Oprah Goes House Hunting...in New Jersey

All the celebrity flibbertigibbets and real estate gossips are going hog wild over the news that soon to be retiring gab-fast queen Oprah Winfrey has been out looking at major estates with major price tags including a shingled English manor style pile on the former Frick estate in super-swank Alpine, NJ listed with a belly aching asking price of $68,000,000.

As the story goes in the New York Post, the billionairess showed up in Alpine, the most expensive zip code in the counter according to Forbes, around noon yesterday in a caravan of cars that included a couple of SUVs and a van. A source told the New York Post that, "Her [Oprah's] people requested that everyone leave the house so it would be empty when she walked through."

Of course she did.

According to listing information and previous reports on the property, the recently completed 42-room residence was built by New Jersey real estate mogul Richard Kurtz. The 30,300 square foot mega-mansion includes 12 bedrooms, 15 full and 4 half poopers, a 11-car garage, more than half a dozen fireplaces, 4 stair halls and an elevator, ballroom, conservatory, wine cellar, movie theater, massage room and an indoor basketball court. The 27+ acre grounds include a 65-foot long heated salt-water swimming pool with adjacent 2-pooper pool house, spa, tennis court, carriage house, extensive gardens and a heated 250-foot long driveway. The mansion is, as should be expected in a sixty-eight million dollar house, all wired up with a generator, fire compression system, a state of the art security system, and Smart House technology that allows things like the heating and cooling systems, lights and drapery to be operated from anywhere in the world from an iPhone.

Lord people, what does Oprah need with a damn indoor basketball thingy?

Anyhoo, Mister Kurtz famously purchased the 63-acre Frick estate in 2006 for about $58,000,000. He subsequently subdivided the thickly wooded property into 11 parcels, according to the Estates at Alpine website, that range from .99 acres to 5.686 acres with asking prices from $1-3,000,000 per acre according to a July 2007 article in the New York Times. The newly built beast first went on the market in 2008 with an asking price of $42,500,000. The price jumped to $52,000,000 and Mister Kurtz allegedly rejected an offer of about $36,000,000 after reconsidering and deciding he and the Missus wanted to live in the mini-mall sized house after all.

Your Mama has no idea if Mister and Missus Kurtz ever moved in to the mansion but in early June of 2010 it reappeared on the open market with its current even higher and more astonishing price tag of $68,000,000. There really aren't very many people in the world who can and would be willing to spend fifty or sixty-some million clams for a crib anywhere in the world let alone in New Jersey. We are not doggin' New Jersey, children There are plenty of insanely rich people there and some very pretty houses and countryside, just not that many who can pay sixty million smackers for a house. However, even though Your Mama would bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly that Miz Winfrey does not buy this estate, she's a good prospect if only because she's well known to dump vast and record breaking amounts of money on her real estate.

Miz Winfrey owns more insanely luxurious homes than Your Mama currently cares to count or recount including in Chicago, on Maui in Hawaii, and the Caribbean island of Antigua. The most significant and magnificent jewel in her real estate crown, however, is The Promised Land, a sprawling 42-acre spread in Montecito, CA with ocean and mountain views that she bought a number of years ago for around $50,000,000.

listing photos: Prominent Properties / Sotheby's International Realty