YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Yesterday “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Giudice simultaneously surrendered to the authorities to serve her 15-month sentence for bankruptcy fraud in a Danbury, Conn., minimum security federal prison and slashed the asking price of her flashy faux château in leafy Towaco, N.J., from $3.499 million to $2.999 million. (The property was initially listed in September 2014 at $3.999 million.)
The table upturning “housewife” and cookbook entrepreneur and her muscle-bound husband Joe, who will serve his four-year sentence after his wife is released, purchased the 3.77-acre property that backs up to Interstate 287 in 2002 for $540,000. The (in)famously spendthrift pair — they filed for bankruptcy in 2009 but withdrew their case in 2011 after investigators started poking around looking for exactly the sort of financial malfeasance that eventually got them both convicted — proceeded to erect an exceptionally garish, marble-encrusted manifestation of their apparently ersatz wealth.
Listing details show the 10,044-square-foot pile — an architectural hot mess of the highest order — has six bedrooms and six bathrooms including a vast master suite with fireplace, three custom-fitted walk-in closets and an onyx-tiled bathroom with — natch — gold-plated fixtures. Not surprisingly, there’s a double staircase in a hotel lobby-scaled foyer that listing details kindly call a “Cinderella staircase.” The formal living and dining rooms both have fireplaces and the former a melodramatically double-height ceiling. Slightly less ostentatious family quarters include a library/office and a granite-countered kitchen with high-grade appliances and an adjoining dining area. In addition to a good-sized family room, there’s a well-stocked children’s play room with pink walls and a leopard print sofa and a roomy game room where a built-in bar does battle with several pieces of exercise equipment. Somewhere there’s a wine-making room with burnt orange walls.
Outside, the gated grounds include large and largely featureless lawns, a small pond, and a grimly, over-scaled porte-cochere stuck like a barnacle to one end of the house. There is, or at least once was, a chicken coop, as well as a chain-link fenced dog run, an attached garage and a two-car detached garage with attached office.
As far as Your Mama can tell, the couple still own a ragged-looking house in Lincoln Park, N.J., currently listed for $179,000 — just over the $170,000 they paid in 2005 — as well as canal-front house along the Jersey Shore in Manahawkin, N.J., that’s currently listed at $315,000, well under the $347,000 they paid in 2005.
Listing photos: Stonybrook Realty
