Though she needs another multi-million dollar home about as much as a centipede needs a unicycle, word on the New York City celebrity real estate street is that Taylor Swift is the secret buyer who shelled out $18 million in an off-market deal for a four-story townhouse immediately next door to the celeb-favored Tribeca building where she already owns a mansion-sized duplex penthouse. According to the New York Post, the corporate entity that appears as the buyer on purchase documents is linked to an attorney who works for Swift’s management firm and who has represented the pop star in previous real estate transactions.
Since the townhouse wasn’t listed on the open market it’s not clear how it’s currently configured but listing details from the time of its last sale, in October 2012, when it traded for $10.5 million, shows the 27-foot-wide residence was renovated some years ago by Italian architect and designer Leopoldo Rosati and measured in at 5,148-square-feet with four ample bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. The townhouse’s interiors had been finished in a rigorously clean-lined contemporary manner and equipped with a comprehensive home automation system and radiant heated limestone and antique imported French wide plank oak floors. A 400-plus-square-foot and otherwise windowless kitchen/dining/living room was topped by a massive skylight and the basement, finished to the same minimalist-minded high quality as the rest of the house, contained a small lounge with wet bar, a state-of-the-art home theater and a fitness room with adjacent spa-style bathroom. Bedrooms are well separated for privacy and include a full-floor master suite with private sitting area, compartmentalized bathroom with jetted tub and steam shower, extensive closets and two custom fitted dressing rooms.
Swift’s purchase of the townhouse isn’t its first brush with fame and international publicity; Disgraced French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, holed up in luxurious ignominy during his 2011 house arrest while he awaited trial on an attempted rape charge of a hotel maid that was later dropped. (Strauss-Kahn later reached an agreement for an undisclosed settlement in a civil case that arose out of the matter and in 2015 was acquitted of charges of “aggravated pimping” at the Carlton Hotel in Lille, France. But we digress…)
Though just 27 years old, Swift presides over a growing fortune the bean counters at Forbes estimate at around $280 million and maintains a sprawling collection of trophy residences all across the United States that includes the aforementioned 8,000-plus-square-foot duplex penthouse atop a late 19th-century, Neo-Greco style boutique building she bought from “Lord of the Rings” filmmaker Peter Jackson in February 2014 in two contiguous transactions that totaled $19.95 million. Previous residents of the building include filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who sold his loft in early 2015 for $5.225 million, and actor Orlando Bloom who bought a fourth floor loft in September 2014 for $4.75 million only to come down with a raging case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and sell it at a substantial profit seven months later for $5.6 million. The ten-time Grammy winner’s private residential holdings also include a nearly 12,000-square-foot, bluff-top mansion overlooking the ocean in Westerly, R.I., she snapped up in 2013 for $17.75 million; several properties in and around Nashville, Tenn., that include a 4,000-plus-square-foot downtown penthouse she’s owned since 2009 when she bought it for $1.99 million; and the Hollywood-historic Samuel Goldwyn estate on about two prime hilltop acres in Beverly Hills she snatched up in the fall of 2015 for $25 million in cash.
exterior photo: Google
