The photographer Annie Leibovitz, who has taken some of the most famous celebrity pictures in the world (including a pregnant Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk), has put her house on the market. And what a house! It’s actually three houses arranged round a corner plot in the West Village. Now, while some of us manage to have a spare room and some of us manage to have a home office, even more of us have to combine both those into one room.
Not our Annie. She has one house for living, one house for guests and one house for office space. Oh yes. And it’s all gorgeous. Take a look. Oh and by the way – she paid $6.1m for it. As the Americans would say: Do the math!
On the estate agent’s website, Brown Harris Stevens there are five interactive buttons including print, save, share and simply Purchase. That’s right,it’s a sort of “Add to Basket” button. There is also a handy mortgage calculator, although one suspects that if you are in the business of needing a mortgage for this property, you probably aren’t going to be the person picking up the keys in a few weeks time.
The entire floor space runs to around 10,202 sq ft, but if that means nothing to you, it has 13 fireplaces complete with woodburning stoves, which might give you some idea of the scale. Although while the room above is vast, the kitchen (which called the chef’s kitchen in the brochure) is comparatively small. Perhaps because it is purely a working kitchen for the chef and not a kitchen as we know it.
Now if we’re going to nitpick (and frankly for $33m it should be pretty damn perfect), the outside space isn’t all that. We English types are prepared to move out of cities for outside space and greenery. Indeed our city parks are filled with grass and trees. Not so in Manhattan. When I first visited I spent hours looking for a park for the children to play in before realising that there are plenty of parks but they just don’t have grass. Which makes them rather camouflaged.
Anyway, outside space is, of course, at a premium in Manhattan. Leibovitz has some, which is is a start. But it’s not terribly private.
Anyhow, what about the rest of the house? Well here you are. This is how the estate agent describes it: “Entering directly into the living room, the soaring ceilings, twin wood-burning fireplaces, and wide plank floors create a stunning living and entertaining space.
“Two doors at the rear of living room lead to the formal dining room while a third leads to a beautiful chef’s kitchen overlooking the slate patio and West 11th Street private courtyard. There is a main stair leading up to the private levels and a second rear stair from the kitchen leading to a guest triplex equipped with a kitchen and living room on the second floor and a bedroom and full bath on the third floor, flooded with southern light.
So there you have it. If you’re interested, do click the purchase button and for $33m it’s all yours.
$33m and you walk straight into the living room……..no thanks!
I know! I guess $33m doesn’t buy you everything after all.