Rachel Uchitel Does Park Avenue

Your Mama is well aware that any number of the children would rather roll themselves in flour and dip themselves in a deep fryer before reading another damn word about VIP ho-stess turned Tiger Woods mistress Rachel Uchitel, who received a rumored and reported ten million clams from Mister Woods for keeping her trap shut about their alleged affair. So, iffin you don’t want to know about Miss Uchitel’s real estate doings–and who could blame a person for not caring a whit?–then move right along until Your Mama gets to something more agreeable to your palette. Okaaay?

Last week all the celebrity real estate gossips were atwitter about Miss Uchitel allegedly snatching up a two million dollar condo on Park Avenue. At the time, based on information from previous reports, Your Mama speculated that Miss Uchitel was fixing to buy an 8th floor apartment listed at $1,995,000 at The Griffon, a lovely, full-service pre-war building located on a lackluster stretch of Park Avenue just below Grand Central Station.

As it turns out, Miss Uchitel opted for a lower priced apartment on a lower floor at The Griffon. According to Housing Watch, Miss Uchitel just moments ago signed papers to purchase a condo at The Griffon paying $1,625,000 for a a 3 bedroom and 3 pooper unit on a low floor that was last listed at $1,849,000. How does Housing Watch know this the children might ask? Apparently the listing agent for the property, a Corcoran agent by the name of Beth Benalloul, walked out of the closing and immediately called the peeps at Housing Watch with all the doo-doo on the deal.

According to Miss Benalloul via Housing Watch, Miss Uchitel does not plan on making the apartment her primary residence and may choose to rent the unit out for as much as $8,500 per month. The 6-room apartment, which has a fireplace, separate dining room, small but proper foyer, 6 closets, a renovated galley style kitchen, and hardwood floors, carries monthly maintenance charges of $1,600 with another $1,313 additional per month in taxes.

The children might be amused to know that the otherwise ho-hum building gained some infamy back in 1936 when one of its residents, a Mrs. Abraham Z. Schiebel, aka Mary Briggs, was arrested, prosecuted, and jailed running a place of prostitution out of her apartment. We’ll let the children decide for themselves if there’s any irony there or not.

Now then, let’s all hope this matter is put to bed for good.

listing photos: Corcoran

Brad and Angelina Do It In Italy

For American superstars and global do-gooders Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt all of the world is a real estate stage.

The comely couple own a 5-ish acre compound in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, a contemporary estate perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, an historic mansion in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a hilltop hideaway and 60,000 hectares of jungle in Cambodia, and a 1,000 acre estate in the South of France known as Chateau Miraval*.

Back in April of 2010, while the Pitt-Jolie clan was spending a few months in Italy while Momma Jolie filmed scenes for her upcoming thriller film The Tourist with fellow Hollywood ex-pat Johnny Depp, Daddy Pitt headed out into the I-talian countryside in search of some marble for some renovation project or another.

Mister Pitt became quickly smitten with the area and by mid-July all the celebrity real estate gossips around the world were reporting that the peripatetic pair and their 427 children were house hunting in the rustic and rolling hills in the north eastern viticultural region of Valpolicella near Verona.

Eventually their search led them to the 17th century Villa Costanza San Pietro in Cariano, an historic and slightly disheveled, Palladian style mansion with a reported asking price of €32,000,000, an amount that Your Mama’s currency conversion contraption indicates translates to $40,792,000 at today’s rates.

Most reports say the spectacularly rich couple coughed up somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000,000 but at least one report from July 2010 in an Italian publication indicates that the couple paid around €15,000,000–$19,121,200–for the property.

According to previous reports, hotel sized house weighs in at a titanic 18,000 square feet and includes 15 bedrooms, 7 poopers, 2 swimming pools, several spas and waterfalls, 1 movie theater, a home fitness room, stables for the ponies, and a damn vineyard.

According to the official website for Comune di san Pietro In Cariano, the “U” shaped Villa Costanza–also known as Villa Saibante-Monga–wraps around a central courtyard that contains six mythological statues, a couple of carved stone lions, and a well that dates to 1623. Among the many rooms in the villa there are two large rooms, one with a tiled floor, coffered ceiling and walls decorated with 17th century frescoes and another with walls painted with landscapes.

*Although Your Mama don’t know a pine tree from a coffee pot, we are not convinced that Mister Pitt and Miz Jolie actually bought the Chateau Miraval property but it is where the comely couple and their 87 children have been living on and off since the spring of 2008.

photos: Vogue

LuxeChatter: Significant Luxury Portfolio Listings for August

New luxury home listings added to LuxuryPortfolio.com in August include properties in 6 US states and several locations around the world – the Cayman Islands, British Columbia, New Zealand and Spain. Top reported closings for the month were all…

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Pop Princess Kylie Minogue Lists London Flat

SELLER: Kylie Minogue
LOCATION: London, UK
PRICE: £3,950,000
SIZE: 2,730 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to one of Your Mama’s butter beans across the pond in Britain we learned over the long Labor Day weekend that Grammy winning and breast cancer beating Australian singing super star Kylie Minogue has her two-floor flat in London on the market. The princess of pop first listed her South Kensington crib in the early part of the summer (2010) for £4,500,000. That’s $6,933,960 at today’s rates according to Your Mama’s currency conversion contraption. However and alas, reportedly due to lack of buyer interest, Miss Minogue recently slashed the price tag of her apartment–which listing information calls a “mansionette“–by more than 10% to it’s current asking price of £3,950,000, or $6,086,480 at today’s rates.

Iffin Your Mama is being honest–and we always are–we’d confess to the kiddies that Miss Minogue’s particular brand of pop music is of little interest or comfort to our ears and as such we really know little about Miss Minogue and/or her career trajectory. A perfunctory peep and poke around the interweb tells us that Miss Minogue began her long climb up the ladder of fame and fortune as a child actor turned soap actress who made a sensationally successful segue into pop music in the late 1980s. Although the sexy singer faced criticism early on that she was little more than a talent-free manufactured pop star who traded in on her celebrity as a soap star, today the Australian born singer is considered by at least one research company to be the most powerful celebrity in Britain.

Since Your Mama isn’t skilled in the ways of researching property transactions in the U.K. we have to go with previous reports that indicate Miss Minogue scooped up her South Kensington pad in the early 1990s, at first sharing the flat with her brother Brendan who has since moved out of the apartment and back to Australia.

According to listing information, the 5th and 6th floor flat that’s located in a small building with a resident caretaker–that’s a super in New York City speak–was given a decorative overhaul four years ago by the glitzy, glammy and highly publicized interior design and property development management firm of Candy & Candy. The re-do reportedly cost the sexy singer somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000,000. Candy & Candy is owned and operated by brothers Nick and Christian Candy who are the same suave chaps who oversaw development London’s über posh One Hyde Park where a six-bedroom penthouse pad recently sold for a record breaking and jaw dropping $220,000,000.

The bespoke brothers, it might amuse and interest the children to know, share ownership of the very same (in)famous Monaco penthouse doo-plex at the La Belle Epoque building where billionaire banker Edmund Safra perished in a bizarre conflagration back in December of 1999. Naturally the Candy brothers have Candified the 30-room penthouse pad making it, we’re quite certain, virtually unrecognizable to the Mister Safra’s wildly wealthy widow Lily Safra.

The Candy brothers are also the same fellows who were involved in an overly optimistic consortium of investors who in April of 2007 paid a ridiculously stoopid $500,000,000 for an 8-acre site in Los Angeles–at Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards–hoping to build a glassy and ritzy Richard Meier designed condo complex strikingly similar to the one that went up a few years ago on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, NY’s Park Slope neighborhood. The pie in the sky investors purchased the Beverly Hills property with a shocking $365,500,000 loan from Credit Suisse a large part of which was quickly sold to Banco Inbursa, owned by Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim. Señor Slim is the dude who, the children will recall, just a couple months ago paid $44,000,000 for the Duke Semans Mansion on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. In large part because of collapse of the Icelandic Kaupthing Bank, the Candy brothers and their group of investors defaulted on the loan and the property now belongs to a group of investors including Mister Slim’s Banco Inbursa.

As inneresting as the Candy Brother’s bizness doings are, we digress and they’re really neither here nor there and of little import the real estate matter at hand. Although listing information indicates Miss Minogue’s “mansionette” has 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms a rapid review of the floor plan included with listing information shows 2 real bedrooms and 3.5 poopers plus a small study and a large dance studio that in a pinch could be used as a bedroom.

The 2,730 square foot apartment is accessed via an elevator that whisks residents and guest up to the fifth floor entrance hall with walnut floors laid in a checkerboard parquet pattern and a sensual staircase with patinated brass balustrade and black piano-lacquer handrail. Double glass doors open to the reception/dining room with baby blue paneled walls with inset mirror inlays, underfloor heating, a large bay window with views over the surrounding roof tops, and a dining room table and chandelier that both look improperly scaled for the room. We’re going to give Miss Minogue–not to mention Candy & Candy–the benefit of the doubt and guess that this room and indeed the entire flat were stripped down and pared back to its bare decorating essentials in preparation for its being hoisted on to the market.

Sliding panels slip into the walls and reveal a drawing room–that’s an American living room–with more baby blue walls, another bay window with roof top views, and a pair of identical Tiffany blue velvet sofa loungers flanking a fireplace with antique brown marble surround and squaring off over too small glass coffee table.

The windowed eat-in kitchen can be accessed through the drawing/living room or the entrance hall and is custom fitted with walnut cabinetry, marble counter tops, a pair of sinks, work island with breakfast bar and wine fridge, and a colossal and colossally expensive La Cornue brand stove with both electric and gas ovens, two plate warming drawers, and a cook top with griddle and two electric and 4 gas burners.

A long carpeted hall leads back from the entrance hall. To one side a small bedroom/study with custom fitted cabinetry and desk with leather counter top and on the other a privately situated powder pooper with window. A bit further down the hall a small bedroom has custom walnut cupboards and a big black marble pooper includes a steam shower, heated towel rail and underfloor heating.

A door at the end of the hall opens into the master bedroom that offers sleepers a view toward the London Eye, a fireplace with Serpegiente marble surround, satin paneled walls with crystal stud detailing, and a silk/wood carpeting with overlapping circle pattern and walnut parquet surround. Between the bedroom and Miss Minogue’s dee-luxe pooper with heated marble floor, fireplace and freestanding tub is a blush colored custom fitted dressing area with two closets and scads of curved cabinetry for storing and stashing all of Miss Minogues knick-knacks and panty whacks.

The very Hollywood from the 1940s staircase leads up to the second floor landing with a utility room with stainless steel counters, laundry facilities and mini-fridge on one side and a pooper, on the other. Beyond the pooper and utility room is a large room with wood floors, six skylights in the sloped and peaked ceiling, a built-in dressing table and built in cabinetry that conceals a home entertainment system and Murphy bed, and additional shelving and storage under the eaves.

According to multiple reports, Miss Minogue wants to sell her South Kensington “mansionette” in order to purchase a larger London spread that will better accommodate visits by her family members.

Back in February of 2008, Your Mama discussed Beauciel, Miss Minogue’s 221-acre eco-friendly spread on Australia’s French Island that she had on the market for just under two million Aussie clams. Presumably the property has been sold, but honestly chickens, we don’t know.

More recent reports from the celebrity real estate beat reveal that Miss Minogue paid around $675,000 for a luxury villa in Tossa de Mar, the hometown coastal village of her muy guapo Spanish supermodel man-friend Andrés Velencoso Segura who is well known among male mannequin watchers for posing butt-nekkid and with his wing-wang hanging out.

listing photos and floor plan: John D. Wood & Co.

Ascend Collection Inks Agreement with Boutique Hotel In Anguilla, British West Indies

Ascend Collection from Choice Hotels International, Inc builds its Caribbean presence with the announcement today of a new member hotel on the exclusive island of Anguilla.

The Royale Caribbean Resort & Spa, currently under construction, is a high-end boutique hotel in Little Harbor on the island’s southern coast, slated to open in January 2011 as a member of Ascend Collection, the upscale network of historic, boutique and unique hotels from Choice Hotels International in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean.

More on Ascend Collection Inks Agreement with Boutique Hotel In Anguilla, British West Indies

Real Estate Wrap Up

1.
Are the children ready to get back on the Dave and Vicky Beckham real estate crazy train?
Your Mama sure hopes so because word is starting to slip slide down the real estate gossip grapevine that the superstar couple is looking to unload Beckingham Palace, their sprawling English spread located in a part of the U.K. called Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire. Don’t ask Your Mama where that is on a map because we don’t know and we didn’t bother to look.

The soccer stud and the celery stalk thin former pop star turned fashion maven paid around £2,500,000 for the 1930s Georgian style mansion back in 1999 and recent reports indicate the 7 bedroom mansion is valued by savvy estate agents at £18,000,000. As far as we know there is not an official listing for the property available online but iffin any of the children should turn one up be sure to holler at Your Mama.

The peripatetic pair who have three boy children own several other homes including a chateau in France, a house in Dubai, and a mansion in Beverly Hills, CA that they purchased in the spring of 2007 for $18,200,000 after a long and tedious search that wore out all us celebrity real estate gossips. Although it’s expected the Beckham clan will settle (semi) permanently in Bev Hills, the high on the hog livvin‘ couple are none the less reported to be looking for a townhouse in London to make as their base when in the U.K.

2.
Academy Award winning actor Nic Cage, who recently reached some sort of secret settlement with his former accountant and bizness manager Sam Levin who Mister Cage alleged led him down a garden path to financial ruin, famously and publicly lost his legendary mansion on Copa de Oro Road in the swank Bel Air section of Los Angeles to foreclosure in April of 2010.

Mister Cage had been trying to sell the mansion since sometime in 2007 when it was offered with a ridiculous asking price of $35,000,000. The property, formerly owned by Dean Martin and hirsute crooner Tom Jones, was put on and taken off and put back on the market a number of times and the asking price eventually dipped to $17,500,000. But alas, despite some serious interest and at least one near sale, no one bit the bullet and signed on the dotted line.

Shortly after the bank took possession the somewhat shabby 6 bedroom and 9 pooper property it was heaved back on the market with an asking price of $12,500,000. We say “somewhat shabby” because Your Mama managed to get a peep at the property with our very own eyeballs and despite some interesting bits and pieces and some obviously high quality craftsmanship, the house was, in our humble and meaningless opinion, a bit of a hot mess. And that’s being nice, children because y’all should hear the choice words a few Bev Hills real estates have whispered to Your Mama about the property.

Anyhoodles poodles, the bank isn’t having any more luck selling the place than Mister Cage had. The asking price now? $11,800,000 and still, apparently, no one wants it. Do any of the children want lay down a wager on what price the property will finally sell?

3.
The British tabs have been all abuzz the last week reporting that celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna has expressed some interest in purchasing the opulently unrestrained Holmby Hills mansion where Michael “The White Lady” Jackson spent his final days.

The 7 bedroom and 13 pooper property is currently listed at $28,995,000 and the not always reliable tab The Daily Mail recently reported that Mister McKenna is considering paying £19,000,000 for the hotel sized house, an amount that Your Mama’s currency conversion contraption indicates is just under full asking price at today’s rates.

An alleged pal of Mister McKenna told the Daily Mail that, “Paul was blown away by the sheer elegance of the property. It is one of the classiest houses in LA.” Listen chickens, Your Mama, who don’t know a corbel from a Corvette might beg to differ with that characterization opting for words such as ostentatious, humongous, steroidal, and a wee bit garish, but real estate beauty is in the eye of the beholder and one person’s classy is another’s architectural punch to the gut. Kapeesh?

Back in January of 2008, Mister McKenna paid $6,600,000 for a house high in the hills above the Sunset Strip that had formerly been owned by showbiz types such as producer Chris Roberts, prolific songwriter Diane Warren, and a-list gay billionaire David Geffen.

Call us crazy, call us cynical, call us a Debbie Downer, but Your Mama thinks there ain’t nuthin‘ hot air to this real estate rumor. But then again, we’ve been wrong before and will be wrong again.

4.
There aren’t as many big deals going down as there used to be during the go-go real estate years of the mid-naughts, but recently dee-vorced Paramount Chairman and CEO Brad Grey managed to sell his Pacific Palisades estate for $21,500,000 according to the Wall Street Journal. Of course, as much moolah as 21 one and some million smackers may be, the 6 bedroom and 11 pooper house had been listed for $29,900,000, which Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus tells us means Mister Grey settled for 72% of what he originally hoped to get.

The property was purchased by the President and CEO Douglas Emmett, a real estate investment trust with fingers in the commercial and multi-family markets in both southern California and Honolulu.

5.
Back in late July of 2010 Your Mama dissed and discussed the lavish but no longer wanted Chicago townhouse of Jamie Dimon, the New York based Chairman, President, and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. At that point the asking price of the financier’s 5-floor, 26-room and 13,500 square foot mansion on Chicago’s Gold Coast had plummeted from its original $13,500,000 asking price to $9,500,000. Mister Dimon and his wife, who paid $4,680,000 for the 8 bedroom and 9 full and 2 half pooper pile in the fall of 2000, must be getting pretty serious about dumping their former digs because they’ve just slashed the price by more than two point five million clams all the way down to $6,950,000.

Given that Mister Dimon reportedly earned around $36,000,000 in 2008, $41,200,000 in 2006
and heaven only known what in 2007 and 2009, we don’t imagine many if any will have any sympathy for the real estate woes of Mister and Missus Dimon.

6.
The rich, famous, and curious in Los Angeles are following the contentious dee-vorce between Dodgers’ owners Frank and Jamie McCourt like it was damn Dickens novel. The McCourts came from Boston and swept the local real estate world by storm snatching up high priced properties left and right.

First they laid out more than $20,00,000 for an estate in Los Angeles’ hoity Holmby Hills ‘hood–and reportedly spent another $14,000,000 or so on renovations–and they they bought the estate right next door. Then next set their real estate sights on Malee-boo where they paid $27,300,000 for a famed John Lautner designed house on Carbon Beach that they scooped up in July of 2007 from architecture nuts Courtney Cox and David Arquette. It wasn’t long before they dropped another $19,000,000 for the house next door. Do the children see a pattern here?

Your Mama did a full run down of the McCourt’s fat real estate portfolio back in October of 2009 and according to our entirely unscientific research we figured that Mister and soon to be ex-Missus McCourt have spent at least $167,050,000 to purchase and renovate their many private residences and at that time were servicing a stomach turning $59,700,000 in mortgages.

There has been a lot of public tussling and private clawing about whether the McCourts own the Dodgers together, if the team is “community property,” or if the heavily leveraged franchise belongs only to Mister McCourt. However, the latest reports on the McCourt’s disputatious dee-vorce doings reveal that soon to be ex-Missus McCourt proposed that she retain ownership of the couple’s colossal private real estate holdings while the Mister could have the financially strapped Dodgers franchise. Smart woman? Maybe. But the question remains whether a dee-vorced Missus McCourt can afford to keep and maintain all those properties let alone service the titanic mortgages.

7.
And finally msnbc.com’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Bill Dedman continues his fascinating and increasingly sordid reportage on the Byzantine financial affairs of the reclusive, mysterious, and wildly rich centenarian heiress Hugette Clark. We, like so many others, can’t seem to get enough of this merry-go-round of a story.

Candy Spelling’s Candyland Hits the Open Market

All the real estate gossips and others who care about such silly things already know that Tinseltown’s most famous widow Candy Spelling is fixin‘ to move to a 16,500 square foot (give or take) dee-luxe doo-plex penthouse of a newly built Robert A.M. Stern designed tower in the Century City area of Los Angeles. It’s widely whispered and reported she paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $47,000,000 for her new crib in the sky.

As the custom build-out of her still gigantic but comparatively downsized digs nears completion, Miz Spelling must be getting eager and antsy to unload her famous (and infamous) mega-mansion in the hoity-toity Holmby Hills neighborhood. Miz Spelling has long had her house, which she rather haughtily calls The Manor, quietly and not so quietly on and off the market for a number of years. There have long been pared down listings on the websites of the real estates handling the property but it’s never been, as far as we can remember, on the wide open market. However, thanks to Wendell Whistleblower, we’ve learned that Miz Spelling has finally, at long last, and just yesterday put the listing for her titanic 56,500 square foot, 123 room faux-French chateau on the MLS.

Interestingly–and somewhat surprisingly to Your Mama–Miz Spelling has opted to stick with the blood curdling $150,000,000 asking price at which she’s been unsuccessfully shopping the property around at for years.

Back when The Widda Spelling first put her humongous house on the market and allowed some news cameras into The Manor, she giggled about how she really didn’t know how many poopers there are in her convention hall sized house. Presumably the real estates of record–or more likely their assistants–spent an entire weekend schlepping through all 4 floors of the mansion counting bedrooms and terlits because listing information now shows there are 14 bedrooms and an astonishing 27 poopers. Have mercy! Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter’s tyrannical and theatrical house gurl Svetlana would fall over in hysterics and convulsions iffin we told her that she was going to be responsible for keeping 27 damn terlits polished.

Other interior comforts and frivolities include a billiard room, arcade room, doll museum, 2-lane bowling alley, a flower cutting hall with professional florist refrigerator, a gift wrapping room or two, an art studio, exercise room, music room, barber and beautician facilities, a full service wing with staff quarters, at least 5 fireplaces, and garaging for 16 automobiles.

The grounds, which span 4.69 flat acres according to listing information and must require a full-time grounds keeping crew to maintain, include a circular football field sized motor court with a fountain in the center, formal gardens, expansive lawns, vast terraces, a koi pond, a l’orangerie, antique rose bushes, tennis court, and a swimming pool with adjacent pool house complete with full kitchen and bar.

It makes Your Mama’s heart squeal with agony to think of Miz Spelling–who ,as fer as we know, lives alone but for her staff–coming home on a Friday night after a casual dinner with Tori at Koo Koo Roo and rambling around that big ol‘ hotel sized house all by her lonesome.

Making matter worse and driving Your Mama to the drink at nine in the damn morning is that we can’t realistically conceive of just who might want to buy a house like this at a price like that in the shabby economy with which we’re currently saddled. None the less, has anyone called real estate size queen Tyler Perry or Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko whose been bobbing around on his big boat off the coast of Venice, CA the last couple of days?

Of course, we don’t know a book end from a tight end but we think that if Miz Spelling isn’t going to slash the asking price she just might have better luck getting the property re-zoned and selling her steroidal mansion as some sort of corporate retreat or maybe as half-way house for Hollywood wives who get unceremoniously traded in for a younger and firmer version of themselves by their middle-aged and out of shape entertainment executive huzbands.

It’s our understanding that Miz Spelling still owns and maintains an ocean front spread on Malee-boo’s super swank Carbon Beach that’s just a few doors down from David Spade.

photo: Pacific Coast News

The Russians Are Coming…The Russians Are Coming…

…And they have their heinously expensive 394-foot long yacht with its Philippe Starck designed interiors parked right off the coast of Venice, CA.

Buckle your seat belts butter beans because it seems the free spending Russian oligarchs that have been snatching up high priced properties in Europe and all up and down the eastern seaboard of the U-nited States have finally hit the west coast and hit it big.

Yesterday we received word from the peeps at Yo! Venice! that word on the real estate street was that 30-something year old banking, steel and fertilizer fat cat Andrey Melnichenko–not to be confused with the fertilizer honcho Dmitry Rybolovlev who paid $95,000,000 for Donald Trump’s Maison La Amitie in Palm Beach in the summer of 2008–was in the process of buying up an entire block on Venice’s Ocean Front Walk. That’s right chickens, you heard that right, an entire damn block.

Although there are no confirmations by anyone connected to the alleged situation, a well connected and intrepid source told Yo! Venice! that indeed several title orders had been opened on multiple properties between Paloma and Sunset Avenues. It’s not known, nor does Your Mama have a clue, what Gospadin Melnichenko might want with an entire city block of ocean front property in Venice. Perhaps it’s just an investment, maybe he’d like to build a hotel, or possibly erect a massive residential monument to his extreme wealth.
Mister Melnichenko and his supermodel Serbian wife Aleksandra have been cat nip for the gossip glossies, billionaire obsessed, and boat queens around the world ever since it became public knowledge that he spent upwards of $300,000,000 to have a super-yacht built at the Blohm + Voss shipyards in Hamburg. The big glittery boat, the one sitting in the waters of the coast of Venice (shown above), was quite simply dubbed A.

Listen chickens, if you haven’t seen photos–or better yet the video–of Gaspadin Melnichenko’s floating mega-mansion, get thee eyeballs on them quick. The submarine-shaped ocean liner measures 394-feet long–that’s longer than a damn football field–and includes 23,600 square feet of living space. The lavish and very contemporary interior spaces of the super sleek and somewhat sinister looking boat were all did up in quintessential Philippe Starck style with acres of mirrors, rotating beds, Baccarat crystal wash basins in the poopers, and walls covered in silver leaf, white sting ray hides, and hand-stitched calf’s leather. There’s even a hidden “nookie” room in one of the many guest suites for, well, for doing the dirty, of course. Other ocean going luxuries includes three swimming pools, a helipad, a gigantic garage with 3 large launches and, natch, heavy duty security including bullet proof glass and dozens of cameras including night vision cameras.

Mister Starck rather humorously told the Wall Street Journal that “while most megayachts are ‘vulgar’ statements of wealth and power” Gaspadin Melnichenko’s A is not. The French designer went on to pronouce–presumably with a straight face–that, ” this boat has elegance and intelligence, it is not trying to show the money.” Bitch, pleeze. You gotta be completely out of touch with reality not recognize that spending $300,000,000 to build a 394-foot private yacht with three damn swimming pools and a helipad ain’t about nuthin‘ but showing the damn money.

Anyhoo, all us real estate gossips will wait on pins and needles for confirmation–or denial–of Gaspadin Melnichenko’s rumored property purchase in Venice.

top photo: Guillaume Pilsson for The Wall Street Journal
bottom photo: Yo! Venice!

Mariska Hargitay Upgrades in the Hamptons

BUYER: Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann
LOCATION: East Hampton, NY
PRICE: $7,340,000
SIZE: 7,000 square feet, 11 bedrooms 6.6 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: With the summer coming to a close–and Hurricane Earl bearing down on the east coast–we thought we’d take a virtual stroll out to the hoity-toity and celebrity packed Hamptons, that glittering string of über upscale communities that dot the beachy and bucolic landscape at the far eastern end of the south fork of Long Island.

In early July of 2010 it was reported that the Emmy winning and freshly unemployed Law & Order hottie-mommy Mariska Hargitay and her actor huzband Peter Hermann upgraded their East Hampton digs from a modest 2,554 square foot house on East Hampton’s Buell Lane to an historic and rambling shingle-sided farmhouse in the same posh part of town as the summertime spreads of Martha Stewart, Mort Zuckerman, and Jerry della Femina. The property is, as it turns out, also just around the corner from the very English-y Coxwould estate–listed for a bone breaking $425,000 for the 2010 summer season–that the Kabbalah Kween is rumored and reported to have leased for the summer because the $10,000,000 horse farm that she bought in late 2009 from Kelly Klein does not, alas, have a house on the property.

Blame it on the booze butter beans, but Your Mama quickly forgot about Mister and and Missus Hargitay’s new house in the Hamp-toons until recently when we were clued in by the bizzy boys at Celebrity Address Aerial who whispered in Your Mama’s big ol‘ ear that the Hargitay-Hermanns scooped up a 3-story house in East Hampton–purchased through a trust–in late June 2010 for $7,340,000.

Listing information shows the disheveled and slightly raggedly old-school Hamptons “cottage”–built way back 1890–sits on a 1.14 acre parcel and measures approximately 7,000 square feet with a staggering 11 bedrooms and 6.6 poopers. We’re not exactly sure what a .6 pooper is but that, puppies, is what the listing says.

A gravel driveway sweeps across the yard to the house where a charming and deep covered porch spans the width of the front facade. There’s little Your Mama enjoys more than whittling a summer day away on a shaded porch near the beach with a big stack of tabs, a giant pitcher of gin & tonics, and a big bag of candy. Yes, we’re a damn fool for candy. It’s a bad habit Sister Woman hates–she’s in the teeth bizness–but one we can not seem to break.

Anyhoo, according to listing information, the interior spaces include a trio of parlors with wood floors distressed by age, a dining room, window wrapped sun room, and a huge, funky eat-in kitchen with a turqwaze and black tile pattern painted on to the wood floor. The laminate counter tops have an unfortunate swirly, cream and rose colored pattern, the beat up cabinetry that is supposed to look old and charming just looks to Your Mama like it’s seen its better days, the Sub-Zero fridge has a chalk-board front, and above the commercial style range hangs, we are mortified to see, a pot rack that looks all kinds of hungry to clank some unsuspecting water boiler on the damn head.

Presumably, many if not most of the cottage/mansion’s 11 bedrooms are situated on the second floor. Also on the second floor is a huge deck, part of which is covered, that overlooks the back yard. Another long deck runs along one side of the main floor at the back of the house and steps down the in ground heated swimming pool that too is surrounded by decking.

Even more deckingwraps around a small blue wooden building–let’s call it a quaint little pool house with French doors and 9-over-1 panel sash windows–and around to where a very 1970s looking round hot tub has been sunk into the deck. The grounds also include wide swathes of lawn, mature plantings and shade trees, a guest house and a recording studio.

The unassuming, quirky, and unpretentious property–if anything in the Hamptons that cost more than seven million clams can be considered unpretentious–was sold by a British born but New York City based fashion designer and her rock and roll drummer huzband. While we always appreciate a home that genuinely looks and feels of its owner–and we do appreciate that this house does look and feel of its former owner–we don’t care for the particulars, in this case a wildly eclectic hippy-dippy beach house meets Shabby Chic meets English country house meets city sophisticate day-core. However, it’s really of no use speaking on it because Your Mama has to (hope, pray and) assume that the Hargitay-Hermanns have brought or will bring in their own nice, gay decorator and maybe even a smart architect to put their own spin on the interior spaces.

The real estate whereabouts of Miz Hargitay and Mister Hermann are oft reported on and speculated about. We’re not sure how much light we can throw down on the matter but here’s what Your Mama knows.

In October of 2007, Miz Hargitay and Mister Hermann unloaded their 2,500 square foot Jeffrey Bilhuber designed TriBeCa penthouse at 19 Beach Street for $5,100,000 and quickly laid out $7,000,000 for a 4,817 square foot penthouse pad in the then newly converted O’Neill Building on bizzy, wide, and loud Sixth Avenue in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.

Eight or so months later, after learning their toddler got into a swank school on the Upper East Side, the peripatetic pair hoisted the 3 bedroom and 3.5 pooper doo-plex digs at the O’Neill Building back on the market with an asking price of $8,250,000. A few months later, in October of 2008, just one year after moving in, the Hargitay’s packed their bags, strapped their baby on their back, and moved back out having sold their corner unit aerie for $8,150,000 to a New York City property mogul.

There was chatter among the celebrity real estate gossips back at that time that the Hargitay-Hermanns were either looking to move uptown–closer to their tykes pricey institution of learning–or to one of the leafy and expensive enclaves in Westchester County just to the north of New York City. Honestly bunnies, we don’t have a clue where the Hargitay-Hermanns went but iffin Chelsea was too far for their child to commute to toddler school, then Westchester County might as well be the damn moon, you know?

listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty

Ladees and Gentlemen, The Taupe Office

Lord have mercy, what is with Americans and their affinity for wishy-washy beige day-core?

The Oval Office, that room in Washington, D.C. where American presidents sit and pull the levers of international politics, has never been a particularly stylish place decoratively speaking. It was a fairly utilitarian affair until Pat Nixon injected an oval shaped electric royal blue rug into the mix. Ever since then each president–with the assistance of his not always very stylish wife and a well paid decorator–has done up and did over the Oval Office to reflect their own personal decorative tastes.We’re down with that. We genuinely feel that the got-damn president of the U-nited States of America ought to have an office in which he (or, perhaps one day, she) feels comfortable and relaxed and capable of making decisions that have global impact. We don’t even mind if a few of our tax dollars go towards funding a redecoration of the Oval Office, even if it is for an administration we don’t care for.

However, we got some issues with the latest tasteful, rigorously restrained, and totally taupe incarnation of the Oval Office. President Obama’s newly redone office is a cautious and almost frumpy sea of taupe with just tiny hints of blue on the sofa pillows and the table lamps sitting on the side tables in the seating area in the center of the room. Even the vertically striped wall paper fades away into visual obsolescence.

Your Mama well recognizes that in a time of war and economic austerity for the peeps of America–at least the ones who don’t work on Wall Street–it would have been wildly inappropriate to unleash a crayon box full of color in the Oval Office. This bizness, however, seems to Your Mama’s pea sized brain like decorating for the lowest common denominator. We smell a conscious effort by the Obamas and Mister Smith to create a set up and get up that would not offend voters–conservative ones in particular–so many of whom are eager as beavers to find a reason to knock the president down a notch or two and just might see something more stylish as a sign of uppity elitism and/or lack of connection with the common man. (Please note kiddies, that is not intended as a political statement, it’s our meaningless opinion of the day-core.)

As vanilla as it may be, the Oval Office’s new day-core is definitely more up to date and of this time than the wealthy grandma look of previous administrations. But honestly chickens, while everything is in good taste and (we presume) high quality, this looks like the sort of thing one might find in the lobby of an expensive business hotel.

All that said, what Your Mama really wants to know is what’s the shit with the fruit bowl on the coffee table? Do Michael Smith, the Prez, and his adviser peeps really think Benji Netanyahu, Nancy Pelosi, or General Austin are gonna reach down for a banana or a damn nectarine in the middle of high stakes meeting? Pleeze.

It should be noted that no tax payer money was spent on the overhaul of the Oval Office. The cheddar for the redo came from a pool of money created by private donations given specifically for the purpose of doing over the White House day-core.

photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

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