Morning Morsel: Macauley Culkin

Ever wonder what the inside of former child star turned ironically-inclined arteest Macauley Culkin's 5,100 square foot Manhattan loft looked like. Frankly, Your Mama hadn't either until we ran across this eye-popping partly-pictoral nugget in the art/fashion/culture publication Bullett and is it ever a ding-dang urban hipster-dipster doozy of a place.

photo: Kelsey Bennett for Bullett

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Morning Morsel: Courtney Sale Ross

According to the property gossips at the New York Post, philanthropist Courtney Sale Ross—the very rich widow of former Time Warner CEO Steve Ross—has floated her 5.5 acre Georgia Pond fronting estate in East Hampton on the market as a so-called pocket listing with a $75,000,000 asking price.

High end property watchers will recall that Miz Sale Ross sold her 20-plus room duplex co-operative apartment in New York City at the very high-nosed 740 Park Avenue last year for $52,500,000 to money manager Howard Marks who himself recently unloaded his fully renovated and landscaped 10-ish acre ocean front compound in Malibu (CA) for around $75,000,000.

aerial image: Bing

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6 Tips For Buying An Older Home

Older Kent homes sometimes offer more charm and character than the newer houses of today. They boast gabled roofs, crown moldings, hardwood floors and antique fixtures.

Buying an old house is like buying a piece of local history. Its beautiful period features can give it a timeless beauty and grace that is hard to resist.

However, buying a house from another era can be an endeavor fraught with potential problems. Older houses are not necessarily built to the same electrical or plumbing standards of today. Plus, if they have not been maintained correctly through the years, they can turn into a serious money pit or a potential hazard.

Here are six tips to keep in mind if you are considering buying an older home:

1. Always hire a professional real estate inspector to take a close look at the property. A professional inspector is trained to spot structural damage or issues that might seem minor, but may cause major problems in the future.
2. Look for signs of moisture damage. Many old houses have problems with moisture because over the years they have settled.
3. If the old house you are considering has vintage wiring, such as the knob-and-tube technology that was popular around the 1920s and 1930s, plan to completely update the wiring for your safety.
4. You might need to add insulation. Many older homes don't have insulation in the walls or attic, which can increase the size of your energy bill.
5. Be on the look out for iron pipes, which were popular up until 1940. They can become clogged with rust and may need to be replaced.
6. Have the house tested for asbestos, if it was built before the 1960s.

These are just a few things to which to pay attention out when buying an older home.

Take time to inspect the property thoroughly. With proper attention, you can mix today's modern technology with your home's period features to create a combination of charm and safety.

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Afternoon Tidbits and Links: Elton John

Have a delicious look-see via Architectural Digest at what Million Dollar Decorator Martyn Lawrence Bullard did to the glassy, low-slung Beverly Hills (CA) contemporary that music industry icon Sir Elton John and his man-friend/baby daddy David Furnish bought last year for $7,250,000.

Sir Elton and Mister Furnish may have two young sons but they still live a globe-trotting rock star lifestyle and maintain a handful of decadent, high-maintenance digs around the world including in Atlanta, Georgia; in both London and Windsor in the U.K.; Nice, France; and Venice, Italy.

photo: Roger Davies for Architectural Digest

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Afternoon Tidbits and Links: Celebrity House Calculator

The folks over at Movoto created a fun little calculator that allows all us regular folks to figure out home many of our own—ahem—modest houses will fit into the celebrity-style mansions of a handful of famous people such as Rihanna, Tom Brady and Kim Kardashian.

photo: Movoto

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Afternoon Tidbits and Links: Another Nine Figure Asking Price

On the heels of the spine-tingling—and record breaking—news that Bay Area financier Tully Friedman sold his nearly nine acre Woodside (CA) estate to multi-billionaire Japanese businessman Masayoshi San for $117,500,000 along comes a much larger and far more storied 47.4-acre spread in nearby Hillsborough with an toe curling asking price of $100,000,000. 

Although the largely wooded estate, situated about 20 minutes south of San Francisco, has been owned by the family of it's current shepherd, Christian de Guigné IV, for the last 150 years, the opulent and downright correct Mediterranean villa was originally designed in 1916 by the esteemed San Francisco architects Walter Bliss and William Faville. The existing residence currently weighs in with seven bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms—plus half a dozen or more staff rooms, a ballroom and a flower arranging room—in about 16,000 square feet of decorative decadence dreamed up and done done done by decorator Anthony Hail.

As the always on top of things kids at Curbed noted, there's a bit of a twist: 75-year old Mister de Guigné the Fourth wishes to retain a life estate on the property, a stipulation that would allow him to occupy the main manse for the remainder of his life. Now, children, let's get real. What bazillionaire buyer willing to drop anywhere close to a hundred million damn clams is gonna go for that sort of thing?

listing photo: Sotheby's International Realty

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UPDATE: Peter Morton and Elvis Presley

Last week Your Mama spilled the real estate beans about former restaurateur and hotelier Peter Morton dropping nearly ten million clams to buy a French Regency meets mid-century modern style house in the once again super-swank, coveted and increasingly pricey Trousdale Estates area of Beverly Hills (CA) that, in the late 1960s, was the west coast home of newlyweds Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

At the time Your Mama heard from two separate sources that Mister Morton planned to tear the house down and replace it with something larger and more modern but the ever-clever kids at Curbed have subsequently reported that the property's provenance—it was not only owned by Elvis Presley but originally designed by too-littled lauded master architect Rex Lotery—and a recently adopted preservation ordinance in Bev Hills may in fact prevent Mister Morton from tearing the existing residence down.

Your Mama recognizes that none of this to raze or not to raze bizness will matter much to most folks in places like Peoria and Timbuktu but we've come to understand from our more architecturally inclined confreres that his has become an eminently watchable real estate soap opera with dedicated architecture preservationists in Los Angeles and beyond.

listing photo: Coldwell Banker

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