LOCATION: Amagansett, NY
PRICE: $2,200,000
SIZE: 3,500 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Last August, before this winter wrung its icy hands around around the throat of the the Eastern Seaboard and other locales throughout the U.S., smoldering full-time movie star and idiosyncratic part-time singer Scarlett Johansson surreptitiously spent $2.2 million to acquire a shingled cottage in the low key but crazy pricey ocean side community of Amagansett, NY, in the hoity-toity Hamptons.
The four-time Golden Globe nominee, a petite, usually blond and buxom silver screen stunner if there ever was one, has danced around Tinseltown since the mid-1990s but, despite a plum role in the critically acclaimed Robert Redford's Oscar-nominated western romance The Horse Whisperer, Your Mama doesn't think Miz Johansson's real showbiz break didn't come until 2003 when she starred in Sofia Coppola's self-consciously quirky, Oscar-winning film Lost in Translation. Since then there have been a slew of movies. Many have been forgettable, a good number of them small but (arguably) interesting (The Girl With the Pearl Earring, Vicki Christina Barcelona, Don Jon, and the currently in theaters Her), and a healthy handful of them big budget sci-fi action flicks (Iron Man, The Avengers franchise and the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier).
Property records show the often circumspect in public and decidedly in-demand Miz Johansoon purchased the property through an opaquely named trust from Australian model turned fashion designer Gail Elliot. Presumably she will share the residence, when in residence, with her Paris-based Frenchman fiancée, Romain Dauriac, often described as a journalist, the former editor of the now defunct art- and street culture-oriented quarterly Clark, and the current manager of an advertising agency (or something like that).
Listing details Your Mama turned up on the internets show the 3,500-ish square foot two-story house sits down a long private drive on 1.41 private acres where it butts up to a sylvan Peconic Land Trust preserve and the unspoiled ocean side gorgeousness of Napeague State Park. On the outside it looks like a classic, shingled cottage dripping with vines and weathered by the bite of the salty air. Inside, however, the main living spaces take on a vaguely-Bali-esque and almost loft-like vibe with a spacious, wood-floored open-concept main living space anchored by a hulking, two-sided stucco fireplace at its center.
The front door opens directly into the main living room that makes one, awkward step down in the middle of the room as it extends towards a generous bank of glass doors that slide open to a wisteria enshrouded veranda with a verdant view—in the summer time, at least—of a long, wide and lush swathe of lawn that lies between the house and a dense perimeter of privacy ensuring, untamed shrubbery that rings the house.
The roomy dining area opens to the somewhat compact but none-the-less expensively equipped center island kitchen that's appears in listing photographs to be fitted and kitted with milk chocolate toned Shaker-style cabinets, sand-colored slab stone counter tops, and the customary suite of high-grade commercial-style stainless steel appliances.
As a cranky aside: Your Mama can't help but note in the listing photo of the kitchen that there's a microwave over—or, worse, a toaster oven—set catty-corner on the counter top. Children, what Your Mama wants to know is how someone spend upwards of $50,000 to remodel or install a reasonably upscale kitchen in a multi-million dollar house in the Hamptons and does not require and provide built-in space for a goddamn microwave oven? Child, pleeze. For $2.2 million, this property gossip would not care to give up a square inch of valuable counter space to a microwave oven that the architect or kitchen designer shoulda hand the common sense and decency to provide a built-in cubby for. Lowrd have mercy, we got our blood all up with our silly rant and now we need a damn nerve pill. Anyhoodles, poodles...
Each of the three guest/family bedrooms appear in listing photos as better than average sized with en-suite facilities and direct access to the outdoors. One of the downstairs bedrooms has an awkwardly positioned fireplace and built-in bookcases and (at least) one of the upstairs bedrooms has a private deck that over looks the swimming pool and allows for an elevated, over-the-tree-tops view towards (if not exactly of) the ocean.
Like all good and worthy houses in the Hamptons, there are generous and many outdoor entertaining and recreation spaces that encourage indoor/outdoor summertime living. Broad lawns are dotted with a mature shade tree or two and there's a pergola-shaded dining deck on the back of the house as well as a balcony-shaded spot off the dining room for grilling. Even though deeded access to the beach and ocean is just a couple hundred yards down the street, there's a simple, rectangular in-ground swimming pool girdled by a wooden fence and encircled by a slender strip of decking.
Everybody know, of course, that the world renown Hamptons communities crawl with rich and famous types and Miz Johansson will not lack for a legion of high profile clam back companions should she want them. Sara Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have long owned (a compound) in the Amagansett Dunes area and actress turned self-styled lifestyle guru Gyneth Paltrow is just down the road in shingle-sided mansion. (Did y'all see Miz Paltrow had the living/music room of her Hamptons house worked over by some designer she likes and then stuck pictures of the entire process and the very white and pearl gray end result up on her Goop website? Well, she did. Anyways...) At the end of the street is the ocean front house that radio shock jock Howard Stern bought in 2003 for $5.5 million and sold in 2006 for $7.6 million.
Although we hardly know a pig from a bergère chair Your Mama isn't aware of Miz Johansson owning any real estate in Los Angeles. In June 2013 she sold a condo in Hollywood—we believe it was her mother who occupied the apartment—and the poor lamb lost her real estate shorts on a 1930s Spanish villa in L.A.'s Outpost Estates 'hood that she scooped up in May 2007 for $7 million and sold in June 2010 for just $4 million.
Back on the East Coast Your Mama's research does suggest that Miz Johansson still owns a small, terraced penthouse apartment in the swanky but somewhat unfashionable Sutton Place 'hood in Midtown Manhattan that she snatched up for $2,100,000 in April 2008, not long before she married Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds.*
*In August 2009 Miz Johansson and Mister Reynolds paid $2.9 million for a Buff & Hensman-designed mid-century modern in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles but did not—so the gossip goes—ever occupy it as a couple because they split up almost immediately after they bought it. It was sold in May 2012 for $3,500,000.
listing photos: Douglas Elliman
