Mish Mash Madness

Here's a couple of tidbits and real estate berries to get the children through the afternoon.

1.
Although Your Mama read it on City File, according to the peeps at the New York Post, newly unemployed night time chat show host Conan O'Brien is quietly looking to unload his doo-plex digs at the mighty Majestic building on New York City's Central Park West. Asking price: a heart stopping $35,000,000.

Mister O'Brien and his wife Liza–that's Liza with a "z" but not that Liza with a "z"–already owned a combined unit residence on the 17th floor of the twin towered Art Deco dowager when in March of 2007 they paid around $10,000,000 for another apartment on the 18th floor which they combined into a sprawling home with 3 terraces and oblique buy dee-voon views of Central Park West. Because the O'Brien aerie faces south, it does not have a view of its even more legendary neighbor across 72nd Street, the Dakota where Yoko Ono still lives in the apartment she shared with John Lennon when he was shot in the arched entrance passageway to the building in 1980.

Presumably, Mister O'Briens desire to dump his doo-plex at the Majestic means the tall and ginger haired comedian plans on staying in Los Angeles where in early 2008, in anticipation of taking over The Tonight Show, he and the Missus paid $10,750,000 for a newly completed mansion the Brentwood area. According to listing information from the time of the sale, the O'Brien's west cost crib contains 6 bedrooms and 8.5 poopers including a "sybaritic" master suite with sitting area, fireplace, private terrace, dual poopers and huge fitted closets. Other luxuries includes a formal living room with a double height ceiling, 1,500 bottle wine room, a 60 foot long veranda, paneled library with wet bar, a swimming pool and spa, and an adjacent pavilion with a fireplace.

There aren't as many $35,000,000 deals as there used to be, but for a good apartment in a good building there still do seem to be some buyers out there with unlimited resources for a Manhattan home. Add the fact that Wall Street was handed behemoth bonuses this year as a reward for wrecking the U.S. economy and maybe Mister O'Brien and his Missus will get lucky. It could happen. Stranger things have certainly happened.

2.
The New York Post also reported today that the Upper East side doo-plex digs of Ponzi scheme perpetrator and convicted convict Bernie Madoff and his stand by her man wife Ruth has been sold for just under its last asking price of $8,900,000. Rumors of the sale began to circulate among real estate watchers and gossips a week or more ago but it wasn't until today that the Post identified the (alleged) buyer as biznessman Al Kahn, otherwise known as the man responsible for pushing Pokemon and Cabbage Patch Kids onto the worldwide scene.

The East 64th Street penthouse, located in the very same building morning chat fest honcho Matt Lauer calls home, has 3 bedrooms, 4.5 poopers, 4 fireplaces, herringbone hardwood floors, an elliptical staircase connecting the two floors and wrap around terrace that could–and should–make even the most jaded New Yorker weak with envy.

The Madoff's ocean front getaway in Montauk was sold in October of 2009 for $9,400,000 after being listed at $8,750,000 just 17 days before. The buyer was identified as Vornado Realty chairman Steven Roth. The formerly high-flying couple's Palm Beach home remains unsold and on the market at $7,250,000 after being first listed with a price take fo $8,490,000.

3.
You better watch out Martha Stewart because according to all the New York City real estate gossips Madonna and her entourage of children, nannies, muscle workers, hair doers, horse whisperers, ass wipers and one Brazilian model named Jeezis are about to be your new neighbors in the Hamptons. At least for the summer of 2010, anyway. According to, well, everyone, the Kabbalah Kween, henceforth to be called K.K., will be shacking up in an English style estate with the flagrantly naughty sounding name of Coxwould. The estate is so close to Big Bad Martha's hideaway in the Hamptons that these two super-divas can easily send their hard working house gurls out–on foot–to borrow a cup of sugar or, if things get really ugly, with instructions to leave paper sacks full of flaming dog poo on each others' porches.

It's not known exactly how many sterling pounds or dollars–or whatever dinero K.K. uses these days–is being coughed up for the dee-luxe Lily Pond Lane estate but it is known that it was last listed with a porcine Mad to Lad asking price of $425,000. For those not schooled in East End real estate speak, that's a rental that runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Coxwould, designed and built in the early 1900s by Harrie Lindberg for a New York City surgeon name John Erdman, was described in a 2001 article in The Observer has having, "stucco walls and small hand-split shingles that conformed to the shape of the roof, curving around eaves and openings in a sensual resemblance of straw thatch. There were no grazing sheep out front, but Dr. Erdman did instruct his gardener to prune the topiary bushes in the semblance of various family members." Your Mama loves us some eccentricity and it doesn't get any more freaky than having the bushes in your front yard all done up like your loved ones. Yes. We like that.

According to listing information, the 2.2+- acre estate that sits just one estate off the ocean includes a main house with 6 bedrooms, 5 poopers and a guest house and a pool house that each have an additional bedroom and private pooper. The main house also has a large living room with a fireplace and French doors that open onto a large terrace, a dining room that seats 14-16, a family room, study and and eat in kitchen. The lavishly landscaped grounds include a large circular driveway at the front of the house plus a separate motor court on the side of the house, extensive English-style and boxwood gardens, a gated swimming pool with a wisteria covered arbor, and private ocean access.

K.K. summer digs are just a few miles drive from Wild Ocean Farm, the 30-ish acre Bridgehampton horse farm she recently and reportedly bought from Calvin's ex-wife Kelly Klein for just under $10,000,000. But as anyone who has ever been to the Hamptons in the height of the summer season and suffered the maddeningly stagnant ant farm of traffic along Montauk Highway knows, without an escort from the po-po it might take the horse luvvin' pop icon a half hour or more just to go those few miles.

Meanwhile, works continues at a furious pace at the 57-foot wide Upper East Side townhouse K.K. bought last year for $25,000,000. Until she moves her stash of Kabbalah water and Age Defying Secrets into that house on East 81st Street, K.K. and family will, we presume, continue to reside at Harperley Hall, the Central Park West building where she has combined several units into one vast celebrity style spread filled with artworks by Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka.

With Madonna spending big on a summer rental and all that mad Wall Street money bouncing around, it looks like it just might be a good year for the Hamptons real estate peeps after all.