Sofia Coppola Lists NoLita Loft and Buys West Village Townhouse

SELLER: Sofia Coppola
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $2,750,000
SIZE: 1,771 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In late August last year (2011), after two shorties born our of wedlock, French rocker Thomas Mars—the front man for the band Phoenix—finally made an honest woman of Oscar-winning American filmmaker Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere) in a low-key but high fashion ceremony at Palazzo Margherita, her famous father Francis Ford Coppola's 19th century mansion in southern Italy. Although the couple and their couple of  enfants live primarily in Paris Miz Coppola has maintained the same downtown New York City condo for the last ten (or so) years but, as we learned late last night, recently decided to let it go and put it up for sale with an asking price of $2,750,000.

Property records show Miz Coppolla purchased the mid-floor corner residence on the once gritty now fashionable border between SoHo, NoLiTa and Little Italy in September 2002, towards the tail end of her marriage to film, television, commercial and music video director Spike Jonze who was born with the far less edgy and arty sounding Adam Spiegel.

Listing information shows the vaguely L-shaped, loft-like residence measures a modest for a gal of her means 1,771 square feet with two bedroom suites situated for maximum privacy at opposite corners of the mid-floor condo.

A key-lock elevator offers direct entry into a wide foyer that funnels into an window-wrapped open plan main living space with 11-plus foot ceilings, 10 over-sized windows that offer a stunningly direct view of the ornate cupola atop the famed Police Building, medium brown wide-plank hardwood floors, and white-white walls perfect for displaying artwork.

The kitchen revolves around a large center island with snack counter and includes white Shaker-style cabinetry topped with honed black marble counter tops, white subway tile back splash, a complete suite of high-grade, commercial-style stainless steel appliances including a wine cooler, an enviable walk-in pantry, and separate laundry room.

Miz Coppola's master boo-dwar offers a long entrance hall off which open a windowed marble bathroom with separate tub and shower, a custom-fitted walk-in closet larger than some Manhattan studio apartments, and an east-facing bedroom with wide bank of windows and a capiz shell chandelier that we happen to know was custom made for Miz Coppola by the hardworking hands of Bespoke Global designer and internet entrepreneur Gwen Carlton.

Property records indicate Miz Coppola owns a number of other properties in the U.S., including but not limited to the building where Café Zoetrope is housed in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood and a condo she scooped up in June 2007 for $500,000 located on a particularly busy and loud strip of Ocean Drive in Miami's South Beach.

As it turns out, as reported by both Curbed and the Wall Street Journal Miz Coppola and Mister Mars just dropped a very-celebrity $9,895,000—more than a million bucks over the $8,800,000 asking price—on a wedge-shaped, five-story, three-unit West Village townhouse. As currently configured, according to listing information, there's a 4 bedroom and 2.5 bathroom triplex garden unit with three fireplaces and gigantic backyard plus two additional full-floor flats on the upper levels. It's not clear if Miz Coppola and Mister Mars plan to reconfigure and recombine the three apartments back into one nearly 6,000 square foot single family house.

 listing photos and floor plan: Corcoran

Thursday Catch Up: Daphne Guinness

SELLER: Daphne Guinness
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $14,000,000
SIZE: 4,118 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Settle down children, we are well aware we are well beyond fashionably late to this particular real estate party. Howevuh, Your Mama can't resist us a nervy, couture-clad iconoclast heiress like Daphne Guinness, a deliciously outlandish woman who stands out like a peacock in pig sty amongst the more staid upper echelons of international high society in which she orbits and who pushed her chi-chi half-floor spread on New York City's Fifth Avenue on the market in early January (2012) with a jet-setting $15,000,000 asking price. Miz Guinness subsequently and quickly dropped the price for her high floor residence at the hoity-toity Stanhope to $14,000,000.

The listing may not surprise glossy shelter publication readers who surely recall Miz Guinness had her New York nest photographed in all it's colorful glory for the March 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.

The famously skunk-haired and gorgeous globe-trotter was born into great privilege as an heiress to the eponymous beer fortune and grew up in grand homes in England, Ireland and Spain. As a teenager—she was nineteen—she married wildly rich Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos with whom she has three all but grown children and as of a year ago, as confirmed by her fashion reporter friend Derek Blasberg in a February 2011 interview in Harper's Bazaar, the adventuresome sartorialist was the lover of (very married) French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy.

Anyhoodles poodles, her complicated sounding romantic life aside, property records show Miz Guinness acquired her Manhattan digs in late April 2008 for $11,459,000. Current listing information shows the common charges, which in this case include the taxes, run Miz Guinness $17,950 per month, an amount the well-worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus calculate total a downright intimidating $215,400 per year. At the same time she bought the half-floor apartment she also picked up a small ground floor apartment—possibly a guest room, art studio or staff suite—that comes with $1,677.28 monthly fees and that she also has on the market with a $1,500,000 asking price.

The Stanhope, a stately if somber limestone and brick edifice designed by preeminent New York architect Rosario Candela in 1926 stands directly across from the southern flank of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The building was converted to 26 (or so) luxury residences in the early- to mid-Aughts and offers its well-heeled residents white glove services (doormen, porters, valet parkers, etc.), a private library/conference room, access to the on-site (and very posh) La Palestra spa and fitness center, 24-7 concierge services accessible through a touch panel/video intercom, and wine storage space (plus sommelier recommendations and free delivery) at Acker, Merrill and Condit, a swank wine shop on the Upper West Side.

The floor plan included with current listing information (above) and on a still active website specifically designed to market the building's apartments shows the 7-room residence measures a spacious but hardly gargantuan 4,118 square feet and includes a shared elevator landing that opens to an entrance gallery with discreetly located powder pooper and a near thirty foot long formal living room blessed with direct Central Park views and a wood-burning fireplace. The formal dining room connects to an eat-in center island kitchen through a butler's pantry with walk-in wine closet and the small-ish three guest/family bedrooms each open off a 35-foot long, fully-mirrored corridor and include a private (windowless) bathroom.

The master suite, at the tail end of the corridor at the extreme rear of the residence, has an entry vestibule that promotes elegance and privacy, an almost square 350-plus square foot bedroom, and an infamous (and windowless) bathroom outfitted with double sinks, separate soaking tub and shower, and a completely enclosed (and hopefully well ventilated) cubby for the terlit and bee-day. The floor plan for the apartment shows the master suite was designed with two walk-in closets plus a separate linen closet. It would not surprise Your Mama in the least to learn that fashion obsessed Miss Thing converted the linen closet to a shoe closet and took over an adjacent bedroom and bathroom as a dressing room and additional closet space.

The aforementioned Architectural Digest article reveals Miz Guinness chose the apartment because of its high floor location and the natural light brought in from north- and west-facing windows. "North for drawing, west for sunsets," she elucidated. On the recommendation of the building's manager she met with and immediately hired smart and prodigiously talented Philippines-born architect Daniel Romualdez whose client list contains high brow, fortuitously born and accomplished women like Tory Burch, Marina Rust, and Aerin Lauder as well as maturing morning chat show hunk Matt Lauer and James de Givenchy, the gemstone loving jeweler nephew of venerated fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy.

Mister Romualdez was brought in to work over and neutralize some of the apartments stuffier interior elements and add in, as she esoterically spelled out in A.D., "...the shine of Metropolis, the modernity that should have happened, with the lush flora of Suddenly, Last Summer. But I didn’t want it to tip into English decadence. It had to be contained, controlled—intelligent decadence. What I wanted was sort of a savage modernism."

This rejection of "English decadence" and re-injection of "modernity" and "intelligent decadence" to achieve "savage modernism" manifested in shimmering, explosive and decoratively dilettantish rooms hung thick with name brand contemporary artworks. High gloss ebony floors in the entry reflect a kaleidoscopic butterfly painting by Damien Hirst and extend down an improbably lengthy, fun house-like mirrored corridor where the cherry red color of the rugs was matched to the exact same shade of polish Miz Guinness has custom mixed for her nails.

The glossy, coal black floors continue into the capacious park facing corner living room where scads of orchids and other house plants in terra cotta and Chinese pots and urns somehow make unexpected nice-nice with a boxy, blood red velvet sofa, a trio of sculptural light objects on the floor, a pair of mirrored Deco cocktail tables, and a variety of saturated and sometimes surreal photographs by blue chip picture takers like Gregory Crewdson, David LaChapelle and Bert Stern.

The original floor plan for Miz Guinness' apartment did not call for a library but it appears Miz Guinnes either re-purposed the dining room or re-fashioned one of the bedrooms to include floor to ceiling bookcases filled with shadow-boxed insects, actual books, and a wall-mounted flat screen tee-vee, although we can hardly imagine Miz Guinness doing anything as mundane as watching the boob-toob. Propped up in the corner, there's a giant photograph of herself snapped by her avant-minded friend David LaChapelle.

At least one of the guest bedrooms makes a courageous (if expensively kitchy) statement with the unlikely (and not entirely holy) marriage between some unusual but de rigueur Chinoiserie this and thats, walls sheathed in shimmering, high-glam silver mylar, dainty white linens on the bed and a cherry red rug on the luminous black wood floors.

Miz Guinness made all the real estate gossip columns back in the fall of 2010 when her downstairs neighbor—hedge hog Karim Samii and wife Tina—complained and sued over water damage caused by the frequent over-flowing of the Miz Guinness' bathtub in the master bedroom. The Samiis reportedly sued for over a million bucks for repairs and "mental anguish." We're not sure of the status of the lawsuit but Miz Guinness told the folks at Arch. Digest last year she was "mending" the matter and we'll just let the children speculate if all the legal ugliness has anything to do (or not) with her decision to sell so soon after settling in.

Miz Guinness reportedly maintains a flat in London. Probably she maintains or has access to homes in any number of other fabulous locales popular with the beau monde, places like St. Moritz, Mozambique and/or St. Barts. But to be honest, kittens, we don't have any direct knowledge of such.

photos (interior): Thomas Loof for Architectural Digest
exterior rendering and floor plan: Corcoran

Thursday Catch Up: Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson

Several days ago Your Mama discussed The Wong House, a low-slung, Buff & Hensman-designed mid-century modern residence in Los Angeles that recently divorced Tinseltowners Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson purchased for $2,900,000 just a few short months before they split in late 2010 and just this week flipped back on the market with a $3,650,000 price tag. It was whispered to Your Mama this morning by trusted informant Mirakle Mike that ex-Missus Reynolds lived in—or, more accurately, stayed at—the house after the couple busted up.

Newly released listing photographs—snapped in a glittering, city-view twilight—show the 2 bedroom and 3 bathroom post and beam abode has been altered little (if at all) since the former couple bought it in August 2010. The long sweep of glass-walled and sparsely furnished rooms along the back of the house—the living room, kitchen, dining area and family room—contain a smattering of not particularly impressive but no doubt punishingly pricey mid-century modern(ish) things that include a teak credenza or two, a couple of classic Barcelona lounge chairs, a glass topped dining table surrounded by some Danish-looking teak chairs with black leather seats, and a pair of tufted leather bar stools in the kitchen area that look to Your Mama like they could have come straight out of The Dresden Room, an old school restaurant/bar-lounge in Los Feliz where the dee-voon sequin-clad duo Marty and Elayne have been warbling and working their high-camp stuff since the dawn of time.

Anyhoo, we were told by an informant we call Mirakle Mike that it was ex-Missus Reynolds who lived in the house after the couple split up although he thinks she's not there much

listing photos: Keller Williams Realty / Beverly Hills

Fallen Financier and Politico Jon Corzine Lists Hoboken Penthouse at a Loss

SELLER: Jon Corzine
LOCATION: Hoboken, NJ
PRICE: $2,900,000
SIZE: 2,400 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Shaggy bearded and publicly beleaguered Wall Street financier cum New Jersey politico Jon Corzine, the much in the news subject of a recent profile in Vanity Fair, married for the second time in late 2010 to Sharon Elghanayan, a 60-something year old twice-divorced New York City-based psychotherapist (and "avid kickboxer") who happens to be the wealthy ex-wife of Thomas Elghanayan, scion to a serious New York City real estate fortune. Mister Corzine and Miz Elghanayan wed, according to a November 2010 announcement in the New York Times, in a small ceremony in Mister Corzine's Hoboken apartment, the very same penthouse it turns out he put on the market this week with a $2,900,000 asking price.

Mister Corzine hails from a farm in Illinois but his out sized and unfettered ambitions pushed him up through the ranks to eventually become the Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was unceremoniously ousted in 1999 by long-time rival Hank Paulson, who himself went on to become the controversial 74th Secretary of the Treasury who presided over the credit crisis and subsequent economic bailout in 2008 brought about by the implosion of the sub-prime mortgage business. But we digress. After leaving Goldman Sachs Mister Corzine, a long-time resident of New Jersey, quickly shifted gears from Wall Street to Capital Hill. He famously spent tens of millions of his own dollars to snag a seat as a senator for The Garden State. He served five of his six year term before he resigned to make a successful run at the governorship of New Jersey in 2006, a hard-fought election that cost him several more tens of millions of his own substantial (if diminishing) fortune.

Mister Corzine wasn't the most popular governor and was defeated in his (brutally expensive) 2009 bid for re-election. Much to the surprise of many who follow the financial markets he returned bullish and bulldog-like to his Wall Street roots in March 2010 as the CEO and Chairman of MF Global, a struggling financial services concern that went belly up in October 2011. Mister Corzine resigned a month later and reportedly declined his twelve million dollar-plus severance package. That expression of largesse—or whatever it was—may or may not soften the sharp edge of reality that over a billion dollars of MF Global clients' money remains unaccounted for and was determined in late 2011 by a committee convened by the U.S. Gubbamint to be unrecoverable. Ouch.

Mister Corzine may be in the dog house both professionally and in the eyes of the public but he's also a fat cat with nine lives and Your Mama expects we haven't seen or heard the last of Mister Corzine's topsy-turvy adventures through the sometimes cruel arenas of politics and high finance.

Fascinatin' as it all is, kittens, Mister Corzine's roller coaster professional life isn't exactly what bring us here together today but rather his recent residential real estate activities. For years Mister Corzine lived relatively modestly—at least modestly for a man of his monetary means—in and around the upscale New York City bedroom community of Summit, NJ. At some point he and his first wife Joanna, who together have 3 grown children, purchased a mansion on more than six ocean front acres in the impossibly pricey, farm-glam enclave of Sagaponack in the Hamptons. A bit more on that beach house later.

Property records indicate Mister Corzine owns (or owned) a large ski condo near Telluride, CO and in early 1998 he and his then-wife Joanne paid around $15,000,000 for a spacious duplex condominium (plus a small storage space and a private wine cellar) at the 43-story pre-war minded post-war tower at 515 Park Avenue. The quickly caught a case of The Real Estate Fickle and flipped the 4,897 square foot duplex back on the market and sold it (and a small storage space and a private wine cellar) in August 2001 for $18,800,000 to music industry mogul Alan Meltzer who also quickly flipped the condo (and the wine cellar and the storage space) four months later at an $550,000 loss, not counting real estate fees and carrying costs.

We're not sure where exactly Mister Corzine decamped after he divorced First Missuss Corzine (at great expense) in 2003 but there are scads of reports of him living in a rental apartment in the same Hoboken, NJ building as a woman named Carla Katz who would eventually become his live-in lady-pal and who would eventually receive a reported six million dollar-plus settlement after they split up in 2004.

Property records show that in November 2008, in the middle of his tenure as the governor of New Jersey, Mister Corzine coughed up $3,263,581 to acquire a penthouse condo in Hoboken, NJ, the one currently listed at $2,900,000 and occupying a prime, south and east facing corner atop the massive, multi-building Maxwell Place on the Hudson complex on the shore of the Hudson River.

A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that even if Mister Corzine's Real Estates manage to pull a real estate rabbit out of a hat and snag a full price sale, the former governor still stands to lose a whopping $363,581 not counting real estate fees, improvement expenses, and carrying costs that include just over $38,000 a year in taxes and another $1,700 per month—$20,400 per year according to our calculations—in common charges.

The Maxwell Place complex, just north of Hoboken's main (and cute) commercial drag Washington Street, offers residents access to a grassy riverfront park and walkway, a landscaped roof top terrace with Manhattan view, swimming pool and spa, extensive fitness facilities, 24-hour concierge services, a free shuttle to the PATH station, and a private resident's only club with game room, screening room, business center and lounge with plasma tee-vee and fireplace.

 Listing information shows Mister Corzine's Hoboken crib spans about 2,400 square feet and as it's currently configured contains 2 bedrooms—one of which appears to be wee and windowless—and 3.5 bathrooms.

The main living/dining room has delish, dark stained walnut floors, 10-foot ceilings, pale creamy beige walls, two long walls of floor-to-ceiling windows with wide river and New York City views, and a Manhattan-side balcony just big enough for an Hibachi, a lawn chair or two, and a cocktail table. What was probably once a bedroom is now a fully-outfitted if compact media room with built-in entertainment center/system with bar, a full wall of south-facing windows, and a slippery-looking brown leather sectional sofa. The smaller, windowless room next door does have (an also windowless) attached bathroom and makes, we imagine, a not a particularly gracious guest bedroom.

The butch-y galley-style kitchen, situated just behind the living/dining room with direct access from the breakfast area and entrance hall, has dark espresso-colored full-height Shaker-style cabinets, manly brown (or black) marble counter tops, fancy fixtures, and a complete suite of stainless steel Viking brand appliances.

What was once a guest/family bedroom with en-suite bathroom was incorporated by Mister Corzine into the master suite and utilized, as per listing photos, as large office/den with head on Empire State Building view and direct access to both the bedroom and the closet-lined dressing hall that in turn provides access to a pair of small but luxuriously fitted bathrooms with more espresso-colored cabinetry and black marble counter tops.

Some of the penthouse's extra added amenities, according to listing information, include a stacked stainless steel washer/dryer set, one deeded parking space in the building's indoor garage, and Lutron dimmer switches and a pre-installed Bose sound system throughout.

We, of course, don't know a bell pepper from a police raid, but Mister Corzine's decision to sell his Hoboken bachelor pad may have something to do with his new wife Sharon Elghanayan's rather impressive real estate portfolio. In addition to a full-floor apartment on New York City's fancy-pants Fifth Avenue—located, coincidentally, just downstairs from financier turned hot shot art dealer Bob Mnuchin who, back in the day, was one of Mister Corzine's mentors Goldman Sachs—property records show in August 2006 New Missus Corzine dropped $7,000,000 to buy a 1.72 acre estate with swimming pool and tennis court on the same scenic seaside lane in East Hampton, NY where a number of other high profile high flyers own houses including the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Candice Bergen, Starbucks honcho Howard Schultz, billionaire Mort Zuckerman, financier Carl Icahn, and domestic diva turned media mogul Martha Stewart, just to name just a few.

Now then, let's circle back to that major estate in Sagaponack (shown above) that Mister Corzine and First ex-Missus Corzine Joanne bought sometime in the 1990s. The mostly flat 6.64 acre estate sits at the bottom of Gibson Lane—that same Gibson Lane on which Billy Joel used to own a couple of houses and where, when we still lived in New York, Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter sometimes took our long-bodied bitches Linda and Beverly to frolic in the sand and surf.

Anyhoo, their divorce settlement granted ex-Missus Corzine deed and title to the lavish and gated estate that then encompassed 6.64 landscaped acres and included a 6,165 square foot main house with 6 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms, separate guest house, tennis court and beach side swimming pool.

Ex-Missus Corzine famously (and with much publicity) leased the estate from Memorial Day to Labor Day 2009 for a stroke inducing $900,000 to billionaire Henry Silverman and sold the property in a private deal the following June (2010) to billionaire Wall Streeter David A. Tepper who shelled out $43,500,000 for the property. Mister Tepper, bless his heart, felt the view from the lower level of the house was not adequate so proceeded to knock down every stick of the various structures and dig up almost every inch of landscaping except for the high hedges and shrubbery that rings the perimeter of the property in order to replace it with a custom-built 15,000 square foot cedar-shingled two-story Georgian beach house with sunken tennis court and better views. If we've said it once we've said it 89 times: Such are the gravy train real estate ways of the super-rich.

listing photos and floor plan: Halliburton Homes