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 "maisonette"–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 "maisonette" 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 "maisonette" 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.

Sienna Miller Takes a Hit on Her London House

SELLER: Sienna Miller
LOCATION: Hatton Row, London, NW8
PRICE: £995,000
SIZE: 2,095 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: A fabulous and most unusual house, discreetly positioned in a quiet lane between Edgeware Road and Lisson Grove, being conveniently located for numerous local shops, restaurants and transport facilities. The house features a striking ground floor studio reception room with a galleried study area as well as a stunning lower ground floor entertaining area with a Turkish bath and sauna.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Relentlessly pap hounded British ack-tress turned "fashion designer" Sienna Miller has put her quirky London pad on the market with an asking price of £995,000, a figure that our bejeweled abacus reveals converts to $1,636,889 U.S.

Twenty-something year old blond Miss Miller–who works her boho-chic look every bit as hard as Kates Hudson and Moss–started up her ladder of fame as a model. She appeared in ad campaigns, magazine and topless in the innocently naughty 2003 Pirelli calendar. Next came tee-vee and movie roles in films like Alfie, Factory Girl and The Edge of Love. However, poor Miss Miller has become, perhaps and sadly, less known for her acting prowess and best known for her long string of romantic relationships and interludes with high profile men including Jude Law, Rhys Ifans, Puff Daddy and Josh Hartnett. Then there was, of course, that nasty bizness with the very married father of four Balthazar Getty which ruined a marriage and, quite frankly, did neither of their reputations or careers any favors.

Not only is Miss Miller unlucky in love, she's not so lucky in the real estate department either. Previous reports indicate Miss Miller purchased the 2,095 square foot Victorian house in 2007 for £1,200,000. That's $1,973,916 at today's rates which means that iffin Miss Miller gets her full asking price, the little lams will still lose more than £200,000. While all reports say that Miss Miller's house is in upscale Marylebone (where the Kabbalah Kween lives when in London), Our Man in London says that it's sort of in super swank St. Johns Wood (where Kate Moss resides) but that it's really located in the much less glammy Paddington where it's surrounded by council flats, otherwise known as public housing.

Miss Miller's much photographed front door opens directly into a main living space on the ground floor which perfectly matches her extremely expensive and eclectic hippie chic style of dress. It's unclear to Your Mama if Miss Miller's ex-step-mommy, the much ballyhooed interior designer Kelly Hoppen, had anything to do with the white walled Manhattan loft meets Moroccan bazaar interior day-core. The white-walled high-ceiling living room area includes a smattering of mis-matched casual furniture, a gas fireplace, a flat screen boob-toob stuck up on the wall and a couple of Moroccan lanterns hung from the ceiling. The living room gives way to the petite dining area and the well organized sky lit kitchen.


A floating and curving staircase climb to the maze-like mezzanine level which wraps around the the living room below and includes a small study with a large closet and a bathroom so narrow that only pin thin chicks like Miss Miller can squeeze past the terlit to the stand up shower.

Up a few more steps from the study is one of the two bedrooms which is open to the mezzanine level and also provides access to a small private terrace. The glass and chrome bannistered mezzanine level circles around to another flight of floating stairs that rise to the second bedroom on the top floor which appears to include a bit of closet space, a wee window that opens to interior space, a large sky light and another small pooper.

Down in the basement, or the much less dank sounding "lower ground floor" according to listing information is a somewhat impractical Turkish bath folly which was reportedly installed by the previous interior decorator owner. Surrounding the deep and intricately tiled tub that Miss Miller, ever the water conservationist, does not fill are several deep seating areas over flowing with more pillows that can be found in a Moroccan marketplace. Also down below is a sauna and the home's third bathroom.

Miss Miller also owns a country cottage in Gloucestershire and some reports indicate that Miss Miller has already moved on to newer, better and more private accommodations. Wherever she goes Your Mama imagines she'll be inclined to live in a house with a tall wall out front to keep the paps' cameras from peeping in her windows.