Jessica Chastain Picks Up Showbiz Pedigreed Pad in NYC
BUYER: Jessica Chastain and Count Gian Lucc Passi di Preposulo
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $5,100,000
SIZE: (approx.) 3,200 square feet, 3-4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Word out of the New York City celebrity property gossips columns is that Julliard-trained movie star Jessica Chastain has, via trust, shelled out $5.1 million for a downright classy, showbiz-pedigreed nine-room cooperative apartment at the historic, brownstone-clad Osborne building directly across the street from Carnegie Hall in Midtown Manhattan. So the scuttlebutt goes, the famously ginger-tressed, two-time Oscar nominee (“The Help,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) purchased the apartment with her current man-friend, Count Gian Lucc Passi di Preposulo, a handsome and obviously Italian executive for the sporty and quite pricey French-Italian fashion brand Moncler where a scarf will rip $580 out of your bank account and a snazzy down ski jacket easily tops $2,500.
Listing details reveal the “painstakingly restored” apartment was “formerly occupied” by Leonard Bernstein, who moved in in the early 1960s but eventually settled in to a nine-room apartment at the equally if not more legendary Dakota building on Central Park West. Miss Chastain’s new apartment’s next occupant was actor Larry Storch of “F Troop” fame who sold in the early 1970s to high-class cabaret singer Bobby Short who lived there for nearly a decade and a half. Property records we peeped indicate the most occupant-owner was two-time Tony Award winning composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (“The Light in the Piazza”), the grandson of musical theater lion Richard Rodgers.
Original architectural details include inlaid parquet floors, gilded ceiling moldings, mahogany doors and window trims, Tiffany glass transoms and at least one interior door with a Lalique glass insert. Floor plans included with online marketing materials show the approximately 3,200-square-foot, bi-level and essentially L-shaped apartment has three proper bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, four exposures, five fireplaces — some with original tile surrounds, elegantly high 14-foot ceilings and maintenance charges that chime in at a hefty $4,957 per month.
In addition to a quartet of handsome, well-scaled public spaces — living, dining, library, and music rooms — that orbit around a roomy central foyer, the apartment also has an unexpectedly spacious eat-in kitchen lit by an antique chandelier and designed by French-born architect Francoise Bollack with deep quartz counter tops, white subway tile backsplashes, custom-milled cabinetry — the uppermost storage cabinets accessible by a rolling library ladder — and top-grade appliances that include a 50-bottle wine fridge.
Some of the many otherart and entertainment luminaries who have shacked up a the Osborne include artist and bohemian bon vivant Peter Beard; concert pianist Van Cliburn; Oscar-winning Broadway star Shirley Booth; Oscar-, Emmy-, Tony- and Grammy-nominated actress Lynn Redgrave; New York Knicks president Phil Jackson; and hard-drinking Oscar-winner Gig Young whose third wife was Elizabeth Montgomery of “Bewitched” and who, in 1978, (allegedly) murdered his fourth wife just before he shot himself in their first floor apartment.
Property records and other online resources show beaver busy Miss Chastain — who has at least half a dozen projects in various stages of production that include a horror flick, a Ridley Scott sci-fi extravaganza and a bio-pic in which she’ll portray Marilyn Monroe — continues to own a two bedroom and two bathroom duplex (with fireplace and sky-lit corkscrew staircase) in Greenwich Village that she purchased in September 2012 for $1.2 million.
Listing photos and floor plan: Halstead
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