Did Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick Finally Bite the Real Estate Bullet?

The east coast real estate gossips are all abuzz and atwitter that pint-sized superstar Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and the City, Smart People, The Family Stone) and her two-time Tony award winning huzband Matthew Broderick might finally be dumping some serious cheddar on an oddly configured doo-plex at The Brentmore, the same swank Central Park West building where Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels lives and where Sting and Trudie Styler owned a titanic 18-room doo-plex until earlier in the year when they sold it for $17,750,000 to billionaire biznessman Michael Naify.

Although the downtown denizens, parents to a toddler and a younger set of twins, have long lived in a 4,100+ square foot townhouse in the heart of the West Village they've been on an extensive hunt for new digs that has led them to high-priced pads both uptown and downtown, a quest chronicled in the press. They reportedly had a look-see and apparently nixed at the titanic Park Avenue triplex of habiliment honcho David Chu (now listed at $25,800,000) and the triplex penthouse at the newly converted Bouwerie Lane building on Bond Street (then priced at $15,400,000).

The 14-room Central Park West residence in question, first listed in August at $25,000,000 and last listed at $21,500,000, belongs to Laurie Tisch, an heiress to the Loews theater fortune. Miz Tisch has done moved on over to the East Side where in March of 2009 she paid a staggering $29,000,000 for a 13-room residence in the über-exclusive 834 Fifth Avenue. Miz Tisch's new home has just 2 bedrooms (plus three more cell-sized one in the staff wing), 3.5 poopers, at least 4 fireplaces, multiple terraces that hang over Central Park and monthly maintenance charges of $9,538. Other residents of the posh pre-war dowager include (but are not limited to) heavy hitters such as Rupert Murdoch who famously paid $44,000,000 for his penthouse, Swiss ink tycoon Maurice Amon, financier Mark Rachesky, disgraced financier John Gutfreund and his wife Susan, retail baron Leslie Wexner, and octogenarian, socialite and haute couture queen Carroll McDaniel Portago Carey-Hughes Pistell Petrie.

The sprawling "L" shaped apartment has a total of 8 bedrooms, 5.5 poopers, 17 closets including 2 walk-ins located in the surprisingly petite park view master bedroom, 2 full kitchens, a fitness room and a 32-foot long living room with panoramic views over Central Park and towards the towers of Midtown Manhattan. Other rooms include a formal dining room with oblique park views, a second floor library (that could just as easily be a bedroom), and another library/family room on the first floor that separates the main kitchen from the formal dining room, an arrangement that's klutzy at best.
The current configuration shows the apartment is really two completely separate apartments connected only through a set of French doors at the tail end of the long long long second floor corridor. The larger of the apartments encompasses the entire lower level (entrance gallery, living, dining, butler's pantry, library/family, eat-in kitchen, laundry closet and powder pooper) and a significant portion of the second floor where there are 3-4 bedrooms depending on how you count, a smaller room for the Pilates machine or whatever trendy body torture device rich people are using nowadays, and three full terliting and bathing facilities.

The smaller apartment–certainly far larger than the average New Yorker's two bedroom crib–has a separate entrance, foyer, living room and dining rooms, a full windowed kitchen, and a mile long hallway that leads back to two bedrooms and 2 poopers. The current layout, with this generously proportioned two bedroom wing is perfect for those with live-in domestics or family members who come and stay and stay and stay.

Your Mama and our real estate crazy pal Hot Chocolate have been looking at this cockamamie floor plan (above) for a couple months now in an effort to reconfigure the rooms into something with a more elegant layout. Either of us have yet to succeed but tonight after we've downed a few gin & tonics we'll give it another try and see if liquor loosens up our abilities to rearrange rooms in large and mind-numbingly expensive but gracelessly laid out New York City apartments.

listing photos and floor plan: Stribling NY