SELLER: Kylie MinogueLOCATION: 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.
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