibblits, nursing gin & tonics, and working a vexatiously monochromatic 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Anyhoo...

In addition to Beechwood Hall and the Greek Revival-style log house, the McGraw-Hill's compound-like farm-estate has at least four much more modest (and far less interesting) residences. Probably they are used by friends, family and/or staff but what do we know, right?

Numerous warehouse buildings house farm equipment (and whatever). The 12-stall barn—a stunning piece of architecture in its own right—has a tack room or two, a 1,200 square foot caretaker's apartment, and a cavernous arched hay loft that with a little gussying up would make an fine spot for  high-toned hoe down for a couple hundred of the McGraw-Hills friends and associates.

Rustic dirt roads and paths criss-cross and loop through the vast farm that includes open fields, fenced livestock pastures, and copse-dotted rolling meadows dotted. Each of the parcels has a large pond although Your Mama isn't sure if either is swimmable and/or stocked with fish.

Mister McGraw and Miz Hill's primary residence remains—at least as far as Your Mama knows—the super-sized mansion they had custom-built at the tail end of a long, gated driveway on 17 acres in the Forest Hills area that they picked up in August 2004 for $3,000,000. We don't have a lot of specific intel on the manse. Based on aerial imagery we'd call it a multi-winged, stone-built neo-Tudor about which Mister McGraw's mom, Betty Trimble, told Men's Journal in 2009 that "You drive up to the house and it looks like Europe. The Davidson County Tax Man shows the 37-room behemoth has five bedrooms and 9 bathrooms in more than 22,000 square feet. A big house for big stars.

*He has 3 Grammys, 14 ACMs, 11 CMAs, 10 AMAs and 3 People's Choice and she has 5 Grammys, 14 ACMs, 3 CMAs, 4 AMAs, and 1 People's Choice. They share 5 of their ACMs.

listing photos: Fridrich & Clark
aerial image: Bing

Famously peripatetic, prodigiously entrepreneurial, and seriously media savvy designer/decorator Nate Berkus has, it seems, officially decamped The Big Apple for the City of Angels where he's settled in domestic bliss with his furniture making designer/decorator fiancée, Jeremiah Brent—of The Rachel Zoe Project semi-fame, into a petite, Hollywood Regency style residence that's tucked up into the tail end of a quiet cul de sac in the Hollywood Hills with a long history of high-profile residents.

The house, designed in 1939 by the legendary John Elgin Woolf, measures in at about 2,150 square feet, according to property records, and has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a pavilion flanked plunge pool that nests perfectly into a sexy, curved glass wall in the living room.

Immediately upon securing the keys to the crib the couple did what well-connected and deep pocketed nice-gay decorators always do...They decorated! Because it's a rental* they had to work with a number of features they could not change, i.e. marble inlaid parquet floors and a flawless mint green range from the 1950s. They slapped some paint around—the jet black walls in the master bedroom are of particular note—and filled the house with multi-textured, mixy-matchy/high-low melange of masculine furniture and day-core. Then, because they can, they called up the venerable fashion rag Harper's Bazaar who sent over the fab (and fantastically mustachioed) photographer Douglas Friedman to take some pictures of the couple lounging around in designer suits amid in their gussied up love nest that adheres to a fairly strict and sophisticated palette of "black, white, saddle, and bourbon."**

*Some reports that indicate the couple purchased the house but Your Mama is pretty dang sure they rented the residence. Not only do property records not reflect a recent transfer of ownership we dug up loads of digital evidence the house was recently listed for lease at $7,900 per month.

**Let's be honest. We have no idea if the Misters Berkus and/or Brent called Harper's Bazaar. For all Your Mama knows, H.P. came a knocking all on their own accord, right? Anyways...

photo: Douglas Friedman for Harper's Bazaar

While not exactly celebrity related, it's certainly intriguing that a 258-acre tract of undeveloped land in the swanky Bel Air area of Los Angeles has come up for sale with a sky high $125 million price tag, as was first reported this week by the kids at Curbed.

As best as Your Mama can tell from our brief and entirely unscientific research, the vast tract comprises two large parcels owned by the Beverly Hills-based Giro Properties who picked up both properties in at the same time late 2006 for and unknown amount of dough. Curbed calculated the two parcels represent a staggering 6% of the total of land in all of Bel Air and, according to the Los Angeles County Tax Man, the two parcels have a combined assessed value of $25,562,621with property taxes that rang up to more than $325,000 for 2012.

Both of parcels are mostly made up of steep and difficult to access chaparral covered hillside that could make development difficult. Plus, any houses (or whatever) that gets built on the property will most likely be in full view of the homes along the ridge lines that flank the rugged canyon property. Indeed, in case anyone cares, the property is overlooked by the $9 million mock-Med macmansion in the guard-gated Bel Air Crest community that new mommy Kimmie Kardashian bought in January (2013).


listing photo: John Aaroe Group

Sixteen time Grammy winning music industry supernova David Foster and his fourth wife, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' Yolanda Foster, have put their 4,200-plus square foot duplex penthouse pièd-a-terre in downtown Victoria, British Columbia—that's Canada, children—up for grabs with a $5,250,000 asking price. An unidentified source told celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ that the couple has decided to sell because they barely have any time to use the three bedroom and four bathroom Shoal Point penthouse that overlooks the city's bustling harbor.

listing photos Sotheby's International Realty

Thanks to the kids at Curbed (San Francisco) we've learned that tech tycoon Evan Williams—he's a co-founder of Twitter, in case you didn't know) has listed his happily anachronistic San Francisco (CA) residence with an asking price of $2,995,000. The three story, 1880s Victorian in the Noe Valley 'hood has had a thoroughly modern architectural intervention and currently contains 4 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms in 3,200 square feet plus a separate, self-contained one bedroom and one bathroom guest house as well as a hotly coveted two car garage with interior access.

listing photos: McGuire Real Estate

After a long slog actress Kate Walsh recently sold her house in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles for $4,675,000 to a powerful entertainment industry executive and her poet husband and this week the folks at Zillow let the cat out of the real estate bag that the ginger-tressed hospital drama/rom-com staple quickly scooped up a new home, a gated estate in Encino, CA. The property comprises a well-maintained but decoratively outdated one level Cape Cod-y residence with five bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. Property records and previous reports show she paid $2,725,000 for the one acre spread that has a swimming pool, tennis court, and one-room detached guest house.

listing photos: Coldwell Banker

Property flipping music industry veteran, pop culture über-icon, and well-known Twitter hound Cher continues to shake up her property portfolio. First she sold her duplex pièd-a-terre at the star-studded Sierra Towers building in West Hollywood, then she sold a Venice (CA) home occupied—so we've been told by the sorts of people who know these sorts of things—by her musician son Elijah Blue. Now comes word down the celebrity gossip grapevine via the long-legged blond at Trulia Luxe Living that Cher coughed up $2,145,355 for a secluded residence above Coldwater Canyon in the Beverly Hills Post Office area (above) that was once owned by actor Ed O'Neill. (Keller Williams via Trulia Luxe Living)

P.S. Despite all the natter and chatter, the Dark Lady singer absolutely did not sell her massive Italian Renaissance mansion in Malibu to Beyoncé and Jay-Z. In fact, she hasn't sold it at all although several high-end players in the Los Angeles real estate game have told Your Mama it remains quietly available with an asking price in excess of $40 million.

 listing photo: Keller Williams

SELLERS: John M. and Laurie Rudey
BUYERS: Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega and Maria de la Concepcion Legorreta de Angoitia
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $16,500,000
SIZE: 10 rooms, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A couple months ago, to global gasps and a plethora of international publicity, septuagenarian timber magnate John Rudey hoisted Copper Beech Farm, his first-rate, 50-acre water front estate in Greenwich, CT, on the market with a sensational $190,000,000 asking price. As many of the children surely saw, last week the ever-industrious kids at Curbed posted a smattering of interior photographs of the 15,000 square foot main mansion that had not previously been included with publicly available listing details and today the property gossips at The New York Times revealed that Mister and Missus Rudey have saddled Copper Beech Farm with more than a hundred million dollars in mortgages. ¡Escándalo! Or is it? You decide.

In 2010, according to The New York Times, the Rudeys had secured (at least) $203 million in loans against Copper Beech Farm. Presumably there were some payment issues because in 2011 one of their several lenders, Bank of America, initiated foreclosure proceedings. Uh-oh. The Rudeys—natch—responded by filing suit against the bank for "predatory lending practices." We don't know the exact results but the lawsuits were dropped last summer (2012), as per The New York Times, and the Rudeys appear to have restructured their debt and/or paid some of the loan(s) because they currently carry, according to The New York Times, a much less but still gargantuan sounding $120+ million in debt secured against the Connecticut estate. That's unquestionably a lot of dinero but, to be fair, at 63% of the current list price of $190 million, it's actually much less than the 80% loan to value that most people—particularly financial mortals—typically use to finance their home purchases.

A source who claims inside knowledge of the Rudeys financial/real estate arrangements snitched to the New York Times that the super-sized mortgages might have something to do with the Rudey's desire to unload Copper Beech Farm at an elephantine price. However, before you jump on that bandwagon, know the couple's seriously successful real estate agent, David Ogilvy, poo-pooed that ugly notion and told The New York Times that the Rudeys desire to sell Copper Beech Farm was—and we paraphrase—simply the sensible estate planning of a very wealthy family.

Whatever the reason—and we can all be sure their are a myriad of them—the article casually mentioned that last December Mister and Missus Rudey divested themselves of their long time residence at the venerable 1030 Fifth Avenue in New York City that carried, according to online resources, monthly maintenance fees of $10731. Your Mama thought that since we've all (probably) seen the waterside decadence of Copper Beech Farm it might be fun to have a look around the couple's elegant, art-filled and much more contemporary digs in The Big Apple that they sold, according to property records and previous reports on the sale, for $16,500,000 to Mexican-born media mogul Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega and his epically named wife, Maria de la Concepcion Legorreta de Angoitia.

We're not sure exactly when Mister and Missus Rudey acquired their now former apartment at 1030 Fifth Avenue but it had to have been before 1980 when, with the permission of the building's board and much to the chagrin of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, they replaced the apartment's original multi-pane sash windows with much more contemporary, aluminum framed single pane windows. It took years but the controversial window replacement ended up—as they always do with the very rich, kittens—in a legal kerfuffle in the late 1980s. We didn't turn up any reports of the results of the heated skirmish in our brief and incomplete research but it would seem the Rudeys prevailed because the single pane aluminum framed windows remain in place as evidenced by listing photos from the time they sold the apartment last year.

The floor plan included with listing materials from the time of the sale shows the full floor apartment—Your Mama guesstimates it might be around 5,000 square feet—has a private elevator landing that opens to a entrance gallery that is decked out in some deliciously graphic and no doubt shocking costly striated marble—or whatever material that is—but is also a smaller than we might expect in an uptown pre-war pad of this stature. The foyer connects through to a spacious but hardly humongous living room with wood burning fireplace, elegant herringbone wood floors, head on views over the tree tops of Central Park, and a serene decorative palette of gray and gray. It sounds boring—and it sort of is—but the monotone color scheme sets a unobtrusive and barely there stage for the vibrant, seasonally cyclical scenery of Central Park. Two other rooms that flank the living room also have direct park view, a formal dining room and a cozily sized corner library with a face-slapping view of the hulking northeast corner of The Met and down Fifth Avenue.

The dining room is open to the kitchen over a built-in buffet set between two tall and thin doors. The center island kitchen has a built in breakfast table, eggshell colored Shaker-style cabinetry with stone (maybe marble) counter tops, two sinks, two dishwashers, two refrigerators, and a walk-in pantry. The service areas behind the kitchen include a windowed half bath, a den/office and an unusually generous laundry room with slop sink and window.

The bedroom wing runs down the southern flank and includes a total of four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The rear most bedroom has a private bathroom plus two walk in closets and the middle two bedrooms each have a walk in closet and share a compact Jack 'n' Jill style bathroom. The perplexingly puny master bedroom also has a walk-in closet but, much to our meaningless annoyance, shares another way-too-tiny but blessedly windowed Jack 'n' Jill style bathroom with the library.

Although it may not be amongst the uppermost echelon of Fifth Avenue buildings 1030 Fifth Ave. is, none the less, a much coveted and brutally expensive address that has long attracted rich and powerful Wall Street titans, spendthrift hedge fund fat casts, and Showbiz bigwigs. In 2009, Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon reportedly had a look-see at a monstrous 9,000-ish square foot duplex with 8 bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms. Owned by hedge fund queen Karen Fleiss, the suburban mansion-sized apartment originally had a sky-high $47.5 million price tag that was later hacked and slashed to $19.9 million. The duplex was eventually offered as two separate apartments and the lower half was sold in early 2010 for $8,898,000 to financier Richard Duke Buchan III. As far as Your Mama knows—and we really know so very little—Miz Fleiss and her orthopedic surgeon husband still own the upper portion of their former duplex.

Other current owners of swanky spreads at 1030 Fifth Ave. include private equity pasha Prakash Melwani who paid $27.5 million in late 2008 for his 11th floor spread, hedge fund fat cat John Griffon who paid $32.25 million for his place one floor below, also in late 2008, and money man Zachary Jared Schreiber who paid cellular communications tycoon George Blumenthal $31.5 for a sprawling 9th floor apartment in April 2012.  In September 2007 Academy Award winning super-producer Wendy Finerman paid just over $10 million for a 12 room duplex and film director Mike Nichols and well-compensated broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer reportedly paid around $10 million in 2001 for the penthouse apartment that was formerly owned by Tinseltown poo-bah Robert Redford.

exterior photo: Scott Bintner for Property Shark
listing photos and floor plan: Sotheby's International Realty

SELLER: Julian and Juliet Casablancas
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,250,000
SIZE: 1 bedrooms, 1 bathroom

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last week Nick Valensi—lead guitarist for the post punk garage rock band The Strokes—and his actress turned celebrity chat show hostess wife, Amanda de Cadenet, listed their neo-Colonial crib in Studio City, CA for $1,799,000. This week word slipped down the music industry real estate gossip grapevine (via an anonymous tipster) that The Strokes' front man Julian Casablancas quietly unloaded a New York City apartment for $1,250,000.

Property records show shag-haired Mister Casablancas—the privileged, New York City born and bred issue of legendary (super)model agent John Casablancas—and his wife, Juliet—the former assistant to Mister Casablancas's manager, picked up the apartment in July 2005 for $840,000. Listing details from the time of the sale show the maintenance charges for the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment—which include the property taxes—ring up to a hefty $2,150 per month.

The bi-level apartment includes a sizable foyer with office niche and a cavernous sunken living room with wood floors underfoot, beamed 18-foot ceilings over head, and a working wood-burning fireplace. The room-wide built-in bench seat under the three arched widows that drop to the floor, stretch to the ceiling, and flood the room with natural light not only provides loads of seating for party guests but also cleverly conceals the radiators.

The wee, windowed kitchen on the apartment's upper level was renovated with marble counter tops and has a picayune breakfast nook that overlooks the living room. That breakfast nook, with horizontal wood cladding on the walls, might be a tight squeeze for anyone like Your Mama who carries around a few (too many) extra pounds but, children, in space starved lower Manhattan, an itty-bitty, skinny bitches only breakfast nook is better than none at all. The corner bedroom, not show in any of the listing photos we dug up on the interweb, has sunny south and west exposures.

Property records Your Mama peeped show the buyer of the pre-war pad is a fella named Richard Armitage who may or may not be the deep-voiced English actor whose movie credits include Robin Hood, Captain America: The First Avenger, and the currently mid-cycle Hobbit trilogy.

Other past and present residents of the much sought after, full-service Greenwich Village apartment complex include Tony- and Emmy-winning playwright Terrence McNally, Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City actor Chris Noth, and style and design mavens Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan.

A December, 2012 article in The New York Times revealed the Casablancases no longer occupied their former Greenwich Village one bedroom. We don't know shit from shinola, of course, but Your Mama's just going to assume they sought more sizable digs sometime around the time they made a baby in 2010. A quick spin through a couple of property record data bases did not, however, turn up any credible evidence when or where they might have moved.

Like Mister Casablancas, most of the other members of The Strokes live or maintain a residence in lower Manhattan: Drummer Fabrizio Moretti—Drew Barrymore's ex-man-friend and the current beau of comedienne Kristin Wiig—keeps an apartment at the American Felt Building in the East Village, the same building where Tom Cruise recently sold his long-time pied-a-terre; Last year guitarist/keyboardist Albert Hammond, Jr. paid Victoria Secret model Maryna Linchuck $1,250,000 for a loft-like 1 bedroom and 2 bathroom apartment in the same NoLiTa nabe building where, as per property records, A-list artist/fashion photographer Inez Van Lansweerde also owns an apartment; Property records also reveal that in February 2009 bass player Nikolai Fraiture shelled out $450,000 for a studio apartment in a post-war West Village building that's right next door to the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment he and his wife, Ilona, bought in March 2005 for $875,000; And finally, our admittedly very brief and entirely unscientific research indicates (but does not prove) that lead guitarist Nick Valensi and wife Amanda de Cadenet do not currently own a residence in New York City. Property records do show that in September 2011 they sold a three floor (plus basement) townhouse in Brooklyn's Park Slope 'hood for $1,315,000.

listing photos: LJB Law (via StreetEasy)

SELLER: Hilary Swank
LOCATION: Pacific Palisades, CA
PRICE: $9,450,000
SIZE: 6,722 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last fall two-time Oscar winning actress Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby, Boys Don't Cry) put her ocean view house in Pacific Palisades, CA on the open market with an asking price of $9,450,000. Before long the house was put into escrow with an unknown buyer for an unknown price). Within a week the 6,722 square foot Mediterranean mini-mansion had fallen out of escrow and was back on the market with the same $9,450,000 price tag. The listing expired in mid-Mary (2013) and has just today returned to the open market with the by now very familiar asking price of $9,450,000.

Property records show Miz Swank picked up the 6 bedroom and 6.5 bathroom multi-story hillside house in March 2007 for $5,800,000.

Since Your Mama has (dissed and) discussed the property previously, it will suffice for today to point out just a few of the many features of the Marc Appleton-designed digs: A lovely veranda off the spacious step-down living room with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean; a colossal center island kitchen with an adjoining dining room capable of seating 20 or more; a home theater with lobby-lounge and elevated seating; a cigar room/wine cellar with rivet accented padded leather walls; and a master bathroom with Jerusalem limestone counter tops. Exterior amenities include an open air poolside pavilion with dining area, built-in barbecue, and bathroom, an organic vegetable garden (probably maintained by someone other that Miz Swank, and a fire pit ringed by cushioned concrete benches. It probably goes without saying that the property is well and expensively equipped with state of the art security, home automation and audio-visual systems.

We have no inside intel as to Miz Swank's future real estate plans in the Los Angeles area but we've read in the celebrity gossip rags she spends a fair amount of time in Paris with her real estate broker/investor man-friend, Laurent Fleury, and our research indicates she continues to own a modestly sized if quite pricey 1,441 square foot corner condo in New York City's Far West Village that she acquired in December 2009 for $3,640,000.

listing photos: Nourmand and Associates

SELLER: Mario Van Peebles and Chita Sukru
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,519,000
SIZE: 4,225 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.75 bathrooms (total)

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen, kittens, as happens most mid-summers the celebrity real estate pickins are a mite slim so instead of something glorious and aspirational being bought or sold by an A-lister we have instead an exhausted looking micro-compound in the Hollywood Hills owned by actor/director/producer Mario Van Peebles who (re-)listed the property over the weekend with an asking price of $1,519,000.

Property records show the well educated fifty-something year old former politico—he earned a degree in economics from Columbia University and worked for former New York City mayor Ed Koch in the late 1970s—picked up the nearly half acre property way back in October 1989 for $875,000.*

Online resources reveal Mister Van Peebles has been trying to dump his hippy-dippy mini-compound in the Cahuenga Pass area of L.A. since at least October 2012 when it popped up for sale with an asking price of $1,675,000. The property was briefly taken off the market in early 2013 before it reappeared with a new and lower asking price of $1,550,000. The price eventually fell to $1,495,000 before it inexplicably jumped back up again to its current (and final) asking price of $1,519,000.**

Nestled into a sylvan hollow at the tail end of a shared driveway below comedienne Kathy Griffin's airplane-shaped house, Mister Van Peebles secluded micro-compound—current listing details call it a "hidden gem" and a "TREE HOUSE"—comprises, as per listing details, an approximately 3,500 square foot main house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms plus a (rather homely) guest house.

Double wood front doors that look like something out of a Dungeons and Dragons player's fervid real estate fantasies open to the main living areas that include a living room that features a free-standing red brick fireplace with an—ahem—artsy, free-form mantel and hearth; a vaulted, exposed wood ceiling with a ribbon of sky lights; and a full wall windows that looks out to a dining terrace shaded by mature trees and girdled by scrubby vegetation. Your Mama's not even going to mention the hodge-podge day-core—if it can be called that—or the funky statuary because, well, that just seems like the right thing to do.

The floors switch from wall-to-wall gray carpeting in the living room to narrow gauge wood planks in the dining area that's open to a woefully dated kitchen where the painted gray lower cabinets are topped with gray grouted white ceramic tile that continues up the walls all the way to the ceiling and wraps around four—count 'em, four!—greenhouse-type windows.

The main floor master suite has a corner fireplace, a pitched exposed wood ceiling, and a bank of windows that open to the outdoors plus a godawful row of three differently sized and unevenly spaced windows. The fully carpeted room is furnished sparely and somewhat bizarrely with little more than a rope swing—that's right, buckaroos, there's a damn rope swing in the middle of the room—and a rugged, Earth Mother-worthy bed that looks to be hand-crafted of driftwood and other reclaimed woods.

Listing photos show one of the guest/family bedrooms has a vaulted exposed wood ceiling and wood-framed glass sliders flanked by a couple of downright depressing knotted up curtain panels that make Your Mama's decorative heart skip a beat, and not in the good way. We're not sure if the guest house is detached or a separate wing of the main house but listing photographs show it has gray wall-to-wall carpeting, a raised hearth brick fireplace, at least one glass block window, a complete but compact kitchen, and a private bathroom.

The L.A. Times property gossip gal reported last year that Mister Van Peebles and his New Age-y wife Chita Sukhu, own another home in the Los Angeles area. Thanks to an assist from The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial we've learned that Van Peebles-Sukhu residence, acquired in the early days of 2007 for $1.3 million, is located in the affluent and largely uncelebrified View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood, one of the wealthiest predominantly African American communities in the United States. Property records show the Van Peebles-Sukhus also maintain a secluded mountain retreat in the Big Bear Lake area that was purchased in 1999 for $170,000.

*Property records show Mister Van Peebles also owns two adjacent parcels that form a long narrow strip but it's not clear to Your Mama if they were included in his 1989 purchase and/or if they're included in the current offering.

**Online listings show a sale is pending. 

listing photos: Keller Williams