SELLER: Matt and Annette Lauer
LOCATION: North Sea, NY
PRICE: $3,500,000
SIZE: (approx.) 1,800, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Property records show long-time “Today Show” host Matt Lauer sold a small, stylishly turned out bay front cottage in the North Sea area of the Hamptons for $3.5 million. The sale price may have been a good bit below its $3.95 million asking price but it’s still an enviable fortune above the $2.15 million he paid for the place in September 2009.
Listing details show the approximately 1800-square-foot Cape Cod-style cottage, with three bedrooms and two renovated bathrooms, sits at the end of a long driveway on a simply but lushly landscaped three-quarter acre parcel that backs up to scenically boat-dotted Wooley Pond. Main floor living spaces include a living room with cathedral ceiling and white brick fireplace plus an all-white kitchen that’s open to a water-side dining area that adjoins a family room where several sets of glass sliders open to an elevated wrap-around deck. The house-wide deck overlooks and steps down to a broad sweep of lawn that makes a gentle slope down to the water where there’s a private boat dock. The master bedroom is on the main floor and, hence, less than ideally shares the only main floor bathroom with visitors while two bedrooms on the upper floor have sloped ceilings and share a hall bathroom.
Mister Lauer, no stranger to the property gossip columns, maintains a residential real estate portfolio commensurate with a man who reportedly hauls in a whopping $20 million a year as co-host of “The Today Show.” In addition to a sizable apartment in a dignified building in New York City’s Upper East Side that he and wife Annette purchased in August 2004 for $5.882 million — it’s in the same building where the penthouse was once owned by infamous and imprisoned Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff — the Lauers now own Strongheart Manor, a 6-plus acre, multi-residence bay front compound near Sag Harbor that they acquired over the summer from Richard Gere for $36.5 million. The Lauers also continue to own Brightside Farms, a 40-acre tract in the Water Mill area of the Hamptons they picked up in 2012 for $3.5 million and built into a world-class equestrian facility, as well as a not-quite 25-acre country estate, also in the Water Mill area, anchored by an approximately 8,000-square-foot, New England Cape-style mansion designed by architect Daniel Romualdez and decorated by Muriel Brandolini that is currently for sale at $16.995 million, down a million dollars from its original price tag of $17.995 million.
Listing photos: Corcoran
