LOCATION: South Salem, NY
PRICE: $1,850,000
SIZE: 5,450 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Occasionally scruffy-faced, often bespectacled with intellectualizing spectacles, always smooth-pated, and immoderately handsome 50-something year old veteran actor Stanley Tucci lost his social worker wife, Kate, to breast cancer a bit more than four year ago.
The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning—and Oscar-nominated—actor was remarried last August (2012) to a tall—and considerably younger—literary agent named Felicity Blunt, the older sister of British actress Emily Blunt. The May-December newlyweds first met in 2006 when The Tooch and E. Blunt were filming The Devil Wears Prada but they didn't hook up until after they became reacquainted, in July 2010, at the Lake Como (Italy) wedding of Emily Blunt and John Krasinki.
All the children who know a damn thing about celebrity real estate know that in the Privileged Land of the Rich and Famous a new spouse—as well as a new baby and/or a failed marriage—often also means a new house. Mister Tucci's (fairly) recent nuptials may (or may not) be why, as Your Mama first heard from Willie Westchester, the lauded and applauded stage, television, and silver screen actor has put his pastoral spread in exceedingly affluent and beautifully bucolic South Salem, NY, on the market for $1,850,000.*
Current listing details show there are five bedrooms and four bathrooms in the rambling, multi-story abode that spans a spacious and but hardly huge 5,405 square feet of interior space that marries original architectural details with contemporary finishes and modern amenities.
The sparse but comfortably furnished formal living room looks extra wide in listing photographs and is fitted with (antique-looking) wide plank wood floors stained a rich milk chocolate color, perfectly appropriate six-over-six sash windows, a fireplace, and a ceiling punctuated by so many can lights it looks a little astrological in there.
The floors switch to another kind of wood—maybe mahogany, possibly cherry—in both the kitchen and the airy, window-lined formal dining room where there's a second fireplace and a steep-pitched vaulted ceiling. The super-sized center island eat-in kitchen has a vaulted ceiling punctuated by a quartet of sky lights, miles of maple-colored Shaker style cabinetry, acres of slab marble counter tops, and the expected collection of high-quality appliances that include a pair of dishwashers.
The floor material changes—again, fer chrissakes—to a whitish-yellow in the privately situated main floor master suite that has a high-pitched vaulted ceiling, scads of (four-over-one) sash windows plus sliding doors to a slender private terrace that overlooks the rear grounds. The luxurious if somewhat austere, marble tile clad bathroom has a two sink vanity, a soaking tub plenty big enough for a romantic twosome—iffin you like that sort of thing, and separate glass-fronted steam shower. A lower level home fitness room has wall-to-wall floor tiles, Easter orange paint on the walls, is equipped with every sort of body torture device known to mankind, and must be where Mister Tucci keeps his middle-aged man-body looking like—uhm—this.
A foliage encircled blue stone dining and entertainment extends off the back of the main level and features a wood-fired pizza oven imported from Italy and a built-in flat grill that The Old Grey Lady herself once described as being "as large as a Fiat." A flag stone path meanders from the house down to a free-form swimming pool surrounded by an equally amoebic flagstone terrace. Split rail fencing encircles a vast swathe of gently rolling lawn before the property gives way to a sylvan buffer that backs up to a nearly 400 acre preserve.
This is not, as it turns out, the first property Mister Tucci owned in South Salem. In April 1996 he shelled out $387,500 for a 4,200-plus square foot house on 2.4-plus acres that he sold in mid-2000 for $1,150,000 and in March 2004 he (and his late wife) sold a large on house on almost ten acres in nearby North Salem for $3,650,000. Mister Tucci also appears to own or have some sort of trustee relationship to a home on 1.6 acres in his hometown of Katonah that appears to have been originally purchased by his parents and may or may not be the home where he grew up.
*South Salem is a sleepy hamlet in the Westchester County town of Lewisboro, a bit more than 50 miles north (and east) of Midtown Manhattan near the border of New York and Connecticut. Westchester County consistently ranks amongst the top ten wealthiest counties in America. Extra tidbit: In the 1970s Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones owned house in South Salem that he shared with his long-time paramour, Italian actress paramour Anita Pallenberg, and their two children. (A third child passed at 10 weeks.) In 1979 Miz Pallenberg's 17-year old boyfriend, Scott Cantrell, shot himself in the head with a .38 pistol that had been reported stolen the year before. That's right. Seventeen. The death was declared a suicide but there were widespread rumors and reports that the teenager was playing Russian roulette in the bed of the master bedroom when the gun went off. Miz Pallenberg, like her former man-friend and baby daddy, hasn't aged so gracefully but remains in close contact with Mister Richards, to which Your Mama can only say, "That's rock-n-roll, baby. Rock. And. Roll.
listing photos: Houlihan Lawrence
