The celebrity real estate scuttlebutt out of New York City today has it that Tinseltown scion Drew Barrymore and her well-bred art consultant husband, Will Kopelman*, might be the wealthy peeps in contract to purchase a house-sized Park Avenue duplex last listed with an asking price of $8.3 million.
An unnamed tipster "with knowledge of the building"
told the all-ears kids at Curbed that the child actor turned wild child turned all-grown-up Hollywood power player peeped a couple of pads in the swanky, full-service building before she and hubby decided on said top floor duplex that listing information describes as having undergone a recent renovation that brought it to triple mint condition.
Listing details don't indicate the size of the swanky co-operative apartment but after a few seconds of rudimentary and blunt-edged mathematics based on measurements shown on the floor plan (above) and Your Mama clocks it somewhere around 3,000 square feet. We count four bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, three fireplaces, several coat and broom closets, and one nicely private powder room. Just to clarify, that's three real and reasonably generous bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms plus a squeezy staff bedroom and bathroom pinched into an extreme rear of the lower level behind the kitchen.
Although Park Avenue would not be an address of choice for Your Mama and The Doctor Cooter even if we were in the $8+ million dollar market but—and even though the
Curbed kids were mostly nonplussed by the place, in addition to the preserved (or recreated) pre-war architectural details such as the fancy moldings and mill work that runs around the lower part of the walls in the double living room space, there are a number of features that really tickle our sometimes too persnickety real estate funny bone...in the good way.
We like how the small entry vestibule makes for a humble spatial counterweight to the expansive grandeur of the double-fireplaced living room/gallery combination space that sweeps more than fifty feet back to front where three sets of transomed French doors stretch almost all the way to the high ceiling and open to an ever-so-slender Juliet balcony 10 floors above the street.
Call us old fashioned—and we've been called so much worse just in the last 24 hours—but Your Mama swoons for a plus-sized dining room that does double duty as a library and, while we might prefer a larger kitchen area with more counter space, we find ourselves unusually drawn to the compact coziness of the adjoining space that manages to incorporate both a four-top dining area and a wee television lounge.
Upstairs two guest/family bedrooms with tiny closets and shared access to a goodly-sized and windowed Jack-'n'-Jill bathroom are well-placed to provide maximum privacy to the master bedroom, a suite of street-facing rooms connected by a central circulation corridor. In addition to the bedroom itself, there's a separate sitting room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls (above, left) and a fitted dressing room. The spacious, all-white master bathroom (above, right) has open-shelf linen storage, a double sink floating vanity with exposed plumbing, a soaking tub, and a separate stall shower.
Since and despite popular opinion we don't know them personally, it seems just about inexplicable to Your Mama that the sellers—photographer
Adam Bartos and and his eminently accomplished foreign relations expert wife,
Dr. Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos—only
purchased the spacious duplex in April of this year (2013) for exactly $8.3 million. Huh. Anyways...
Miz Barrymore and Mister Kopelman reside primarily in Los Angeles in a gated hillside compound above the
Outpost Estates neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills that Miz Barrymore has owned since 2002 when she bought it for $4,350,000. The couple also continue to own a
vintage, Monterey Colonial estate in the hoity-toity seaside community of Montecito (CA) that they scooped in early 2010 for $5,705,000 and currently have on the market for a (
recently reduced) asking price of $6.9 million.
*Mister Kopelman's sophisticated father, Arie, is the former CEO and chairman of Chanel—that would have made him Karl Lagerfelds boss!—and his mother, Corinne goes by the name—we are dead serious, chickens—Coco.
exterior photo: Kate Leonova for Property Sharklisting photos and floor plan: Sotheby's International Realty
