LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,250,000
SIZE: 1 bedrooms, 1 bathroom
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last week Nick Valensi—lead guitarist for the post punk garage rock band The Strokes—and his actress turned celebrity chat show hostess wife, Amanda de Cadenet, listed their neo-Colonial crib in Studio City, CA for $1,799,000. This week word slipped down the music industry real estate gossip grapevine (via an anonymous tipster) that The Strokes' front man Julian Casablancas quietly unloaded a New York City apartment for $1,250,000.
Property records show shag-haired Mister Casablancas—the privileged, New York City born and bred issue of legendary (super)model agent John Casablancas—and his wife, Juliet—the former assistant to Mister Casablancas's manager, picked up the apartment in July 2005 for $840,000. Listing details from the time of the sale show the maintenance charges for the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment—which include the property taxes—ring up to a hefty $2,150 per month.
The bi-level apartment includes a sizable foyer with office niche and a cavernous sunken living room with wood floors underfoot, beamed 18-foot ceilings over head, and a working wood-burning fireplace. The room-wide built-in bench seat under the three arched widows that drop to the floor, stretch to the ceiling, and flood the room with natural light not only provides loads of seating for party guests but also cleverly conceals the radiators.
The wee, windowed kitchen on the apartment's upper level was renovated with marble counter tops and has a picayune breakfast nook that overlooks the living room. That breakfast nook, with horizontal wood cladding on the walls, might be a tight squeeze for anyone like Your Mama who carries around a few (too many) extra pounds but, children, in space starved lower Manhattan, an itty-bitty, skinny bitches only breakfast nook is better than none at all. The corner bedroom, not show in any of the listing photos we dug up on the interweb, has sunny south and west exposures.
Property records Your Mama peeped show the buyer of the pre-war pad is a fella named Richard Armitage who may or may not be the deep-voiced English actor whose movie credits include Robin Hood, Captain America: The First Avenger, and the currently mid-cycle Hobbit trilogy.
Other past and present residents of the much sought after, full-service Greenwich Village apartment complex include Tony- and Emmy-winning playwright Terrence McNally, Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City actor Chris Noth, and style and design mavens Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan.
A December, 2012 article in The New York Times revealed the Casablancases no longer occupied their former Greenwich Village one bedroom. We don't know shit from shinola, of course, but Your Mama's just going to assume they sought more sizable digs sometime around the time they made a baby in 2010. A quick spin through a couple of property record data bases did not, however, turn up any credible evidence when or where they might have moved.
Like Mister Casablancas, most of the other members of The Strokes live or maintain a residence in lower Manhattan: Drummer Fabrizio Moretti—Drew Barrymore's ex-man-friend and the current beau of comedienne Kristin Wiig—keeps an apartment at the American Felt Building in the East Village, the same building where Tom Cruise recently sold his long-time pied-a-terre; Last year guitarist/keyboardist Albert Hammond, Jr. paid Victoria Secret model Maryna Linchuck $1,250,000 for a loft-like 1 bedroom and 2 bathroom apartment in the same NoLiTa nabe building where, as per property records, A-list artist/fashion photographer Inez Van Lansweerde also owns an apartment; Property records also reveal that in February 2009 bass player Nikolai Fraiture shelled out $450,000 for a studio apartment in a post-war West Village building that's right next door to the one bedroom and one bathroom apartment he and his wife, Ilona, bought in March 2005 for $875,000; And finally, our admittedly very brief and entirely unscientific research indicates (but does not prove) that lead guitarist Nick Valensi and wife Amanda de Cadenet do not currently own a residence in New York City. Property records do show that in September 2011 they sold a three floor (plus basement) townhouse in Brooklyn's Park Slope 'hood for $1,315,000.
listing photos: LJB Law (via StreetEasy)
