Keith and Kidman Get a New Krib in Manhattan

BUYER: Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $10,000,000
SIZE: 3,248 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Word on the celebrity real estate street is that bizzy as a beaver Oscar winning Aussie actress Nicole Kidman (Nine, Bewitched, Cold Mountain, The Hours) and her Grammy award winning country-pop music crooning huzband Keith Urban are moving into the same high profile New York City building as the Dolce and Gabbana boys.

Last fall it was widely reported here, there, and everywhere that smooth pated Italian fashion queen Domenico Dolce, through a trust, forked over a blistering $29,500,000 to purchase two doo-plex penthouse units of the critically acclaimed Annabelle Selldorf designed building recently erected on the corner of 11th Avenue and West 24th Street, at the edge of the heart of the Chelsea Arts District and across the street from the Gagosian Gallery. 14 of the building's 16 apartments, some of the children may recall, comes with a private 300 square foot "En-Suite Sky Garage™", accessed by driving one's luxury automobile into a giant key-lock elevator that magically lifts the car up to the same level as the the apartment to which it's deeded.

According to the most recent reports, the Australian born Kidman-Urbans plunked down some big American bucks for a doo-plex unit that measures 3,248 square feet and includes 3 bedrooms, 3.5 poopers, and two city view loggias. Miz Kidman and Mister Urban appear to have drove a hard real estate bargain because the puffy lipped actress and her flat iron loving husband reportedly snatched up their new doo-plex pied a terre in the Big Apple for $10,000,000, a figure that our bejeweled abacus indicates is a 20% reduction off the $12,500,000 asking price.

The main living spaces are located on the doo-plex unit's upper floor and include a 20-foot by 22-foot living room with western views over the Hudson River towards New Jersey, and a combination dining room and a gore-may kitchen with folding oiled teak panels that when closed conceal the kitchen equipment. Just beyond the kitchen/dining room, a large study/bedroom with walk-in closet and private pooper has Hudson River views to the west and opens to one of the two covered covered loggias that anchor the eastern corners of the doo-plex . A breezeway–a hallway really–with built in storage closets and a powder pooper links the two loggias and opens into the kitchen as well as to the single car garage in the sky.

The lower floor is accessed by a dramatic staircase that descends from the living room down into a double height great room with two walls of floor to ceiling glass with double glass doors that slide open to glass balustrades that obliterate any visual barrier between the interior spaces and the glittering and enviable views. A guest bedroom with en-suite pooper sits in the north east corner and the master bedroom includes a wall of closets, dressing area and large windowless pooper with teak cabinetry and floors, double sinks sitting on a counter top of imported French glazed lavastone Pyrolave, acid etched mirrors, separate glass enclosed shower, and freestanding honed granite soaking tub.

Amenities in the sleek stainless steel and cast gunmetal glazed terra cotta clad tower that was carefully designed to maintain an architectural dialogue with the industrial lofts and buildings that surround it include a 24/7 attended lobby, key-lock elevators, cold storage for food deliveries, a second floor fitness center with treatment room, Hudson River views, and terraces, and, of course, those private garages.

In addition to Domenico Dolce and the Kidman-Urbans, other owners of residences in the state of the art building include interior designer Jamie Drake, a man blessedly unafraid of color who sold his exuberant Flatiron District loft last year for $2,945,000, and real estate agent extraordinaire Leonard Steinberg.

Prior to coughing up the cash for this new doo-plex condo, Miz Kidman leased a number of high profile apartments including the old Lenny Kravtiz penthouse in SoHo just picked up by Alicia Keyes and Swiz Beatz, another penthouse in SoHo formerly owned by tennis ace Boris Becker and now owned by chat queen Kelly Ripa and her hunky man-mate Mark Consuelos, and another large apartment in the same Chelsea building that Your Mama and the Doctor Cooter once called home.

The alabaster skinned actress and her diminutive huzband own several luxurious residences around the world including a contemporary pile in the same Beverly Hills neighborhood as Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, and Jessica Simpson and a 10,925 square foot beast with 7 bedrooms, 8 full and 2 half poopers in Nashville, TN that originally all us real estate gossips thought was purchased by Jessica Simpson.

Miz Kidman and Mister Urban also own a few plum and pricey properties Down Under. In the summer of 2008 it was widely reported that Mister and Missus Kidman-Urban dropped around $6,500,000 (AUS) for a 110 acre spread called Bunya Hill in Sutton Forest, a sleepy and swank enclave in the Southern Highlands about 1.5 hours outside of Sydney.

In the spring of 2009 Miz Kidman dumped her digs in the Darling Point area for $13,200,000 (AUS) after first listing the 4 bedroom waterfront villa a year before with the rumored asking price for $20,000,000 (AUS). The Kidman-Urbans subsequently scooped up a $6,500,000 (AUS) doo-plex penthouse apartment on the 21st floor of a converted office building with panoramic views of the scenic Sydney Harbor.

listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Elliman

Geoffrey Bradfield's Jewel Box

BUYERS: Geoffrey Bradfield
LOCATION: New York, NY
PRICE: $1,100,000
SIZE: 1 bedroom, 1.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: While cobblers often need a new pair of shoes, nice, gay decorators rarely do. As a breed they are deeply and highly sensitive to their surroundings and would rather saw off a limb than reside in rooms that do not reflect their personal vision. A not yet successful decorator may live in a dump, but hunnies, it's a dump decorated and done over to within an inch of its life.

The homes of decorators and designers are not only laboratories for testing their decorative ideas in the most thorough and pure manner, but they are also calling cards. One decorating eminence well known to work over his personal spaces as a direct reflection of his decorating psyche is the wildly successful and much acclaimed Geoffrey Bradfield who recently placed a done, done, done 1 bedroom and 1.5 pooper Park Avenue pied a terre on the market with an asking price of $1,100,000.

The upright but sassy Mister Bradfield, who typically plies his talents for international high society types with nothing so boring or bothersome as a budget to get in the way of a well decorated home, is a clever chap who was once asked what it would take for a home to look like a million bucks. His pithy response was, "To spend two million bucks," which may not be funny to everyone but ought to provide a wee window into the uppity world in which Mister Bradfield floats.

Mister Bradfield, who scoots around town in a $200,000 Bentley Continental Flying Spur with a driver named Carlos, is well known among the hoitiest of the toitiest for creating sumptuous, opulent, somewhat outre, and–natch–remarkably expensive rooms. A Geoffrey Bradfield designed space will typically be done with a severely restricted background palette–often white or the most soo-blime shade of grey–and punched up with piquant and forceful pops of vibrant color. He achieves his vision of elegance and restrained glamour by fearlessly concocting a carefully balanced but rule breaking decorative marinade of various styles and eras. He takes high-minded often abstract contemporary art and a dizzying number of mirrored walls that he bravely mixes, matches and mismatches with a Baroque this, a Neopolitan that, a Louis the something or other here and a Gustavian gewgaw over there. The idea behind Mister Bradfield's stew like day-core, as far as Your Mama can tell, is that good design is good design no matter what century it hails from and well designed things, regardless of when they were designed, fit together like a top and a bottom. Mister Bradfield's creations drip with an urbane sophistication that might seem fussy to the point of precious by some, but for a certain segment of the high faluttin' folks who own homes in posh places like Palm Beach, St. Moritz, and the Sherry damn Netherland Hotel in New York City, he's a freakin' genius.

Property records show that Mister Bradfield has owned a number of properties in New York City–more on that later–and that he picked up his 8th floor pied a terre at The Beekman in April of 2006 for $585,000. Since Mister Bradfield has owned an E. 61st Street townhouse since May of 2004, it's unclear for what purpose(s) he purchased or maintained this Park Avenue apartment. The Beekman was built in 1927 in the Italian Renaissance style and offers white glove services to residents that include 24/7 doorman and concierge, and hotel style amenities such as valet, 5-day per week maid service and fitness center. Those services, plus the private storage room, account for the the unusually high $2,530 per month maintenance charge.

The 3-room apartment–4 if you count the picayune kitchen–has a standard and unexciting layout with a front door that opens into an entrance gallery that Mister Bradfield transformed into an intime jewel box of a dining room with a wall of paneled mirrored doors that extend up to the ceiling and attempt to give the low ceilings a more dramatic sense of scale. The square dining table has a crisp white tablecloth surrounded a quartet of painted Rococo style chairs with intensely detailed carved backs. A large, monochromatic abstract painting takes up most of the wall opposite the mirrored doors and pushed up into the corner of the room near the mirrored doors that open into the hallway leading to the bedroom a stone carving of a man's torso wrapped toga-like in an elaborately draped fabric sits atop a pedestal that due to it's design allows the torso to be lit from underneath. Listen chickens, Your Mama certainly understands the importance of antiquities and the decorative benefits to bringing some genuine patina into a well dressed room but we always find these kind of male (semi) nude things to be a bit silly and–dare we say with all due respect to Mister Bradfield–desperate when placed in the private quarters of a middle aged man.

Behind the entrance gallery/dining room is a typically teeny-tiny and windowless New York City kitchen that's barely more then 5 feet wide but includes what listing information calls "top gourmet appliances" and " floor to ceiling bookcases." While Mister Bradfield like to entertain, he hardly seems like the type to get sweaty in the kitchen so Your Mama imagines the wee kitchen is nothing more than a expensive room to store the champagne magnums and fois gras until the hired help comes over to pour and dish it all out.

Several of the walls of the shoebox shaped living room are fitted with Mister Bradfield's signature giant mirrored panels comprised of smaller frameless mirrors set end to end. The room's all important contemporary art component consists primarily of a somewhat disturbing and gigantic portrait of an unknown redhead with a bad hair do. Quilted curtain panels with exquisitely hidden hardware puddle generously on the ground, and a couple of clean lined slipper chairs are swaddled in the same delicate lavender colored fabric as the Louis the XVI (or something) settee with silver leafed wooden accents and a gently undulating back.

In front of the dainty but elegant settee a thick, masculine slab of glass balances beautifully on a tangle of twigs cast from some sort of metal and finished with a silver material, possibly nickel or silver plating. Whatever those twigs are covered in we'd bet our long bodied bitches that that coffee table cost more than the Dr. Cooter's big white BMW. The children will note that one of the many ways Mister Bradfield achieves balance in this room is with lighting sconces affixed to the center of the wall mirrors that stylistically reflect the the twiggy tangle of the coffee table legs.

Although storage space is often at a minimum in New York City apartments, Mister Bradfield managed to squeeze in a total of 11 closets into the 1-bedroom apartment that by our rudimentary and unscientific calculations measures somewhere between 700 and 800 square feet. Seven of the closets are located in the lone bedroom where Mister Bradford smartly lined one entire wall with mirror-fronted closets.

The mirrored closets reflect the massive mirror on the opposite wall that reaches up to the ceiling and acts as the backboard for the bed. The mirrors reflecting the mirrors reflecting the mirrors reflecting the mirrors ad infinitum would be enough to make Your Mama need a damn nerve pill. Plus and quite frankly, chickens, we do not want or need to see every contour and bulge of our body reflected an infinite number of times at the very moment in the morning that we wake up and step out of bed all bleary and boozy eyed. Anyhoo, the portions of the walls not slathered in mirrors are covered in a canvas that depicts a dozen or more gentlemen in pre-revolutionary garb who may (or may not) be the founding fathers or just some pre-Revolutionary chicken for Mister Bradfield and/or his guests to check out while drifting off to slumber.

Mister Bradfield maintains homes in both New York and Palm Beach, natch. His former real estate holdings include a 5th floor apartment at 610 Park Avenue that records show he purchased in October of 1998 and sold in November of 2003 for $1,200,000. That same month he picked up a 1 bedroom and 2 pooper Palm Beach condo for $375,000 and a month later sold a Palm Beach home for $1,800,000. In December of 2005, Mister Bradfield sold a small apartment in the same E. 62nd street townhouse building where Joan Rivers lives in a doo-plex penthouse pad she recently had on the market for $25,000,000.

In May of 2004, property records show that Mister Bradfield paid $4,150,000 for an East 61st Street townhouse built in 1869 by the same Irish bloke who built the entire block. Sometime in 2009 Mister Bradfield took the peeps at LXTV on a fascinating video tour of the townhouse that includes a white, Lucite, and mirrored reception room with a few hot pink bits and pieces, a library done mostly in a most gorgeous gray with electric bursts Yves Klein blue, and a mostly black and white top floor office suite wrapped in black and white wallpaper depicting hand sketched clusters of New York City buildings.

A Little Floor Plan Porn to Get The Children Through the Afternoon

There are few of the children who do not crave a little floor plan porn to help them whittle away the early evening cocktail hours or the late afternoon office doldrums when no one is really working but everyone is sort of pretending to work so their boss does not blow a gasket or make snide remarks. Therefore, Your Mama aims to please with a juicy nugget from New York City.

Last week the fine folks at CityFile fished out the listing for the Park Avenue doo-plex that filthy rich Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Lloyd Blankfein and his wifey Laura recently hoisted on to the market with an asking price of $15,000,000.

All the children with eyeballs can plainly see the 5 bedroom and 6 pooper apartment (plus two staff bedrooms and a shared pooper) includes 14 rooms, 19 closets, 2 fireplaces, and a 30+ foot long living room. In addition to the well separated four bedrooms and three terlits on the second floor, the first floor master suite is comprised of a private study, two walk-in and four smaller closets, a corner bedroom with a view of tree-lined Park Avenue, and two petite but adequate bathrooms, one for him and one for her we pree-zoom.

Other than the generous but wonky shaped living room, the apartment is marvelously laid out for a family and includes a well equipped eat in kitchen, large family room, laundry room, separate family room, and and two sinfully small staff rooms that share a bathroom where, the eagle eyed will note, the closets are unfortunately located. Listen chickens, we got nothing against rich people hiring people to do things they don't care to do, like raise up their kids, but it just isn't right to make the hired help live up in rooms smaller than the damn closets in the master bedroom. And don't even get Your Mama started on the long list of problems we have with the staff room closest being in the same room as the terlit. Honestly.

Mister Blankfein, who took home a staggering $53+ million bucks in 2006 and another $68.5 in 2007, has decamped for the other side of Central Park where he and the wifey forked over $26,000,000 for a 6,136 square foot dee-luxe doo-plex at the limestone clad Robert A.M. Stern designed building at 15 Central Park West.

Property records also show that the Blankfeins still own their 7 bedroom and 6.5 bathroom Hamptons hideaway on Parsonage Road in Sagaponack, NY which they had on the market back in the summer of 2007 with an asking price of $13,995,000.