Monday Mish Mash: Olivier Sarkozy

Several weeks ago Your Mama discussed a sleek, completely contemporized 8,000-plus square foot townhouse on the Upper (and Far) East Side of New York City formerly owned by famed photographer Richard Avedon and later by French-American banker named Olivier "Oliver" Sarkozy who sold it in January 2012 to Showbiz/media mogul Kevin Wendle for $8,400,000. (Mister Wendle, co-founder of the Fox network, E! Online, CNET and iFilm, quickly flipped the townhouse on the market just over a month ago with a $12,500,000 price tag.)

Now comes word slips down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine via Page Six of the New York Post that Mister Sarkozy—otherwise known as the recently (and contentiously) divorced, 42-year old half-brother of former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy and the current man-beau of pint-sized child star turned mogulette Mary-Kate Olsen—has dropped $6,250,000 to purchase an historic, nearly 150-year old fixer-upper townhouse in the still funky but fully-strollerized East Village neighborhood where Mister Sarkozy, so the scuttlebutt goes, plans to live in May-December sin with 26-year old Miss Olsen.

Listing information shows the 5-story red-brick residence retains many original architectural details, and includes five bedrooms, four bathrooms, more than a dozen closets, eight fireplaces with ornate mantelpieces, a cast-iron Juliet balcony that stretches across the front of the piano nobile, and an English basement that lets out to a terraced garden.

Lucky for Miss Olsen's equally tiny and prodigiously wealthy twin sister Ashley, the townhouse immediately next door is—or, until recently, was—also on the market so, should they choose, the not-quite-identical twins could live in nearly identical side-by-side townhouses. Don't laugh, children, stranger things have happened in the sometimes mystifying world of celebrity real estate.

listing photos and floor plan: Rubicon Property (via StreetEasy)