BUYER: Susan SarandonLOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,750,000
SIZE: 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen chickens, there are a number of juicy(ish) celebrity real estate tidbits in the works but, right now, at this very moment, the pickins are slim. Rather than leave y'all high and dry–or drowning in discussions of properties owned by "celebrities" most people have never heard of before–we're going to dig down into the archives and pull up a few old things that we never got around to dissin' or discussin' when all the other real estate gossips were yammering about them.
Let's start with soo-blime actor Susan Sarandon, a gutsy gal with one Oscar in her pocket (Dead Man Walking) and another four nominations under her belt (The Client, Lorenzo's Oil, Thelma & Louise, Atlantic City). Miz Sarandon has dated (Louis Malle) and procreated (Franco Amurri) with a few high-profile gentleman but her longest romantic entanglement has been with fellow Oscar winning actor Tim Robbins (Mystic River, Dead Man Walking, The Player, The Shawshank Redemption). The lefty-left-left activist couple never hitched their wagons in the eyes of God and government but they did bring two children into their unmarried union, something that no doubt reinforced the seething hatred right wingers to have for these two famous limousine liberals from Tinseltown.
Anyhoo, sometime during the summer of 2009, after about 23 years of bleeding heart coupledom, Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins called the whole thing off. Until that point the Sarandon-Amurri-Robbins clan split their time between New York City and the bucolic and upscale community of Pound Ridge, about 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
In 1991 Mister Robbins and Miz Sarandon acquired a lofty-style cooperative apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood. They eventually bought up one entire floor and half of the one above to give them about 7,000 square feet of interior space on the 7th and 8th floors. The massive apartment is just a few blocks from SPiN, a ping-pong bar/eatery in which Miz Sarandon is an investor.
In June of 1995 the then happy now kaput couple coughed up $1,675,000 for a secluded 7.74 acre spread that backs up to the Cross River Reservoir. The New York State Tax Man shows the estate includes a 5,068 square foot main house with 4 bedorooms and 3 bathrooms. Several out buildings dot the property and a large terrace off the back of the house has a swimming pool.
Your Mama has no idea what plans Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins might have in regards to keeping or selling their Pound Ridge property but we do know it sits within a couple miles of the posh mansions, sprawling estates and colossal compounds of loads of other rich and famous folks with a yen and the bucks for a pastoral getaway just an hour from the hustle and bustle of New York City. Ralph Lauren maintains a vast estate in the area where other property owners include Richard Gere, George Soros, Martha Stewart, Abigail Disney, Matthew Bronfman, and Clive Davis.
In June 2011, not long after it became publicly known that Miz Sarandon and Mister Robbins' relationship had reached its sunset, property records (and previous reports) reveal Miz Sarandon paid Mister Robbins $3,200,000 to take full ownership over their leviathan loft in New York City. At the same time she was buying Mister Robbins out she also snatched up a wee but pricey bachelorette pad in an elegant pre-war apartment building in a particularly charming (and swank) section of Greenwich Village known as the Gold Coast.
Property records (and previous reports) show the newly single sixty-something year old Miz Sarandon paid high-end wallpaper designer Anya Larkin $1,750,000 for a well-scaled but far from humongous 1 bedrooom and 1 bathroom penthouse pad with million dollar city views and a wrap around terrace almost as large as the apartment itself.
Now, children, have some common sense here. The only way to look at a one bedroom apartment that costs one and three-quarter million clams is to see it through the very specific real estate goggles of New York City. Like it or not, Big Apple Haters, the petite penthouse's pit falls–the stingy closet space, the crapper accessible to guests only by walking through the bedroom, for example–are far outweighed by the prime location in the hoity-toity heart Greenwich Village, the white glove services of the pre-war building, and the giant but manageable wrap around terrace with sparkly city views to the east, north and west. The wood-burning fireplace and unusually spacious contemporary Craftsman-style kitchen are icing on the nearly two million dollar one bedroom cake.
Much to our chagrin the front door opens directly into the main living space, which means that all the Chinese food delivery men in in neighborhood are going to know exactly what Miz Sarandon's living room looks like.
In the nearly 400 square foot main living space, divided into living and dining areas, built-in cabinets anchor one side of a Batchelder (or Batchelder-style) fireplace. French doors in the tile-floored dining area connect to the terrace that snakes around three sides of the apartment. Your Mama knows that some of you real estate beotchas are going to hiss, "Pshaw!" and deride a New York City terrace as dirty and loud spaces that, more often than not, lack any real privacy. And y'all would be right. Terraces in New York City are typically loud, dirty and in full view of at least a few neighbors. Howevuh, honey bees, this former New Yorker would have happily endured the indignity of a dirty and loud wrap around terrace where our neighbors could spend all day watching Your Mama lounge around in a ikat sarong on a nappy chaise lounge eating candy, drinking gin & tonics and picking at our toenails.
The dining area is open to the cook-accommodating kitchen outfitted with commercial-style stainless steel appliances and blessed with a window over the sink that provides a pretty city view while doing battle with the dried up sticky shit off the bottom of a frying pan.
A small vestibule off the living area leads back to the generous but far from ginormous bedroom that includes French doors that open to the east-side terrace area and a double-windowed pooper re-done in classic 1930s style with white subway tiles on the walls and black and white honeycomb tile on the floor. Floor plan information indicates that the bedroom's lone closet–a small walk-in–is inconveniently situated in the vestibule between the bedroom and the living/dining room. But again, these wonky real estate moments might seem like deal killers in suburbia but in New York City, as in many other densely urban areas, these annoyances become mere quirks.
Property records also show that in addition to the two apartments in New York City and the Pound Ridge spread she once shared (and as per public records still co-owns) with Mister Robbins, Miz Sarandon also owns a 1.5 acre waterfront property with a 3,270 square foot residence on Mount Desert Island in Maine, the same swanky neck of the dramatic Maine coast where media mogul/domestic goddess Martha Stewart maintains a 63-acre waterfront spread with a 35,000 square foot mansion she calls Skylands.
Politically progressive Miz Sarandon has not always had an easy-peasy relationship with her staunchly Republican mother Lenora Tomalin but property records do indicate that mother and daughter buried the hatchet when it came to real estate and co-own two condos at a Leisure World retirement complex in Leesburg, VA.
exterior photo: Property Shark
interior (listing) photos and floor plan: Sotheby's International Realty via StreetEasy
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