Tina Fey Gets All Uptown

BUYER: Tina Fey and Jeff Richmond
LOCATION: West End Avenue, New York, NY
PRICE: $3,400,000
SIZE: 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Huge and gracious family home in premier full service pre-war coop....Private elevator landing leads to rooms of enormous proportions, 4 master bedrooms plus maid's room, eat-in kitchen, 20 x 19 dining room, 27.5 x 18.5 living room with WBFP and a peek of the river, plus library and 4.5 bathrooms.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to a gentleman we call The Legal Eagle, we were recently directed to a short story on the notoriously naughty Gawker website that reports six time Emmy winning writer/actress/comedienne Miss Tina Fey and her composer huzband Jeff Richmond dropped $3,400,000 for new digs on the Upper West Side of New York City.

Ever Miss Tina Fey became the head writer at Saturday Night Live in 1999, she's been comedic catnip. She co-hosted Weekend Update on SNL, wrote and starred in the movie Mean Girls, got herself a damn fine tee-vee show called 30 Rock, yes she did, and starred in a not very funny movie called Baby Mama with the usually very funny Amy Poehler. But her star turn, the bit that made Miss Tina Fey a household name, was her blistering, spot-on spoofs of former Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin which even the right wingers of America have to admit were dee-lishus.

Located on West End Avenue, Miss Tina Fey's new spread, according to listing information, includes a private elevator landing, a central entrance hall, a dignified 27 and a half foot long corner living room with a working wood burning fireplace and a peekaboo view of the mighty Hudson River, and a dining room large enough that she could comfortably host a weenie roast for the the entire cast of 30 Rock.

Listing information shows the half floor sprawler was first listed nearly a year ago with an asking price of $4,100,000. The Gawker guys and gals divulged that the purchase price is $3,400,000. Given that property records for the unit have yet to clear the interweb location(s) Your Mama uses to check these things, we can't yet confirm or deny whether that purchase price is accurate.

Listing information indicates the apartment, which has windows on all four sides, includes 4 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. Our beady little eyes count three principal bedrooms, each with a private pooper, and a fourth room that can be used as a family bedroom or a staff room or maybe a Pilates room since that form of exercise torture is so popular. The fourth (bed)room does not appear to have a direct connection to a terlit, but a full bathroom is accessible off a small room behind the kitchen. A powder room just off the foyer ensures Miss Tina Fey's guest will not need to enter the family's private quarters in order to do their pre-dinner coke snorting and/or after dinner dirty bizness.

Listing information also shows a 17+ foot long library, a kitchen with a large butler's pantry and the master bedroom features a large dressing room and a second non-functioning wood burning fireplace. The apartment is described in listing information as in "estate condition" which in real estate speak usually means some old person has been living up in there for a long time and that the apartment is in desperate need of a smart architect and a nice gay decorator to bring the place up to snuff.

If we were Miss Tina Fey, which obviously we are not, we'd just knock out that fourth (bed)room and bathroom–who really wants their household staff living up in their bizness anymore?–and open the space up to be a good sized family room. At the same time, we'd add a proper laundry room and convert the powder room to a full sized lavatory with a stand up shower.

We'd also recommend making some traffic flow changes to the master bedroom suite which would include closing off the door to the shared bathroom with the adjacent bedroom, moving the entrance to the room a few feet towards the front of the apartment, combining the small closet with the large walk-in from the adjacent bedroom, add a closet to the adjacent bedroom and then enlarge the bathroom by making the dressing room smaller. The plan still needs tweaking and the details need working out, but this is just a few apples to ponder about reworking the place.
According to CityFile and confirmed with property records, Miss Tina Fey and her man-mate Mister Richmond continue to own an 1,873 square foot apartment at 500 West End Avenue which they bought in early 2005 for $1,900,000 as well as a 659 square foot place on W. 85th Street they picked up in May of 2006 for $550,000 and reportedly use as an office.

The apartment is located in the same building where the fine boned musician/actor/activist Harry Belafonte famously combined two apartments into one sprawling and not particularly well feng shui-ed apartment. Mister Belafonte sold the 18-room spread in October of 2006 for $10,750,000 to Micky Mouse heiress Abigail Disney for $13.75M who quickly flipped the bitch back on the market with an asking price of $13,750,000 after deciding she didn't want to take on such a large residential renovation project after all. If we've said it once, we've said it a thousand-million times, rich and famous folks can be so damn fickle with their real estate choices. Miz Disny had a devil of a time selling her never occupied apartment but according to Josh Barbanel at the New York Times, she recently signed sales contracts but had to split the joined apartment back into two separate units to be sold to two different buyers. For anyone who cares, Miz Disney and her huzband Pierre Hauser forked over 12 and some million clams for an apartment at the newly converted 15 Madison Square North building.

Your Mama Hears...

...That Grammy winning R&B superstar Usher has been out and about looking at real estate in the City of Angels. According to our sexed-up snitch Luwanda Courvoisier, Mister Usher recently, "worked his milk chocolate skin up and down the twisted streets above the Sunset Strip" where he checked out at least one contemporary crib listed at "around 5.5 million bucks."

Although Mister Usher is married to and has a couple of kids with some ladee named Tameka who recently had a plastic surgery emergency in Brazil, the peeped property isn't exactly family friendly. We're not saying anything about Mister Usher's family life because we don't know eh-nee-thing about Mister Usher's family life. We are simply saying that Miz Courvoisier snickered that the glassy house in the hills is far more suitable to a bevy of horny babes in bikinis than a couple of small children and a newly liposuctioned mommy wife.

Of course, Your Mama got to wondering why Mister Usher even wants a house in Tinseltown. Best as we can figure, the man probably wants to be a movie star just like that over-blinged egomaniac Puff Daddy (or Diddy-P or Fiddle Faddle or whatever stoopid name he wants to be called nowadays) wishes he was. Queen, please. Stick to what you know, which is singing smooth, sappy songs meant to get women in the mood to make babies and leave the film business to actual actors.

Anyhoo, some of the children may recall that way back in September of 2007, the dapper Mister Usher listed his 8,022 square foot suburban Atlanta mansion with an asking price of $1,950,000. Listing information shows the 5 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom house in the celeb friendly Country Club of the South community is still available and, much to our surprise, has a slightly higher asking price of $1,995,000. Your Mama questions the wisdom of upping the asking price of a property even as the real estate markets continue to limp along like a lame horse. Then again, it's been proven over and over again that Your Mama don't know nuthin' from nuthin' about how to price property, particularly in suburban developments filled with newly built mcmansions.

A Nicolas Cage New Orleans Double Whammy

Prolific property collector Nicolas Cage continues to keep all us naughty celebrity real estate gossips busy as beavers trying to keep up with his still substantial but slowly shrinking real estate empire. In early 2008 the hairrific Oscar winning actor sold his waterfront house in Newport Beach, CA to a gas station mogul for thirty some million dollars. More recently he managed to get rid of a little used 28-room schloss in Bavaria which he, puzzlingly, to his German advisor.

As far as Your Mama knows (and we really don't know nuthin'), Mister Cage continues to own luxury real estate in San Francisco, Las Vegas, the Bahamas, two high floor apartments in New York City's Olympic Tower on a fancy stretch of Fifth Avenue, and the UK–where he has a four story Georgian style townhouse in Bath and an 18th century castle. He also owns a handful of houses currently languishing on the open market including his brick built and ivy covered spread on Copa de Oro Road in Bel Air, CA which has been price slashed from $35,000,000 to $19,750,000. Also for sale (at least the last we checked) is an undeveloped 45-acre private island in the Bahamas, an ass-uglee house in a gated community in Las Vegas, a 24,000+ square foot manor house in Middletown, RI and two historic houses in Loo-zee-anna's Big Easy which–against our better judgement–we're going to spend the morning discussing.


SELLER: Nic Cage
LOCATION: Prytania Street, New Orleans, LA
PRICE: $3,450,000
SIZE: 13,176 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: The most superlative of Garden District mansions with the best of every amenity. Ample room for a large family and big-time entertainment venue with formal gardens, parking, and everything anyone could possibly want in a most grand of grand, star-quality home.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The first of the two properties we're going to chat about is Mister Cage's big ol' house in the Big Easy's gorgeous Garden District which first arrived on the open market sometime in the fall of 2008 with an asking price of $3,700,000. After six or so long months of sitting around without a serious buyer, the asking price now stands at $3,450,000 which property records reveal to be the exact same amount for which Mister Cage bought the house in June of 2005.

Before Mister Cage, the three story grande dame on Prytania Street was owned by several other notable characters including the Catholic Church who gave it the wonderfully ridiculous name of Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel. The corner property later fell into the hands of the formerly brooding now Christian author Anne Rice who sold it to antiques dealer Reuban "Buzz" Harper who had a famous flair for turgid day-core and who, in turn, sold it to our Mister Cage.

Listing information shows the 13-room "L" shaped mansion measures a considerable 13,176 square feet and includes 6 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms. There are wide covered porches with flamboyant iron balustrades on the main and second floors, four kitchens and an elevator that does not appear to rise to the third floor. Perhaps most remarkable about Mister Cage's crib is the vast living and dining room area on the first floor which spans over more than 2,000 square feet of high-ceilinged architectural elegance that features extremely high-gloss wood floors, intricate plaster mouldings and ceiling medallions, four fireplaces and a swooping staircase that could raise Norma Desmond from the grave.

Your Mama wishes we had such florid words for the day-core which manages to be lackluster and lifeless despite the dramatic length of the dining room table and the campy period furniture. But we don't. Also, it seems unlikely that a home of this age would have been built with such loft-like public spaces. Even though we thrill at the idea of roller skating in the nood around the giant room, the architectural purist in Your Mama wishes the public rooms had been maintained as their original, properly proportioned and separate chambers.

Anyhoo, behind the dining room is a large, chef friendly kitchen with white cabinetry, granite counters, beige tile floors, navy colored walls and somewhat bizarrely, a red ceiling. The main floor is completed by a laundry room, a small room of unknown usage, a half bathroom and a master suite comprised of a medium sized bedroom, 33-foot long walk in closet and a bathroom that only Victoria Gotti (and Nic Cage) could love with its spectacularly silly spa tub set in the center of the room and surrounded by columns .

The second floor includes a landing/sitting room and a second master suite with a dressing room, large bathroom and access to two balconies. Another suite of rooms on the second floor includes a mini-kitchen, a commodious closet, an elevator landing and both a full and a half bathroom. The extreme rear of the second floor is a separate staff or guest suite with bathroom, walk in closet and eat in kitchen.

The lone terlit on the third floor is located off the large landing which separates two suites of rooms. One side contains yet another small kitchen and a couple of sitting rooms painted an eye-popping and grimace making shade of hot pink and then further punished with banal brown leather furniture, crushed velvet drapery, heavily carved wood pieces and a couple of wall mounted flat screen boob-toobs. The other two rooms on the opposite side of the landing are, we presume, bedrooms.

The grounds include well tended box hedges that surround a terrace with formal gardens and a gurgling fountain as well as a large brick terrace that encircles an in-ground swimming pool. Listing information also indicates there is off street parking, but honestly children, we can't figure out where that is or how many automobiles can be parked on the property.

Given that Mister Cage owns at least two (some say three) houses in New Orleans, it's unclear whether he and his much younger wifey and child occupy this house or the blood soaked and rumored to be haunted LaLaurie house, which is also currently for sale.



SELLER: Nicolas Cage
LOCATION: Royal Street, New Orleans, LA
PRICE: $3,550,000
SIZE: 10,284 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: One of the most beautiful homes in America. This home was originally built for French royalty and all the details of this period show it. Named the LaLaurie Mansion and known for its ghostly history, it is the height of superlative. if you want the best of the best, then here it is! Galleries, widow's walks, parking and prime location.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Although he already owned one house over in the Garden District, in December of 2006 Mister Cage could not resist his historical real estate desiring demons and spent what records show was $3,450,000 to purchase a second home in New Orleans.

According to listing information, the four floor French quarter mansion, commonly known as the LaLaurie House, was originally built for French royalty. However, it was later owners Dr. Louis Lalaurie and his wife Delphine who moved into the house in the early 1830s and who gave the property both its name and its witchy and macabre reputation as a house of unspeakable horrors. Mister and Missus Lalaurie were prominent pillars of New Orleans high society and well known for their lavish parties and for swanning around town with their impeccably dressed daughters. However, the couple had a deeply perverted and bloodcurdling dark side that will scare the skin right off the children.

Like many big living rich folks of that era, the Lalaurie House was taken care of by slaves. Sadly, and although it wasn't uncommon for slaves to be mistreated, Mister and Missus Lalaurie launched slave abuse into an entirely new and savagely sadistic realm of hell. The cook, the same one who prepared feasts for the Lalaurie family and their friends, was allegedly kept chained to the fireplace in the kitchen. Missus Lalaurie, whip in hand, was seen by a neighbor chasing her personal servant up to the roof of the house from where the tortured young girl leaped to her death. Later, authorities investigated and found a secret door in the attic behind which more than a dozen brutally abused slaves were chained to the wall and locked in cages. There were reportedly severed body parts strewn about the floor and decapitated heads in buckets. Some of the men had their private parts lopped off and a hole had been drilled into the top of the head of one male victim where a stick was inserted to "stir" his brain. More than a couple women had been cut open, their intestines pulled out and tied around their waists. Another woman had her arms and legs ruthlessly amputated and yet another had all of her limbs broken and re-set at alarming and unnatural angles. Shockingly, the Lalauries managed to escape authorities and their barbaric crimes against humanity were never prosecuted. It's unknown what fate befell the sick and twisted Lalauries, but Karma is a bitch children and even though it pains and challenges our own Karma to say so, Your Mama can only hope they met an untimely and hideously painful end.

Anyhoo, property records and multiple reports show Mister Cage picked up his haunted house in December of 2006. Records also reveal that Mister Cage paid $3,450,000 for the six bedroom house which has 8 terlits divided into six full and 2 half bathrooms. The property was first listed in the fall of 2008 with an asking price of $3,900,000 but has since been karate chopped to $3,550,000. It doesn't take even a brief consult with our bejeweled abacus to determine that when the property sells and after the fat real estate fees are paid, Mister Cage will likely lose boo-coo bucks on his real estate folly.

The sinister looking grey lady lords over the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls Streets, measures 10,284 square feet, according to listing information, and wraps around a brick courtyard filled with a bunch of raggedy looking trees and potted plants. The house is entered on the ground floor through a narrow foyer with a classy black and white checkerboard floor. To the right of the entrance are two generously proportioned reception rooms, each with a gray and yellow marble fireplace surround, gray and white checkerboard floors, tall windows, built in book cases, a bunch of kooky Gothik meets Art Deco furniture and some really wretched looking paintings. Much to Your Mama's chagrin and dismay, it is our humble and meaningless opinion that these are indeed the best rooms of the house in terms of day-core. Behind these rooms is a pooper for the guests and small suite of rooms used for we don't know what. To the right of the foyer is a staff or guest suite with sitting room, kitchenette, full bathroom and bedroom. At the rear of the property is a garage that looks large enough to hold one big car or perhaps two itty-bitty but impossibly cute FourTwo Smart cars which would be perfect for tooling around the French Quarter and down to the the Jolie-Pitts place on Governor Nicholls Street.

The main part of the second floor contains the primary public rooms which include the dining room, a butlers pantry, a 1980s looking kitchen with some updated appliances and a double parlor style living room with wood floors, elaborate pilasters and pediments, dee-voon dentil ceiling moulding and a hodgepodge of unfortunate leather and brocade furniture. On the walls hang more of that upsetting artwork that, we're sorry Mister Cage, makes our flesh crawl. At the rear of the second floor there are two staff or guest suites with small kitchens and bathrooms that open to a balcony that wraps around the courtyard below. A mezzanine level contains two more staff or guest suites each with a small kitchen and bathroom.

Up on the third floor are the principle family bedrooms. Each of the bedrooms has its own private pooper and the master features a good sized bathroom and a walk in closet for all of Mister Cage's black jeans and leather jackets.

While it is well known that Mister Cage owns the Lalaurie House and a giant house in the Garden District, it has been reported (and whispered in Your Mama's big ear by Little Mary) that he and his family actually live next door when they are in town. Perhaps the viscious history and lingering bad juju makes the Lalaurie House simply too frightening to live. Or maybe Mister Cage is just strange like that.

Eventually, of course, Mister Cage will either make a butt load of money that will enable him to keep all his many dee-luxe digs or they will sell at prices that will surely leave him a few hundred grand (or maybe even a few million) in the hole. What is clear is that according to a recent interview in a German publication regarding the sale of his Bavarian schloss, Mister Cage said, "Due to the difficult economic situation, unfortunately, I was no longer able to keep it." Pity that.

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Your Mama Hears...

...From two separate sources, one we'll call Glinda the Good Witch and the other we'll call Winnie Baygo, that large lipped ack-tress Scarlett Johansson (Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Other Bolyn Girl, Lost In Translation and etc.) is fixin' to list her house on Senalda Road in the Outpost Estates area of Los Angeles.

If the children will put on their thinking caps they might recall that the formerly curvaceous now twig thin Miss Johansson purchased the 4,352 square foot Spanish style pile in May of 2007 from director Harold Becker who piloted movies such as the gripping The Sea of Love, Taps and The Onion Field.

What's perhaps most titillating to Your Mama about this particular celebrity real estate rumor is that, according to Miss Baygo, the house will be listed for "around $5,100,000," a figure our bejeweled abacus reveals is a gasp inducing $1,900,000 less than the $7,000,000 property records show she paid for the 7 bedroom and 7 bathroom house. Keep in mind children, that's just Miss Baygo passing along idle real estate gossip, so until the house actually hits the market we will not know what number is slapped up as the asking price.

Glinda whispered to Your Mama that the four time Golden Globe nominee, whose mother owns a crash pad condo at the Hollywood Versailles apartment tower, never moved into the house on Senalda Road because she, "Had to make repairs and renovations...The house isn't pretty at all." Oh dear.

After first hearing this real estate rumor, Your Mama also contacted the The Easter Bunny to see what he knew. Mister Bunny immediately responded to our query saying he didn't know a thing about Mrs. Ryan Reynolds house on Senalda, but would not be surprised if she were to sell the property since it is his understanding that she's moving (or already moved) to Manhattan.

Miss Johansson was real estate gossip catnip in May of 2008 when she sold her New York City loft at 66 Leonard Street (at a reported $52,000 loss) and then quickly coughed up $2,100,000 for a 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom terraced penthouse apartment in an undistinguished building on East 53rd Street near–but not actually in–the swank Sutton Place neighborhood. These real estate distinctions make a difference in New York City in the same way that real estate snobs in Los Angeles get their panties in a kerfuffle about the difference between Beverly Hills and the Beverly Hills Post Office.

photo: Pacific Coast News

Britney Spears Takes It To New Jersey

Sounds like Little Miss Britney Spears is taking her real estate crazy train on the road. According to a report by Jennifer Gould Keil–who has taken over her huzband's Gimme Shelter column in the NY Post since his sad and untimely passing earlier this year–the lip synching and dancing super star has been house hunting in...

...are you ready for this children?

New Jersey.

That's right. New Jersey.

The touring pop princess recently and reportedly leased an ass uglee 7 bedroom quasi-Colonial with 8 full and 2 half bathrooms in fancy schmancy Alpine, NJ where she set up temporary digs while touring on the East Coast. The tabloid trainwreck apparently liked the Alpine area so much that she went out looking at $20,000,000 homes in the area. If we're being honest, and we always are, this twenty million dollar number makes little sense since with the exception of the $59,000,000 Frick Estate, there don't seem to be any houses in Alpine listed on the open market for more than seventeen point five million.

Whatever the case, according to Miz Keil, none of the properties peeped by Miss Spears met her–ahem–high real estate standards. If she does actually locate and buy an estate that comes up to her security standards and requirements, she'll be in all kinds of celebrity company like Puff Daddy (or PDiddy or Diddle Daddle or whatever) who has a giant house on Alpine's Anderson Road. Other Alpine residents are said to include tax evader Wesley Snipes and that increasingly freaky looking Lil' Kim ladee who lives just around the corner from comedian Chris Rock and looks more and more like the unholy love child of Kimora Lee Simmons and Queen Latifah every damn day.

Roger Birnbaum Lists For Less in Beverly Hills

SELLER: Roger Birnbaum
LOCATION: Summit Drive, Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $16,000,000
SIZE: 7,187 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Long gated drive leads to an estate of unparalleled quality & timeless design. Completed in 2007, this contemporary farmhouse includes a special master w/ sitting room, gym, walk-in closet, unique bath & huge terrace overlooking the city. A most extraordinary 2-story living room w/ floor to ceiling sliding glass doors that open to a covered veranda & over sized lap pool surrounded by gardens, dream kitchen, dining room & media room.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Every now and then a pricey Platinum Triangle property comes along that makes Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter drool with bank account envy and spit with financial jealousy. Such is the bewitching Beverly Hills property that prolific producer Roger Birnbaum recently listed with an asking price of $16,000,000. It's not that we have an incurable craving to live in a shingled contempo farmhouse, because we really don't. It's that the recent renovation and dignified day-core is so soo-blime that we can't help but covet thy neighbor's house.

Mister Birnbaum, for those who do not recognize the name, is what Your Mama calls a super producer. He has shepherded dozens of tee-vee programs and films through the Tinseltown gauntlet including (but not limited to) Four Christmases, The Love Guru, 27 Dresses, Evan Almighty, the unbelievably bad but stoopidly high-larius Stick It, Memoirs of a Geisha (which was, sorry Mister Birnbaum, a much better book), Seabiscuit, G.I. Jane and Who's That Girl, one of the Kabbalah Kween's more insufferable cinematic ventures.

Property records show Mister Birnbaum purchased his swank Summit Drive domicile in April of 2007 for $16,500,000. Several reports from the time suggest the sale price was closer to twenty million clams, but sixteen point five is what we find. If the records are accurate, and we have no reason to believe they are not, it appears that Mister Birnbaum will take a significant financial hit because, as our bejeweled abacus reveals, the property is currently priced half a million bucks below what he paid for the place in 2007.

The property was purchased from legendary former talent manager turned high-priced house flipper Sandy Gallin who, records reveal, purchased the property in November of 2005 for $5,350,000. Mister Gallin did what he's done with the 30 or 40 other fancy flips he's got under his belt: He Gallin-ized the place. That means, he knocked down what he hated, improved what he could tolerate and built what he thought the place needed to be elevated to its rightful place in the complicated lexicon of ritzy Beverly Hills real estate.

The house, tucked up behind other similarly sumptuous dwellings and invisible from the street, is approached down a long, tree-lined stone driveway that leads to a large gravel motor court. There are few sounds Your Mama enjoys more than the crackle and snap of tires on a gravel driveway. Not only does it evoke a childhood sense memory of our Grand-mammies long gravel driveway, it also reminds both Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter of our beloved farmhouse on the East End of Long Island that we sold when we moved west last summer.

Listing information shows the Birnbaum manse measures 7,187 square feet and includes 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms including a clean lined master suite with a large, fully paneled bedroom, a kitted out closet/dressing room the size of of a Manhattan studio apartment, an expansive private terrace for nood sunbathing, a gym for working up a sweat and a behemoth bathroom with a beamed ceiling, wood floor and two shelving racks with enough fluffy white towels to stock a small boo-teek hotel.

The almost self-consciously modest entry leads to a dee-voonly double height living room with a wall of windows that slide open to the commodious covered veranda that overlooks the somewhat small yard and long lap pool. The living room is ringed on two sides by a second floor gallery with a modern horizontal railing that both reinforces the impressive length of the room and offsets the vertical volume of the space. Your Mama would like to point out that Mister Gallin and his nice gay decorator showed an extraordinary and all too uncommon restraint in the living room by not hanging two unnecessarily chunky chandeliers from the rafters, which would have wrecked the entire tableau. When people say, "less is more," this is what they mean.

The dining room has more of those barn-like sliding doors and a monstrous round dining room table surrounded by ten caramel colored padded leather chairs. The children will note, again, how Mister Gallin and his nice gay decorator showed tremendous self-control when it came to the heavy-duty but still barely there light fixture.

Other rooms, according to listing information, include a gore-may kitchen with all the super-sized stainless steel appliances a kitchen queen could want as well as a gigantic work island that does double duty as a breakfast counter. We're not going to discuss those ridiculous daffodils that are begging to be squashed by the large and looming pot rack. There is also, according to listing information, a large den with one of the home's three wood burning fireplaces, a large built-in bar for all the booze hounds to belly up to, a media room and an office.

The back yard is, admittedly, a wee bit small for a house in this price range. But truth be told, there's plenty of space for a child-free couple with one mean ol' pussy named Sugar and two long bodied bitches named Linda and Beverly who require only a wee patch of grass where they can lay around and soak up the sun for hours on end. The lap pool, according to listing information, is heated and over-sized, whatever that means. A wonderfully woodsy outdoor living space has cozy looking patio furniture facing a wood burning fireplace where we can imagine it would be nice to sip Chardonnay as the sun sets and the marine layer scoots in.

All the children know that Your Mama has often railed against the boring, banal and beige day-core we too often see in the homes of folks who think "neutral" makes their home more digestible to guests and attractive potential buyers. However, we've also many times claimed that there is a way in which to do beige without sinking into a monochromatic snooze-fest of tone on tone day-core. This, children, is how beige is done.

Property records indicate that Mister Birnbaum and his Missus Pamela own an 18th floor condominium at The Californian as well as another slightly smaller condominium at The Remington, both on Wilshire Boulevard. Records also reveal the condo crazy couple have a townhouse/condo in Boynton Beach, FL, and an oceanfront condo in Jupiter, FL. Obviously, we have no way of knowing if Mister and Missus Birnbaum occupy all those condos or if they are used as rentals or by other family members.

Going back to Mister Gallin...we recently heard from our dee-lishusly catty pal Kenny Kissintell, who always has all sorts of juicy real estate dirt to dish, that Mister Gallin recently completed his latest project, the former Jane Wyatt estate on Siena Way in Bel Air which he picked up in the spring of 2007 for seven million smackers. Kenny whispered the amount that he heard Mister Gallin wants for the fully rehabbed residence and the number is so damn high we don't dare repeat it because it simply can not be true. It's not that Mister Gallin can't work over a property like nobodies bizness, it's that houses just aren't selling for those kind of 8 figure prices right now.

Anyhoo, Mister and Missus Birnbaum's real estate loss on Summit Drive will surely be some lucky bastard's real estate good fortune. Now then, we've got to figure out a way to get all this green off our skin.