Oh: Taylor Swift's Cornelia Street apartment has a pool
In the sudden zeitgeist debut of Cornelia Street following Taylor Swift’s dreamy ode to leased property on Lover, there’s been no lack of mystery, buzz, or mass migrations of white women with iPhones to the site of Swift’s onetime rental in a swanky subsection of New York’s Greenwich Village.
Since it’s not every day that a celebrity name-drops their former neighborhood with the subtlety of an aircraft carrier, the intrepid blogs that invariably cover this sort of real-estate rapture have seized upon the opportunity to inspect and academize the home where Swift once lived — no doubt happily, for a brief stint in 2016, with her cats, yogurts, and presumably a full DVD box set of Friends in each room.
Thanks to Curbed, we can now experience a virtual townhouse tour of Swift’s 5,500-square-foot rental, which contains everything you’d expect a pop star of Swift’s fortune and brief familiarity with The Sims to have: high ceilings, low chaises, stainless steel, natural light, exposed brick, shy brick, rugs, art, and plants maintained by proper caretakers and not just gay millennials on Instagram. Consider:
Perhaps the most important asset is the overall blueprint, which is fun to imagine like a Marauder’s Map where it’s just Taylor Swift walking around in slippers debating whether to weigh in on the 2016 election. How many times did she put on her coat in the 3’2”x12’6” Garage Vestibule while waiting for her Escalade to take her to a cat cafe?! To what ends did she seek the tranquil coffee refuge of early morning retreats on Rear Terrace to contemplate whether to give up watching Grey’s Anatomy? Which is the room where she always accidentally left her phone charger so that when she was in another room she’d go, “Ugh, hang on, I left my phone charger in the other room”?
According to Curbed, 23 Cornelia Street has it all: “Four bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, several terraces, a garden, three fireplaces, a fitness room, and a large indoor pool.”
In the words of Mariah Carey at a Home Depot: Wait, what?
If you’ve never lived in New York, it’s important to know that an indoor pool in a Manhattan apartment is an unbelievable feat of miracle work, a truly next-level architectural flex — defying history, practicality, and probably some zoning laws — that even the richest Real Housewife of New York has yet to reveal in her doorman-guarded manse.
Even among celebrity homes, a pool in Manhattan is wild. I have been in exactly one (1) mega-celebrity’s loft in the Village and, despite featuring a stunningly gorgeous steampunk style that looked only half-designed by the people who do the metalwork on the walls at Chipotle, there was no such pool — or even a hint of a yearning for one — in this superstar’s home. And yet here’s Cornelia Street, in all her $39,500/month glory, making no apologies about the aquatic luxury she bears, for Swift or any other tenant whose wealth unlocks her doors. This pool — Cornelia owns it, flaunts it as the piece de resistance of her sprawling floorplan, to say nothing of the fact that said Pool Room is adjacent to Gallery, another completely unattainable example of something you can dedicate an entire room to.
So, that’s it. Taylor Swift had a pool in the townhouse she once rented for a few months and then wrote a song about. She probably used it twice, at most.
It’s crazy, but so is the entire world right now, so let us have this. We are and continue to be vicariously kept alive solely through the celebrity lifestyles which we have limited time to envy before we all get tan and die. Let us all just relax knowing that “Cornelia Street” is the sole outlier of Lover’s immensely relatable lyrics, that our reality allows for the dual existence of Taylor Swift fondly remembering her house with an indoor pool while every other New Yorker just fondly remembers a time when they didn’t have to pay $22 to do laundry every five weeks.
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